Writing is hard because we like it that way

My friend and fellow word-herder Will Buckingham has something  to say about the pleasure – and pain – of writing. In short Mr. Buckingham believes writers like to big up the misery experienced while writing in order make ourselves look all brooding, dark and mysterious, instead of the shallow pleasure seekers we truly are. Well, Mr Buckingham I have only this to say to you.

No Comment.

The world is full of people doing difficult things. It’s astonishing. The prevailing orthodoxy that people are, at root, lazy — as if human beings are little Aristotelian universes, and need some kind of outside prompting, some primum mobile, to get things going — is simply nonsense. Sometimes, to be sure, people are doing difficult things out of necessity; but very often, people are doing difficult things because difficulty can be fun.

via The Pleasure and Difficulty of Writing | Will Buckingham.

Well, maybe just a brief comment.

I’ve been listening to The Second Machine Age recently (audiobooks while jogging are my primary non-fiction consumption opportunity) It’s an interesting book on the far reaching effects of workplace automation and the exponential growth in computer power. Boiled down the book’s message is that the few remaining “jobs” in the near future will go to super intelligent, super creative workaholics while the rest of humankind malingers around in poverty. It’s an argument somewhat undermined because The Second Machine Age is a book that understands machines much better than it understands people.

People don’t hate work because it is hard. We hate work because it is routine and repetitive IE it is easy. The “hard” part of most jobs is that they are done for exploitative corporations and bureaucracies intent on stripping value out of workers. As Mr Buckingham makes clear, humans actually love doing difficult things. And a writer is defined by their love for the difficult, complex and sometimes murderously frustrating act of writing. We don’t need to worry about people sitting around watching TV and eating pies if we liberate the from work. Most people who slob around in that way do so because their creative spirit has been crushed by work. If we took the burden of uncreative, exploitative jobs from the shoulders of humans, they would actually work much harder, at truly creative work like writing.