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 get back.
It’s not leisure, it’s survival. Those who don’t listen to the story don’t learn. Those who don’t learn, don’t survive. Since then, telling stories has been our way of organizing the world.
The myth, he remembered Mircea Eliadeit wasn’t entertainment: it was a manual of meaning. The narrative allowed us to recognize ourselves, create community, name fear and desire.
Long before writing, we already knew that survival depended on being able to tell what happened. And when words started to stick to stone, clay or paper, we invented something even more powerful: the possibility of saving what we learned for those who would come later.
Was Ursula K. Le Guin who imagined that the first human artifact was not a weapon, but a container to preserve seeds, objects, stories. That’s what writing continues to be: a bag where we keep what we are before it evaporates into noise.
Sometimes it seems like We live in noise: leaders shouting, immediate messagespolitical programs that promise absolute truths on screen.
The recent triumph Milei 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.
In these months a question repeats itself: 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 looked at the effects of delegating memory and thinking tasks to artificial intelligence. 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 pressure and noise, the hardest thing is to stop and 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 doesn’t happen before writing: it happens while we write. Joan Didion He said it better than anyone: “I write to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see, and what it means.”
“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 just expressing what we know, but discover what we didn’t know we thought.
The philosopher Byung-Chul Hanlast Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities, warns that we live in an era of hypercommunication without reflection, where the immediate replaces the meaningful.
This is why writing, with its time, is an act of resistance to the loss of meaning. And maybe, as you remember Mariam Martínez-Bascuñán in The end of the common world. Hannah Arendt and post-truthit’s also a way to keep the conversation that makes us human alive.
Arendt saw in thought an internal dialogue, a practice that preserves shared space when the common world falls apart. Writing is continuing to talk to ourselves and to others, even when noise threatens to make it impossible.
In 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 typed, clumsily or fluently) keeps us in the process of thinking, connects us to experience.
It’s not about fearing artificial intelligence or idealizing the past. It’s about not losing the gesture that gave us a voice. Continue using your hands to think. To keep alive that bag where we keep what would otherwise disappear.
Maybe that’s what continuing to write is: continuing to manufacture 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 consultancy Zelwa Storytelling.
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