Well, it's a fascinating journey I've been on in my relationship to writing. Years ago, I very eagerly taken to writing like a fish to water. It has been a way to learn about life.

I was inspired years ago reading a bit of the works from the old Westerm philosophers, such as Descarte, Nietzsche, Immanuel Kant, Aristotle, and Henry David Thoreau. I really didn't get too far into their books. But still, it was an instrumental moment in my life - when I saw how these people reasoned, and decided to seek to follow in their footsteps. It made sense to me to think independently, using logic, putting together all the puzzles of the issues in our world.

I realised how people's perspectives about the world around them shape their attitudes and their courses of action. These conceptions are like the bed of a river, and the actions and attitudes roll downstream like the water.

A next stage, when I started having all of these insights about things, was when I thought it was very important to persuade others of what I had learned. A lot of what has been written on this weblog thus far falls under that category of prose.

However, just over the last few days, I've had a new realisation - that it isn't healthy to try to persuade people, per se. It's almost as if one is treating them like children. And I see that countries and cities where the journalists are doing the kind of journalism that I think is the most noble - such as Seattle, and New Zealand - seem to have people who fight emotional depression.

My conclusion has been that it's not a healthy situation for an editor of a newspaper to decide which slice of the events of the world she or he is going to tell the citizens of the city about that day. There shouldn't be that kind of filter. Instead, people should have a way of reaching out and finding the information about the world which interests them.

More of my thoughts about this can be read here.

So now, a series of conclusions are synthesising in my mind. The first idea is that writers and other creative people need to make their money from customers, rather than giving their work away for free, or relying on a third party to pay them - advertisers. I think that people would be willing to buy into a system where their dollars support these people's work, if it means that folks can choose what to read, and if it is a higher quality than the normal stuff you find out littering the web.

Writers tend to put their prose into a narrative which reflects their own views on the world (naturally!). And they would be inclined to believe that their words are merely a conversation held with everyone. But, in fact, that really isn't the case. Most people aren't interested in thinking or talking in the kind of way that a philosophical writer does, for instance. At most, that writer is having a conversation with his peers.

I think that this world would be a much healthier place if actual consumer markets decided whose writing was more desirable and whose was less. Also, it would lead to more respect for writer/thinkers - who are a class of people who have throughout much of history born the brunt of a lot of scorn. Independent thinkers are often viewed as "crazy" by mainstream society. Habits that writers develop when they are taking up the trade - such as using a self monologue in private, and talking with friends and neighbors about insights they have had without having a good communication technique down - can really lead to a lot of social stigma descending upon them. If these writers were able to make money with their prose even in those early years, I believe that stigma would be replaced quickly with respect from the public.

So... hmmm that's where my attitude towards writing has shifted to now.

Consequently, I think I'm going to try to open up a pay section of this website... where I will seek to put higher quality prose that probably targets other people's interests and tastes more specifically. Up until now, this blog has been a place to share a handful of my insights, and writing the posts has been mostly an excercise in personal musing about the issues.