Why I Haven't Been Writing

In 2025, I stopped writing regular blogs. I was in the process of renovating an entire house (which I am mostly done with now, thank goodness), but I could not find the will to put the written word to page and share it with the public. I tried a few times, but no draft seemed to be good enough to publish.

To be honest, I've been disheartened, and it's been difficult to see what good my writing would do.

AI Slop

The sheer volume of AI-generated posts on LinkedIn and other parts of the internet has effectively interrupted human-to-human connections. Most of these posts say nothing of import and all blend into each other. It is such a breath of fresh air when I come across a post from a person I know that is about something real and important.

You would think that since the human-written word has become more valuable, I should have more motivation to write. But who am I writing for now? All the bots out on the internet? The five people who will see my post on LinkedIn after it gets eaten by the pay-to-play algorithm?

There are so many indistinguishable, uncreative variations on a theme that it feels hard to make an intervention in the conversation that's happening, because the conversation is not happening. People are generating more and more content with AI to create pieces of content and make metrics go up. But fundamentally, that is not communication.

As one of my writer friends put it, when you write, you want to communicate something to another person. Farming out your writing to an AI means that you are no longer communicating.

How am I supposed to add anything meaningful to this mess?

Cruelty and Stupidity

The kind of writing I like to do requires the perspective 1) that many readers have a chance of reading charitably and thinking seriously about what I'm writing, 2) that many readers realize there are complex ethical issues out there which require careful thinking, and 3) that many readers can understand on some level that extending charity and empathy to others is often the right thing to do.

2025 has been a year of exceptionally degraded discourse. There is so much hatred and cruelty for cruelty's sake, warranted and unwarranted resentment, and a deep lack of curiosity about inflammatory and often misrepresented news stories. Our nation's leaders do not even attempt to make cogent, clear, and widely appealing ethical arguments for their policies, if they can even be called coherent policies. Across multiple parts of our government and citizenry, there is a total disregard for truth and accountability.

It's hard to get to complicated and nuanced ethical issues when you can't even get the basic facts on the board. When even the obvious is continually obfuscated, what's the point of trying to write something that goes beyond an elementary level of ethical understanding?

Censorship

I keep finding new ethical issues I can't write about because it would have negative consequences on my career. It would not matter how carefully or kindly I wrote about those issues; I would be misread regardless. It no longer seems to matter if I have a nuanced take on an issue where the sides have been taken and the trenches have been dug.

These are the conversations where I feel I could most help, because they are being had between actual people (and bots, with greater focus on real accounts). But I need to stay employable right now.

Many of these problems aren't new, but in 2025 they seem to have gotten worse than ever. I want to be optimistic and continue to write about ethical issues I care about, but it's genuinely significantly harder to do that now.

Who am I helping?

Photo Credit: Markus Winkler