My Writing Journey

I always hated writing as a kid. I remember we had this spelling homework where we were assigned a list of 10 words that we had to incorporate in sentences of our own construction to show semantic and syntactic understanding. I would spend longer than I had to on the homework because I would try to construct the longest, most convoluted sentence, cramming all words into it simply so I had to write less. Throughout my education up until the IB, I always asked for the minimum word count on every assignment because I hated writing so much. Today, my output would shock my younger self. I have a journal which is over 400,000 words long. I am currently working on multiple unfinished books (both non-fiction and fiction) at the same time (not the greatest approach but I digress.) I have written a couple of articles too, and a lot more.

This shift first happened when I began taking more interest in the subjects I was studying, such as history and economics in the IB, and being able to write on my computer instead of paper. Don't get me wrong, I still dislike writing on paper almost as much as I did in the past, but the shift to computers was like a renaissance to me. A major issue with writing in the past was speed, I always hated that my mind thought far faster than I was able to write which would cause my thoughts to trip and not stay constant. I was also very prone to go on tangents which were hard to refocus as I couldn't go back or edit the text at all. This also tied to the fact that it was so hard to plan my thoughts and structure my text properly. As I'm writing this, I have already written 4 paragraphs ahead of the words you are reading, but noticed that I missed some things so I was able to go back and modify my text.

The second greatest shift was the advent of AI. I will be 110% transparent, AI is heavily involved in my writing process. The use of AI in my writing generally follows a parabola where at the start I use it very little and gradually ramp it up until it tapers off and gets reduced as I near the end of my process. AI has taken off the weight of the most high friction part of my writing which is taking my ideas and organising and structuring them into a cohesive linear piece of writing. I personally am slightly afraid of atrophying this part of my brain so I almost completely forbid AI from my journaling, which I do daily, through writing or video, so I'm able to keep my brain nimble and trained, however I do not recognize the utility or virtue in purposely making my life harder, unnecessarily. I am faced daily with immense amounts of AI slop, and maybe I have even partially contributed to that in the early days. This has made me use it less and less over time however I believe I wouldn't have been able to do what I have done so far without the advent of LLMs.

I published my first Substack article on April 3, 2023, and then published five more before burning out, or maybe losing interest.

After that initial burst, I stepped away from Substack and did not publish again until May 1, 2025. Since returning to writing articles I have published a total of 38 articles. The articles I have written honestly just come from me looking around and getting incredibly frustrated with how broken our default systems are. I tend to write a lot about the structural traps we’ve built for ourselves, whether that’s the housing crisis pricing everyone out, the way our factory-model education system grinds down kids' potential, or how we’ve let algorithms completely hijack our attention and politics. I guess my brain just gets hung up on why we keep choosing these terrible setups when we could literally just design them better. I’m not really interested in grand, sweeping political ideologies or academic theories that sound great in a PDF but fail in the real world. I just want to figure out the actual mechanics of how we live together, like how changing a zoning law or adding a little friction to a social media feed can actually fix our epidemic of loneliness or save our shared grip on reality.

A lot of my output ends up hovering around this weird intersection of technology, human nature, and policy. I'll dive into heavy things like the global collapse in birth rates, the absolute mess of the modern immigration debate, or what happens to our sense of meaning when AI can suddenly out-create us or even simulate love. But I try to keep it grounded. I talk a lot about moving past that tired, century-old fight between the free market "jungle" and the central planning "machine," pushing instead for what I call a "Gardener State"—something that actually tends to the soil so people can grow, rather than just standing around yelling at the plants. I even end up writing about stuff like the crisis of modern masculinity or the absurdity of the addiction economy, not to start a culture war, but just because they are glaring structural failures that no one is fixing pragmatically.

Don't get me wrong, I know writing essays won't instantly fix the world, but putting these thoughts on a screen is the only way I can get my mind to slow down and actually organize the chaos. Like I mentioned with how much I hated writing on paper because it couldn't keep up with my tangents, typing out these articles lets me piece together the puzzles of urban planning, cognitive manipulation, and economic incentives until they actually make sense. I’m basically just trying to draw better maps for a future that feels like it’s arriving way too fast, looking for the pragmatic levers we can pull to make sure we don't end up living in an isolated, algorithmically driven nightmare.