I'm Begging You to Write More Essays
Author: Dan Koe Type: Newsletter essay
Core Thesis
The information environment is being poisoned by "fast content" optimized for engagement rather than thinking. Essays — the one form AI cannot truly replicate — may be the last bastion of real thinking, and writing them is both a personal intellectual practice and a civilizational act.
I — The Poisoned Epistemic Commons
Daniel Schmachtenberger's three generator functions driving civilizational risk:
- Rivalrous dynamics — win-lose competition (content creators optimizing for clicks over truth)
- Substrate consumption — consuming your own foundation (the attention economy consuming cognitive capacity faster than it recovers)
- Exponential technology — tools that improve faster than human wisdom adapts (AI accelerating content production and imitation)
The epistemic commons (public information environment) is like a water supply for minds. Content that doesn't cause beneficial behavior change poisons it. The consequences: a population unable to understand civilizational-scale problems coherently.
II — Fast Content vs. Slow Content
Fast content (articles, listicles, hot takes, AI summaries): delivers conclusions without requiring thought. Skips the ordering process. Reader feels informed but stays cognitively disordered.
Slow content (essays, genuine long-form, idea-dense tweets): requires both writer and reader to engage in the ordering process — wrestling with complexity until it coheres.
Article vs. Essay distinction:
- Articles are answers; essays are arguments
- Articles package existing knowledge; essays change the author's beliefs
- Articles start with the conclusion; essays figure it out
- Articles inform; essays are an act of thinking
- Articles communicate what's there; essays discover what isn't
"The defining factor of an essay is that AI cannot write one." AI lacks a situated point of view, direct experience, and the capacity for genuine surprise and discovery.
III — Meaning as the Scarcest Commodity
Meaning = the experience of ordered consciousness. When attention is fragmented → psychic entropy (anxiety, restlessness). When attention is invested in a complex challenge with clear feedback → psychic negentropy (flow, purpose, meaning).
Fast content keeps consciousness disordered. Essays create meaning by requiring the ordering process — for both writer and reader.
The meaning economy: As AI floods the world with cheap content, genuine thinking in public becomes the scarcest and most valuable offering. The opportunity: be an ordinary person who makes sense of their own mind and documents it publicly. This is "value creation" as distinct from influencing.
IV — How to Start
- Write to discover, not to perform
- Focus on a single main idea; go down rabbit holes; challenge sources
- Resist templates — find your own structure through doing
- Ask: "Do I actually believe this?" — change your beliefs through writing
- Read essays and consume centripetal content; curate your feed actively
- Build a body of work, not a content calendar — each essay compounds
Platforms: X or Substack (only two that prioritize long-form thinking).
Key Entities
- Dan Koe — author
- Daniel Schmachtenberger — systems thinker, metacrisis framework
Key Concepts
- Epistemic Commons — the public information environment as shared cognitive infrastructure