Why I write

The good ideas always come on runs.

I don't know why. Something about the rhythm, the lack of screen, the way your brain wanders when you stop managing it. Whatever it is, I’ve learned to trust those ideas. I run a little faster on the way home so I don't lose the thread.

A few months back, one found me midway through my loop: how do I reconcile being a climate activist with loving to travel? I've built my life around that first thing: plant-based food, bikes and walks instead of the car, work centered on climate change. And yet some of the experiences that cracked me open most—that made me who I am—required a carbon-intensive flight.

Sharp thought. So I sped up.

Then I sat down to write about it, and the confidence evaporated. The idea that felt clean on the trail got slippery on the page. My reasoning tangled. I spent an hour circling the same paragraph, unsure whether I was grappling with a real contradiction or just dressing up rationalization in nice clothes.

That discomfort is the whole point.

I write to clarify my thinking. Not to share it, not to be published or even read, but to understand what I actually believe. Writing forces you to wrestle with the material. In that wrestling, you start thinking critically. You find where your logic goes thin. And you stop getting away with sloppy thinking.

James Van Pelt put it plainly: the act of writing is more important than the fate of the writing. I agree.

We live in a world engineered to remove friction. We outsource navigation, memory, recommendations. Increasingly with AI, thinking itself—summaries, analysis, the first draft of our own ideas handed off before we've sat with them. It's efficient. Frictionless.

But writing is not frictionless.

It's analogue in a world that prefers shortcuts. You can't delegate the moment where you decide what you actually believe. We need that friction right now, maybe more than ever. We need people willing to slow down enough to wrestle with hard ideas instead of outsourcing the wrestling.

I didn't finish that essay on travel and climate with a clean answer. The contradiction didn't resolve. If anything, it got more layered. But I understood it better, and I could name the tradeoffs instead of quietly ignoring them. Now I know what I really believe. And I think that’s the point. The essay's fate is secondary to what happened in the writing of it.

The writing might not ever be seen by anyone else. But the writer rarely stays the same.