Writing about life as it occurs to me
Writing is a powerful tool to think. The main motivation behind this blog is to help me clarifying my own thoughts. I can imagine someone wondering, why share it with the internet then? Why not write in a journal? I came to the conclusion that there's benefits to sharing your thinking publicly for myself and the reader that happens to come upon this blog.
How this helps me
Writing in general forces us to think about what we want to say. This is obvious. Why it matters and how it helps us in our lives may be less obvious to some. It matters because in our lives today here in the United States in 2026 it is easy to spend all day consuming other peoples thoughts. Media in all forms; social media, streamed movies and tv shows, advertisements of any kind, helpful youtube videos, books, etc. Someone somewhere or a group of people had to think about what they wanted to communicate even if that came down to "this would be funny". I believe the media we consume has some impact on who we are and the choices we make. If we only ever take inputs, we may be unknowingly driven down a path we didn't choose. Depending on the outcome you might not mind this. I assume for most of us the outcome is not net positive, I know for me it wasn't. Writing helps me to become more conscious of the media I consume, disempowering it's influence over me and empowering me to choose media that keeps me on a path I chose for better or worse.
We don't spend a lot of time thinking about the inputs. If you tried to think about every single input you got from every form of media you'd likely see your mental health go downhill quickly. Our brains aren't built to run concurrent operations, one being holding the inputs, like remembering key points from all the social media posts you scrolled through and the second operation being analyzing each key points in context. Asking questions like does this even make sense in context? What is the full context here? What are the counter points? This is a lot of work to do. It's even harder without being able to store your progress somewhere. Back in the day some video games had no way to save progress. Writing allows you to save your progress in processing inputs.
I believe free thinking is the foundation of all other freedoms. Free thinking is not natural. It is a skill and like all skills you can improve at it with time and genuine effort. It is also perishable if not practiced regularly. Writing about life as it occurs to you is practicing free thinking.
Free thinking is a skill and one of the key ingredients to create social environments where good faith debate occurs. It allows you to explore another persons ideas temporarily. It's like scouting an a trail to discover if its attributes, properties, and what led to the creation of this. If we don't practice free thinking during conflict, I've observed in myself and others, we fall back on the safety of snap judgements or ideology. Snap judgements for those who don't know are mental shortcuts. They're usually easy to understand and hide the complexities of every idea. It's not always bad to use snap judgements, it's important to be aware of when your applying a snap judgement. Snap judgements can lead to de-humanizing others. De-humanization is how we override our built in safety mechanism to kill and otherwise damage other human beings. I won't go deep into that here. Maybe in another blog topic. Anyway, good faith debates is how we make real progress on most conflicts towards solutions that lead to better outcomes for both sides. Obviously that's easier said than in practice. Just because something is hard doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
Practicing free thinking with genuine effort will eventually require research. This exposes you to new information and grows you in unexpected ways. We are all either growing or dying in a philosophical sense. The simplest way to put this is this way: there is consciousness and unconsciousness. With the way our world is today, that's to say the day-to-day experience of it, combined with how we as human beings work biologically speaking right now cause human beings to be pulled back into unconsciousness without effort. There's a constant slight tug almost like gently pulling a rope dragging an animal towards you. It's always there and shows up in different ways for people. The other force that's also pulling on you arguably even more gently is consciousness. This is not spiritual mysticism I'm talking about here even though nearly every religion touches on this in some form I assume. These are actual experienced states. I encourage you to not believe me and simply experiment paying attention looking for these states so that your able to differentiate between them. The best suggestion I can provide if your wondering yourself how conduct such an experiment is spend three hours straight doom-scrolling YouTube. Pay attention to the automation driving you. Then on a different day, go out to a place where you are surrounded by nature and pay attention to the awareness you have. Maybe do that a few times. I assume it will be different for everyone so find what works for you.
I won't go into the brain health benefits of writing because I'm actually not very familiar with that. Thinking about it on my own it would make sense that writing is good for your brain since your using it. Like other parts of the body if you use it, it improves. There is some recent research that has come out that suggests using a AI to generate ideas and basically write for you actually has a negative effect on brain health. This would make sense since the AI is doing the thinking for you. My intention here is that every word here is typed by me. I don't use AI to generate this. I write it up, spend time thinking about it, refine, spend more time thinking about it until I'm satisfied with the output. It sometimes takes multiple iterations. This means it will be slow since I work full-time and have a life with people I love spending time with. My goal is to make each article usable for the long-term though. The ways in which I will use AI is as a fact checker on my own thoughts and to discover books, white papers, or articles that inform my posts.
How this helps the reader
Sometimes it's nice to see another person out there on a similar path thinking about similar topics. If we always keep everything to ourselves we could fall into the trap of thinking that these ideas are unique and special and therefore we are unique or special. This is a trap because it isolates you from other human beings and I believe is the road to self-deluding to the point our lives become unmanageable.
You get to practice free thinking! Reading and writing are like yin and yang. You need to do both. By reading though I'm talking about reading + thinking about what you read. This grows you in unexpected ways.
At the end of the day if you get something out of it great, if not that's okay to.
I don't provide a way to interact with the posts. I don't plan to currently but I'm toying with the idea. If you do want to connect over any of these topics. Feel free to reach out to me over good old fashion email or LinkedIn. I sometimes get a barrage of messages so if you do reach out put the title in the subject line and that will stick out to me when I'm checking my messages.
Email: robertjsalas1@gmail
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertsalas/
-rob