This piece raises the concern that our current information environment is actively degrading our ability to think, and it proposes essay writing as the solution. It argues that writing essays can not only sharpen individual thinking but also address the epidemic of "fake thinking" spreading through society, and that essays will play an important role in the emerging "meaning economy." The author urges readers to use essay writing to lead themselves—and society—toward something better.

1. Why Essays Matter: Personal Benefits and Social Impact 🧠

Writer Dan Koe makes a forceful plea for us to write more essays—or, if we haven't started yet, to begin now. The essays he has in mind are nothing like the stiff assignments handed out in school. He describes essay writing as the single best tool for learning faster, thinking more deeply, expressing ideas and beliefs more clearly, and avoiding being replaced by AI. 😊

But the benefits of essay writing don't stop at the individual level. Koe argues that the modern information environment is destroying our capacity for thought, and that essays are one of the very few content formats capable of cultivating our ability to understand reality.

"The modern information environment is destroying our ability to think, and most people don't even notice. Essays are probably one of the only content formats that develop the ability to make sense of reality."

We are living through the largest-scale production of fake thinking in human history. Koe warns that the spread of this fake thinking not only worsens our individual lives but could potentially lead to societal collapse. The purpose of this piece, he says, is to show how this fake-thinking epidemic is destroying our lives and society, and to explain how essay writing can repair the most precious resource we have: our minds. 💖

2. A Polluted Information Environment and Its Social Threat ☠️

Koe claims that social media and AI are literally a threat to civilization—a statement that might sound strange at first. How could scrolling Instagram, watching TikTok dances, or reading five-second takes on X lead to societal collapse? 🤷‍♀️

He explains that there are three important layers to this problem.

2.1. The First Layer: Pollution of the Epistemic Commons

The first layer is that our epistemic commons is being contaminated. Think of the epistemic commons as the source water of information—it matters enormously. Most people turn to news to stay informed, but in reality they're just treading water: their lives aren't improving; they're growing more cynical, more polarized, more hostile.

Every time we post on social media, produce a TV show or film, or release music, the epistemic commons—the public information environment—keeps expanding. And here lies the problem. If the content we publish publicly does more harm than good, and isn't offset by genuinely helpful content, our intellectual source water will inevitably become contaminated. 💧

Why does that matter? Because the information individuals consume shapes their identity, and identity shapes the trajectory and behavior of their lives. The form of content we consume trains our attention span, capacity to tolerate complexity, ability to hold contradictions, and skill at understanding nuance.

Koe asks whether the reason we acquire knowledge and cognitive ability isn't ultimately to live the life we want. But solving civilizational threats—climate change, governance, AI alignment, public health—requires a population capable of consistently understanding those problems. Yet 99% of people, he laments, are too distracted by cat videos to even understand what those problems mean. 😿

The takeaway: we need to ask ourselves whether what we consume or produce leads to beneficial changes in behavior—for ourselves and others—or whether we're unconsciously soaking in information that makes life worse and pollutes the information environment.

2.2. Daniel Schmachtenberger and the Metacrisis 🤯

Koe then introduces Daniel Schmachtenberger, one of the most important thinkers of our era. Schmachtenberger calls the crisis facing modern civilization the Metacrisis: three generator functions combining to produce two catastrophic outcomes—civilizational collapse or dystopian control. 😨

The three generator functions are:

• Rivalrous dynamics: Zero-sum games where one side's gain requires another's loss. Arms races, corporate competition, and the social media content race all qualify.
• Substrate consumption: Systems consuming their substrate (e.g., soil, attention, trust) faster than it can regenerate. The attention economy, which burns through cognitive capacity at an unsustainable rate, is a prime example.
• Exponential technology: Technology that improves itself faster than human wisdom can keep up with. AI advancement, automated weapons, and social media algorithms all fit.

When these three combine, Schmachtenberger warns, the result can be civilizational collapse (nuclear war, misaligned AI, ecosystem destruction) or dystopian control (total surveillance, digital authoritarianism). He calls these attractors—traps that complex societies tend to fall into. 📉

Fortunately, a third attractor also exists—a positive one: a world with meaning-making, shared understanding, and aligned incentives.

Looking at the internet, AI, and social media, it's easy to see how these threats operate. Content creators optimize for engagement rather than transformation (rivalrous dynamics), which means prioritizing reaction over truth or impact. Content optimized for engagement doesn't require thinking or understanding, which atrophies cognitive ability (substrate consumption). AI then accelerates the replication of this destructive content (exponential technology), making it appear like genuine thought while demanding no cognitive effort from creators or consumers. 🤖

The result: the epistemic commons is contaminated at alarming speed by content that looks like transformed thinking but isn't.

3. Slow Content and the Rise of the Meaning Economy 📈

So what can we do about this, and how can we benefit from it in a meaningful way? That's the third layer. 💡

"Wisdom is not algorithmic and cannot be made algorithmic."

For decades, the internet has been dominated by a particular type of content: content that delivers conclusions without requiring thought. Koe calls this fast food for the mind—fast content—because social media companies use the same psychological triggers as fast food companies to get people addicted. 🍔🍟

The spectrum of fast content includes BuzzFeed listicles, rage-bait tweets, AI-generated summaries, off-the-cuff opinions, engagement-optimized threads, and thirty-second TikTok explanations that leave viewers feeling like they've understood something. This, Koe suggests critically, may be exactly why so many people today consider themselves experts.

But the internet landscape has changed. The kind of post that once pulled hundreds of thousands of readers with "10 Best Habits to Get Rich by 30" no longer works the same way.

Slow content, by contrast, demands thought: essays, long unoptimized conversations, certain books, lectures. Even a tweet written in a way that makes you think in order to extract its insight can qualify as slow content.

