A Survival Manual in a World of Intellectual Overproduction

The times we’re passing through are just as strange as all those that came before. I am far from thinking our current difficulties are somehow more insurmountable than those, say, of the people who had just let fire into the cave (oh, the horror!) or those of the mercilessly advancing Industrial Revolution (oh, the helplessness!). The trial is always the same — either you swim or you sink — but the specifics, naturally, are entirely different each time. Which is also the main reason, at least in my opinion, that the same basic reaction keeps forming again and again in response to the new: Armageddon!

I try to resist this, every day, with all my strength. The polyphonic chorus of prophets predicting the end of the world as we know it rarely fills me with anything other than grim irritation. And yet I cannot deny that the trials we face today appear entirely different from anything we’ve encountered before. Because — surprise, surprise! — today the battlefield includes even the last sanctum sanctorum of human possibility, the one we always, albeit secretly, hoped would remain untouched by non-humans, at least in the universe we’ve imagined for ourselves. Under the knife of progress now lies not just our physical strength, but our very diferentia specifica as a species: our intellectual capacities, the thing that has always made us feel über alles.

But not anymore. Intellectual abundance — the age-old dream of the human race — now pours over us not like a blessed rain, but like a flood, like divine punishment. And especially in the form of text. Seas of text. Essays, reports, dialogues, poetry, aphorisms, novels, commentary. Entire universes of words… generated at the press of a key.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, dazzlingly, our dream appears to have come true. But why, then, does it provoke in me every reaction except the urge to sing Hosanna or Hallelujah? Is the reason just my eternally rebellious character, long trained to respond to every wave of collective enthusiasm with a raised middle finger? I don’t think so.

Call me a pessimist, a gloomy reactionary, just an aging grumbler if you like, but I simply cannot bring myself to believe in bliss amidst the flood. Am I the only one who, with growing unease — no, with rising dread — sees behind the set dressing of the paradise garden something else, entirely different? Not exactly a peaceful, sleepy landscape, but rather a kind of storm — even if only a “verbal” one? Not a babbling stream, but a tidal wave, a veritable tsunami of colourless and tasteless fluid, mixed from synthetic ingredients? You think you’re thirsty — but in fact, you’re drowning.

Fine, then allow me to spit it out: Somewhere deep in our beings we are all beginning to feel that this is not just another “mixed blessing.” It’s something far more insidious, more lethal: a modern version of the curse of King Midas. Everything we touch turns into something beautiful, resonant, golden. But just try to take a bite. Try to chew it. Might you not also, dear unknown reader, feel the unpleasant sensation that the food beneath the golden sheen is missing? That only the gilt remains?

The temptation to produce brilliant intellectual trinkets — to write, to generate, to publish — is nearly irresistible. Everyone does it. Their cousins do it. Their mother-in-law does it. At some point even the long-dead grandmother seems to start doing it. Everyone uses some kind of machine “assistant.” Everyone wants to fly like Icarus. No one wants to be Sisyphus. And for what crazy reason, if you please? To show you’re independent? To impress someone? Oh, get lost, you wise guy! Doesn’t saying no to all of this amount, quite plainly and stupidly, to quitting the race?

Yeah. But I dare to say here: Actually — no. And let the chips fall where they may.

On the contrary: stepping back from all this, at least in its simplest and most obvious forms, may turn out to be the most human act possible. Lend me a bit of patience, let me borrow your eyes and minds for just a few more minutes — and then decide for yourself.

The Disappearance of Resistance

Let’s begin at the foundation: human thought cannot exist or flourish without resistance. Our minds are not made to function in an environment where they face no opposition, no friction. Absolute freedom, as much a fiction as an age-old dream, is nothing but an imaginary world without physical substance — at least in the framework of thought I’m offering here. A person and their mind need obstacles. They need a wall to crash into, to push against. Questions that have no answers. Silence that presses more murderously than any cacophony. Emptiness that sucks you in with the irresistible pull of the eternally longed-for.

To think means to wrestle with the unknown. To write means to stumble, to fail, to begin again. To stand terrified before the proverbial white void of the blank page or screen. To go on not because there’s some rare pleasure hidden in it, inaccessible to others, but simply because you have no choice. Because you’ve tried to quit more times than you care to count. And because again and again you find yourself facing that same thing — the merciless, all-consuming, all-defining universe of the blank page. Something with no escape. If that’s what you were born for, I mean.

Machines don’t work like that. They don’t stop, they don’t hesitate, they don’t yearn. The blank page means as little to them as the streams of ones and zeroes that define their own being mean to us. They don’t “think” — they compute, at speeds we can’t even imagine. And that’s precisely what makes them dangerous: they erase our sense of what that mysterious “ineluctable humanness” of thought might be. And that means — of writing, too.

