Dan Koe — I’m begging you to start writing essays (even if you hate writing)
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––– Chapters ––– 0:00 I am begging you to write more essays 1:35 The internet isn’t dead, but it’s killing us 6:31 The three forces breaking civilization’s ability to think 10:53 Why essays may be the last bastion of real thinking 16:59 The meaning economy and how to thrive in it 22:05 How to think in public (and why it’s the most valuable skill you can develop)
Key Insights
I am begging you to start writing more essays or to just start writing essays if you haven’t already. And no, I’m not talking about the essays that you were told to write in school. I am talking about one of the greatest tools to learn faster, think deeper, improve the articulation of your ideas and beliefs, and avoid being replaced by AI. Yes, I’m serious. But those specifically are the selfish personal benefits of writing. That’s what you and I get from the act of putting words on paper. But there is something a lot deeper. The modern information environment is breaking our ability to think, and most people don’t even notice, and even more don’t even care. Essays might be one of the last forms of content that actually develops your capacity to make sense of reality. Because right now we’re living through the largest scale production of fake thinking in history. And the consequences of this are quite high, as you’ll find out in this video. And only a select few of you will actually care enough to take advantage of it and profit from it. So in this video, I want to show you how this fake thinking epidemic, as we’ll call it, and if it goes on as it is right now, which is in a bad downward direction, will not only make your own life worse, but will potentially lead to the collapse of civilization. And then at the end, I want to help you write your first essay so that you can fix one of the most precious resources that you have, which is your mind. And of course, turning it into a career or a side income doesn’t hurt either. So the first point here is that the internet isn’t dead, but it’s killing us. And we’ll start with a quote from Daniel Schmachtenberger. Actually, every quote in this video is going to be from Daniel Schmachtenberger. The written word as the primary type of media was probably required for democracy to work because it required the capacity to pay attention to an idea for long enough to understand it. Now the point of this section is that social media and AI are quite literally a threat to civilization, and I know you don’t see it as that because all you see it as is this little app on your phone that you use every day. And I know it sounds insane. Like how could doom-scrolling Instagram Reels eventually lead to the collapse of society? How could watching a little person dance on TikTok hurt? How could reading someone’s 5-second, 280-character opinion polarizing opinion on Trump on Twitter/X ruin the world? That’s just something that you do on your lunch break. The reason is because you only focus on yourself. You only think about your own little bubble of life, and you don’t think about the impact or the consequences of the little unconscious actions that you’ve picked up over time. And so, when you zoom out beyond yourself to see what’s really at play, it’s hard to unsee. Now, there are three layers to this, so stick with me because we’re going to go deep, and I promise that it will change the way that you think about not only writing and essays, but just long-form content in general and social media and how actually impactful those things can be. So, the first layer is that the epistemic commons is being poisoned. So, your question then is what is the epistemic commons? And you can think of it as the water supply, but for information. So, that’s social media, that’s the news, that’s wherever you get information from a public resource. So, as an example, most people watch the news to stay informed or to educate themselves, but if you look closely, you can just see that they’re getting complacent. They’re not thinking at all. Their lives aren’t changing for the better. In fact, more people are just becoming more jaded, more polarized, and more violent. Whenever you post on social media or whenever someone creates a TV show or movie or whenever someone produces music on Spotify, the epistemic commons or public information environment grows. Now, this obviously gets very complex and it requires a certain level o
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