A tribe gathers around the fire. Someone tells what happened during the hunt: how they tracked the animal, what mistake almost cost them their lives, how they managed to return.
It’s not leisure, it’s survival. Those who do not listen to the story do not learn. He who does not learn, does not survive. Since then, telling stories has been our way of organizing the world.
The myth, he remembered Mircea Eliadeit was not entertainment: it was a manual of meaning. The narrative allowed us to recognize ourselves, create community, give a name to fear and desire.
Long before writing, we already knew that survival depended on being able to tell what happened. And when the words began to stick on stone, clay or paper, we invented something even more powerful: the possibility of saving what we learned for those who would come after.
Was Ursula K. Le Guin who imagined that the first human artifact was not a weapon, but a container to preserve seeds, objects, stories. Writing continues to be that: a bag in which to keep what we are before it evaporates into the noise.
Sometimes it seems that We live in the midst of a din: shouting leaders, immediate messagespolitical shows that promise absolute truths on a screen.
The recent triumph of mercy in Argentina (with its exaltation of individualism and its contempt for the common, with a rhetoric that divides the country between “good people” and “baboons”, with that strange idea of freedom that oscillates between provocation and threat) is a clear example of how noise can disguise the emptying of meaning.
These months a question is repeated: why continue writing when a machine can do it for us and the world seems to reward speed and stridency?
A recent study from the MIT Media Lab analyzed the effects of delegating memory and thinking tasks to artificial intelligence. The experts are more or less catastrophic, but they agree on something essential: if we stop exercising reflection and language, we stop thinking deeply.
The journalist Katharine Graham He used to say that “sometimes, in the midst of the pressure and noise, the hardest thing is to take the time to think.” Maybe writing is just that: a way of being silent to think slowly, when everything around us pushes us not to do so.
Because thinking does not happen before writing: it happens while we write. Joan Didion He said it better than anyone: “I write to discover what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see, and what it means.”
“The experts are more or less catastrophic, but they agree on something essential: if we stop exercising reflection and language, we stop thinking deeply”
Writing, in short, is not only expressing what we know, but discover what we didn’t know we thought.
The philosopher Byung-Chhlast Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities, warns that we live in an era of hypercommunication without reflection, where the immediate replaces the significant.
That is why writing, with its own time, is an act of resistance against the loss of meaning. And perhaps, as you remember Máriam Martínez-Bascuñán in The end of the common world. Hannah Arendt and post-truthis also a way to keep alive the conversation that makes us human.
Arendt saw in thought an internal dialogue, a practice that preserves shared space when the common world breaks down. Writing is continuing to talk to ourselves and others, even when the noise threatens to make it impossible.
At a time when algorithms can write for us completely correctly, the question is not whether they can do it better, but what we lose when we stop doing it. Because writing (by hand or type, clumsily or fluently) keeps us in the process of thinking, connects us to experience.
It is not about fearing artificial intelligence or idealizing the past. It’s about not losing the gesture that gave us a voice. To continue using your hands to think. To keep alive that bag where we keep what, otherwise, would disappear.
Maybe continuing writing is that: continuing manufacturing bags to store what we are, before it evaporates into noise.
*** Javier Siedlecki is a specialist in narrative and public speaking and director of the consulting firm Zelwa Storytelling.