Writing Can Make One Rich*

It’s exceedingly clear to me that I have a very chatty internal monologue. From the first signs of an awakening mind to the moments before sleep, there exists a flurry of loose-ended thought processes in my head that range from explaining technical concepts to coming up with my own “self-help” principles. In parallel, I believe there is a common narrative that has been growing over the years in my social circles: that writing is a powerful tool. In the age of Proof-of-Stake blockchains, private space industry, CRISPR and other genomic technologies, AI language models, etc… it's quite silly to think of writing as a technology. Unfortunately, writing does not have a token to speculate on, nor stock to list on a public market. It doesn’t rely on power laws in computing to get more powerful, nor does it need to be unlocked inside a laboratory environment. It’s a simple technology, thousands of years old, that gave us the ability to control our minds in a way that enables precise and compact knowledge.

As of late, I’ve lamented the fact that after graduating college, my rate of learning hard knowledge from various fields has compressed. While I wasn’t the most eager to do random homework, I always cared deeply for the educational compass that schoolwork and formal instruction gave. But all is not lost, the act of writing pushes one to learn what one may not have premeditated to learn about. And if the quality of the writing is a goal to optimize, then it’s sufficient to say that writing, both literary and technical, is the path to being an inveterate student. How does writing make one rich? It doesn’t passively make one rich, but rather one finds capital through writing. It’s the active use of writing as a technology. One of the fundamental characteristics of technology is that it provides humankind with leverage. The asterisk in the title is a nod toward being rich in non-monetary capital, achieved by pursuing what one wants in life, with the tool of writing in an easy-to-reach part of the toolbelt.