Why I Write

An ode to writing (video essay).

Hey there, I felt like doing something different. I made a video version of a piece I wrote about why I write. Here it is. You can find the text version below the video.

Happy New Year,

Darius

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A few days ago, I was reading.

Or at least, I was trying to.

Five minutes in, my mind drifted. I checked my phone. Put it down. Read another paragraph. Drifted again.

It was frustrating.

Because this wasn’t always me.

I used to read for hours. Long stretches. No effort. No inner noise. Just me and the page.

Now? Five minutes felt like a workout.

And that bothered me more than I expected.

So I started paying attention. Not to the book. But to my mind.

What I noticed was simple and uncomfortable.

My thoughts were crowded. Unfinished. Competing. Half-formed ideas piling up with nowhere to go.

Reading used to calm me down. Now it agitated me.

That’s when it hit me.

Reading stopped working because I wasn’t thinking clearly anymore.

And when you’re not thinking clearly, input becomes overwhelming.

So instead of trying to read more, I did the opposite.

I stopped consuming.

And I started writing.

Not for an audience. Not for publishing. Just to get things out of my head.

Messy pages. Bad sentences. Notes that went nowhere.

But something strange happened.

My mind slowed down.

The noise reduced.

And reading became possible again.

That reminded me of something I’d read years ago by Friedrich Nietzsche in The Gay Science.

He writes a short dialogue between two characters.

One asks why the other writes.

The answer isn’t noble. Or poetic.

It’s blunt.

“I have not discovered any other way of getting rid of my thoughts.”

And when asked why he wants to get rid of them, the answer is even sharper.

“I must.”

That line stuck with me.

Nietzsche didn’t write because he wanted to build a brand. Or share wisdom. Or feel productive.

He wrote because not writing wasn’t an option.

Writing was how he survived his own mind.

That’s when I realized why I write.

Not to express myself.

Not to teach.

But to think.

Writing is how I clean up the mess upstairs. It’s how I decide what matters and what doesn’t. It’s how I turn vague anxiety into something solid I can deal with.

Writing has given me everything that I wanted in life. My career, meaning, and it even helped me find my wife.

Without writing, I would never have hopped in a car and driven to the south of Spain, where I met her.

Writing is everything.

When I don’t write, my mind clogs up.

When I write, things move again.

That’s why I’m back to writing every day.

And I’m enjoying it more than ever.

Not because it’s easy.

But because it’s necessary.

I don’t write because I want to.

I write because, like Nietzsche said,

I must.