The Significance of the Written Word

“The significance of the written word.” Welcome to day 11 of the words for myself challenge.?39 days of wisdom I want to apply in my life.?Let me know if these words resonate for you too, and if not, what words you might say to yourself today to make a difference?

I don’t write enough…

Something that Dr Jordan Peterson has impressed upon me is the significance of writing to help you make sense of your ideas and to help test if they are actually any good.?I often speak of the significance of getting your thoughts out of your head, particularly unhealthy or destructive thoughts, writing them down, speaking to someone who will simply listen, or even recording your own voice as you speak out loud.?This process is often extremely cathartic and helps you separate yourself from the thoughts and helps release the mental processes to re-focus on something which is hopefully more constructive.

But this applies equally to all our ideas about ourselves and the world around us.?The mass of noise inside our head doesn’t always function very effectively and is seldom scientific in approach.?We can find ourselves lost in the realm of confirmation bias where our awareness attaches exclusively to things that validate our existing model of the world and discounting or disregarding anything that might contradict it.

Writing down our ideas allows us to more clearly see the holes in our reasoning or our beliefs.?It allows us to more effectively challenge ourselves, to see if we really do have a strong argument and what the alternatives might be.?This is a core component of cognitive behaviour therapy, the writing down of thought patterns and beliefs, looking at them critically and considering alternative ideas.?

The last 11 days have really shown the value of the process in terms of my own ideas and concepts that I practice and share with others.?But these written and recorded explorations themselves are very short and bite sized, they have to be to avoid being struck down by the social media algorithm which only profits from redirecting your attention constantly to the next thing.?This shorthand world we are increasingly drawn into of text messages, email, social media, comments on posts, encourages us to make short, snappy determinations and responses.?I think this risks narrowing our critical thinking ability, reducing our interactions with each other on complex or sensitive issues to a whittled down, possibly emotionally charged, single line response, which in turn encourages whittled down, possibly emotionally charged replies.?

This isn’t to say we should start writing essays on social media or in comments fields, but we should be challenging our ideas with ourselves perhaps by writing them down and inviting discussion of complex issues away from the comment fields.

I would love to hear from you with regards to your experience of the above.