The lost art of daily writing

Maybe the great creative apocalypse of ChatGPT changing the way we write, create, and otherwise consume content is already well underway. We are starting to see research that suggests it is changing the way people talk. I’m glad that for the most part, Substack and other forms exist where writers can just write. Telling stories the old-fashioned way is a key part of putting writing to practice, which is what begets more writing. It’s a vicious cycle that if you have enough people lose the art of daily writing, it may very well be a skill that changes or dilutes. I’m not a fan of the SLOP that gets created by artificial means and is flooding our online spaces. I sit down on a daily basis and write an essay, capture my thoughts, or produce a research note. Sometimes that involves sitting down and sketching out a structure, but more often than not, it is a pure stream-of-consciousness-based effort. This is after all my functional journal.

I got really close to finishing the entire Stargate SG-1 series during my rewatch efforts. I made it all the way to season 10, episode 10, which is about the quest. That means I made it roughly 204 episodes into my rewatch before abandoning and swapping over to watch Farscape. With the principal Farscape characters being omnipresent toward the end of Stargate SG-1, it turns out I would rather just watch the original magnum opus those two actors helped create. While Stargate SG-1 made it 10 seasons, the same was not true for Farscape. Both science fiction-themed shows had very rich characters, worlds, and history to draw on, but one most certainly relied on puppets more than the other. I would argue that today both of these shows would have much stronger visual effects as the cost to that type of effort has dropped.

Unfortunately, for some reason, these types of shows are not what is being produced anymore. Reality Island is in perpetual dilution of all sorts of variants. It might just be the economics of producing reality television is just a lot cheaper than digital special effects and puppets. We need people to keep writing essays and assembling thoughts that are produced in long form and invoke the best of the written word. Sadly due to extreme content flooding those bursts of genius have a much harder time in the marketplace of ideas than they would have just a decade before the great flooding.