Writing Without Weight

Once upon a time, writing was a slow process of search. The blank page wasn’t just a background — it was a mirror, a white hole, a sucking funnel into a world of metaphysical emptiness, in battling which we always found the ultima ratio of our existence. Frantic, indescribable tension. A meeting with the unknowable in its rawest, most naked, uncontrollable form. Words came slowly, painfully, often after countless failures. And that — only if we were especially lucky.

Now it’s no longer like that. We no longer write — not in the sense that this magic once had. Today we just submit prompts. We don’t wait, we don’t struggle, we don’t wrestle with the void inside ourselves. We generate. And the words pour out so easily, so impossibly gracefully and abundantly, that the most important question of all — does any of this have value? — gets buried deeper and deeper in the lower layers of our awareness, until it ends up where every downward spiral leads: in the intellectual landfill of habit.

When the cost of expression drops to zero, its value approaches the same number.

Why Overabundance Is a Threat

And maybe it’s here that we reach the core of the issue: overabundance is not good for the human mind (nor for the human body, but that at least is something most of us are used to resisting, I hope). It’s not good intellectually. It’s not good emotionally. It’s not good in any spiritual sense of the word “existence.”

But why?

Because the human psyche constructs meaning through a system of limitations. We understand the world not because we have everything, but precisely because we don’t. Scarcity gives form. The unreachable awakens desire. Difficulty produces value.

When everything is always available, nothing remains important. The mind becomes a sponge under a waterfall — soaked and useless, devoid of direction or choice.

There’s a reason “infinite scroll” sounds like a punishment.

The Strange Death of Difficulty

And this applies not only to writing. In fact, it’s most clearly seen in a different field, long held as a stronghold of the highest reaches of the human spirit: in the intellectual games we once created as symbolic theatres of thought. Chess and Go — two of the most intricate strategic systems of human invention — once stood as monuments to the beauty born of human imperfection. They thrived not merely because of their rules, but because of the depth that arose from human limitation, from human error.

With the rise of machine intelligence, that drama has begun to collapse. In today’s correspondence chess, where players can use computer assistance, most games end in a draw. No advantage, no suspense, no mistakes. Only a sterile, entropic repetition of pre-mapped sequences — because everything else “isn’t worth it.” Even in the unpredictable terrain of “Chess 960,” where traditional opening rules are thrown out entirely, the outcome of 97–99% of games between players using equally powerful engines ends inevitably in draws.

The game survives, but its soul — the struggle — has vanished.

The same pattern is repeating elsewhere. Games turn into simulations. Simulations into automated procedures. Participation is replaced by spectatorship. The thrill of the mistake, the glory of the unexpected move, the dread of misjudgement — all vanish. What remains is sterile perfection, evoking lukewarm admiration but no true connection.

This isn’t a minor concern. The shift from imperfect participation to perfect spectatorship marks a deep civilisational change. When we no longer make space for failure, we also stop making space for the human.

Writing is facing the same fate.

Why It Matters to Stop

The answer is not Luddism. Not a rejection of technology. Not panic. Not ideological purity.

The answer is only one: to stop.

Deliberately. Strategically. Radically.

And personally.

The answer is in refusing to write automatically. In stopping just because it’s become easy. In waiting until the words once again demand effort. Until you must fight for them.

Paradoxically — and truthfully — this refusal may be the last remaining form of human resistance.

A Manual for the Thinking Person

If you want to remain human in an age of weightless writing, you’ll need rules. Here are a few:

1. Read more than you write

Sounds modest. Might even sound sarcastic. But it’s not.

Unlike writing, reading still requires time, attention, effort. You still can’t read five books at once. No machine can yet “read for you,” not in a way that changes who you are from the inside.

Reading is resistance. Writing without reading is just echoing an echo.

2. Make writing hard again

Don’t trust the easy first draft. Don’t idolise speed. Don’t confuse smoothness with depth.

Set constraints. If nothing else helps — write by hand. Slow down. Edit until it hurts. Then again.

Value comes from effort.

3. Train your mind like your body

Like a muscle, the brain atrophies without strain.

Thinking is work. If you want to stay in shape — think slowly, with difficulty, with awareness. Wrestle the unknown. Hunt your own mistakes. Write not to produce, but to stay fit.

4. Refuse instant answers

The machine always has one. A human doesn’t.

Learn to say: “I don’t know.” Get used to waiting. To silence. To leaving the sentence unfinished.

That’s where real thought is born.

5. Defend silence

The most endangered mental state today isn’t knowledge — it’s unknowing. Silence. Waiting.

Leave the page blank. Don’t fill every pause. Don’t “complete” everything immediately. Emptiness is not failure — it’s necessity.

Conclusion: To Not Write Is to Remember

It may sound absurd — that in a world of endless writing, the only meaningful answer is to stop. But maybe that’s the only gesture that still means anything.

Because in a future where every sentence is easy, the only ones worth reading will be the ones that cost something.

If you want to protect thought, meaning, the human — don’t write more.

Write less. But write with weight.

Stop.
Think.
Resist.