Writing does not come naturally to me.
I've always been slow with writing, and I don't particularly enjoy the part when my sentence won't come out right. So why am I doing more of it in 2026, when I can generate a thousand words in the same time it takes for me to write ten?
Practically, why?
We consume so much information every day. The systems that I had in place before 2026 started breaking down. They really just don't work anymore.
If you're like me and you context switch a lot at work, you would know that the most common complaint about context switching isn't the fatigue. It's that fighting fires on the fly causes you to lose track of your thinking. Diving into different sets of problems on ground doesn't help with understanding whether the strategic thinking of the company has changed. I don't mind that to be honest, and I like the nature of my job that requires me to jump between fires.
However, there's a certain class of decisions (including life decisions outside of work) that I wish I had more clarity on before making a decision. Decisions that require me to draw inspiration from life's experiences, and those that require sharp intuition. What I noticed is that the amount of brain fog we get from context switching and reading AI-generated slop dulls our human intuition.
Writing is an obvious habit that can help me sharpen that intuition.
Emotionally, why?
I have always enjoyed reading, and I still do. Reading in 2026 has become so much of a slog though.
There's just so much slop out there at the moment man.
The issue isn't really just as simple as slop being everywhere. It's how people are proud of the stuff they can now create through AI, without really reading or understanding what the output is.
Even for work, do we truly need AI to generate every single word on our documents? If you're drafting a team charter or retrospective, how can you expect a large language model's words to move and influence the people you're leading into taking certain action?
Emotionally, writing in 2026 feels like me pushing back against the larger forces of the world.
You can be a software engineer that believes in the ongoing AI revolution, but at the same time believe in the importance of human taste.
Existentially, why?
I recall coming out of the exam hall in 2011 after taking the GCE 'A' Levels General Paper examination. I had chosen to write about "Art and Architecture" for my essay paper. On the way out of school, my dear teacher told me, "Don't come and find me if you fail!". She was absolutely right though; we had previously spent months preparing and discussing topics that ranged from technology to globalisation to healthcare. To pick a topic that I had not prepared for was examination suicide.
I got a "B" for my General Paper.
How...? I never once got anything better than a "C" in school.
I'll never know why I was given a better grade, and to be honest the grade does not matter at all today.
But maybe, that experience was a hint at what makes 'good' writing. I don't know if that piece of essay was really indeed better to the examiner. Heck, I probably rambled on and on talking about random stuff that the grader in the UK didn't know about. But that piece of writing was probably more to me than just an exam essay. I chose to write about "Art and Architecture" because I knew that it was what was interesting to me then.
So in the year of 2026, why write?
It really is as simple as writing because I feel like I have to. Writing should not feel like a chore because I'll only be writing about things that interest me.