Koe says he wants to focus on essays specifically, because essays are something you can produce alone and because they are a powerful tool for capitalizing on the meaning economy we are entering. Essays have the most scalable and lasting form. A meaningful conversation might influence one person, then disappear into the memories of those present. But an essay develops the thinking capacity of both reader and writer, and can influence thousands of people over decades. 😮

Most people, he adds, go through life holding beliefs they haven't really examined. They feel they believe something, but they've never written it out in a way that could withstand scrutiny from a sharp reader.

The fact that the world's most respected intellects—Paul Graham, Isaac Newton, Nietzsche—honed themselves through essay writing further underscores the point.

The decisive feature of essays is that AI cannot write them. 🤖❌ Koe spells out the difference between articles and essays:

1. Articles provide answers; essays make arguments.
2. Articles package existing knowledge; essays change the writer's beliefs.
3. Articles start from conclusions; essays go searching for them.
4. Articles inform or educate; essays are an act of thinking.
5. Articles transmit what already exists; essays discover what doesn't yet exist.

Only humans can write essays, because robots have no particular perspective or lived experience. AI can simulate a viewpoint you direct it toward, but it lacks the beliefs, biases, and emotions that make you think and question in a specific direction. 😢

More importantly, AI destroys the magic of surprise and discovery. You can ask AI to share something new with you—but because you anticipated the request, it's no longer a surprise. AI can give you good material, but that material doesn't arise from your own creative capacity and thought process. Koe confesses that the more he uses AI, the more useful he finds it—but also the more quickly it drains his creativity. That's why he believes the most relevant content on the internet will take the form of essays: slow content.

3.1. The Rise of the Meaning Economy and Ordered Consciousness 💫

The meaning economy began emerging a few years ago, and AI has accelerated it further—because meaning is now the scarcest commodity in civilization. 💎

Before industrialization, we worshipped God. In the industrial age, productivity became our god. Today, more is our god: more money, more information, more content. We have more than ever, but less sense of purpose.

In Koe's view, meaning will increasingly be sold at a premium. People already crave it, and they will crave it more. And no one is better positioned to supply meaning than those who shape the epistemic commons—the value creators who push back against the contamination of our informational source water.

So how is meaning created and experienced? Meaning is the experience of ordered consciousness. When attention is fragmented, scattered, and pulled in competing directions, that is psychic entropy—experienced as anxiety, boredom, and restlessness. Chaos itself. 🤯

But when attention is invested in complex, challenging activity with clear feedback, that is psychic negentropy—experienced as flow, purpose, and meaning. Order itself. 🧘‍♀️

Meaning, then, is not something you find somewhere in the world. It is a state of consciousness that emerges when your attention is invested in an orderly way in something complex enough to fully absorb you. If you're at level 10, a level-1 challenge is boring and a level-20 challenge is overwhelming—but a level-11 challenge is just enough to lock in your focus. Meaning is created through the process of ordering consciousness. ✨

The act of ordering consciousness—turning chaos into order, wrestling with complexity to arrive at coherence—is what gives birth to meaning. If you've ever found yourself stuck in a rut, uncertain about the direction of your life, and then suddenly achieved clarity and stepped into a more meaningful way of living, you've experienced this firsthand, Koe says.

What does this have to do with content and essays?

1. Fast content (entropic, pre-digested, algorithmic, AI-generated) skips the ordering process and delivers pre-packaged conclusions. The reader's consciousness grows more disordered. They received information but generated no meaning—so they feel informed yet hollow.
2. Slow content (essays, genuinely public thinking, insights that require effort) asks both writer and reader to participate in the ordering process. The writer orders their own consciousness through the act of writing; the reader reorders their thinking by properly digesting the ideas.

The opportunity is here. The world doesn't need more people competing to produce the most enraging posts. Nor does it need more people trying to become the most productive person alive in order to build the next billion-dollar AI company.

What the world needs is ordinary people who understand their own minds and record that understanding publicly. Koe calls them "value creators"—a concept distinct from the typical influencer or personal brand. 🚀

A value creator is someone who chooses a positive trajectory for their own life, develops deep interest in the skills and areas of focus that help them move toward that trajectory, and shares that journey with others who can relate and benefit from their perspective. Koe believes this is a way of living that will remain valid and deeply meaningful in the future. Even without creating tangible physical products, the impact is larger—because you are providing information that shapes identity, influences behavior, and affects whether civilization flourishes or decays. Building rockets, he argues, doesn't carry that kind of power. 🌟

Koe says writing this piece was incredibly difficult. He scrapped three drafts of "why you should write essays," but by staying with the challenge, synthesizing perspectives, and arriving at a deeper understanding of what he actually wanted to say, he was able to finish it. He hopes that if this piece brings positive change to the reader's thinking and actions, it will bring greater meaning to both their life and his.

4. Practical Advice for Writing Essays 📝

Now for some practical guidance on getting started—and where to publish what you write.

• Write to discover, not to announce. 🔍 Most social media engagement comes from packaging—you'll get to that later. For now, start with a concept, a perspective, a question, an experience, a thought, something that bothers you, or simply a topic. Essays begin with uncertainty and an open mind.
• Write about what genuinely interests you. 🌟 Focus on one central idea and treat it as an opportunity to research and learn. Go deep, challenge every perspective, and don't treat any single source as gospel.
• Resist templates. 🚫 As you get better at writing, you'll discover your own structural patterns. Remember: this is a skill. For now, just write. Argue with yourself; ask questions to keep the writing moving. Then, if you want to worry about structure, get help from AI. But do the thinking first.
• Ask yourself: "Do I actually believe this?" 🤔 It's easy to write about what you already believe, but the point of an essay is to change what you believe. That's the hardest part. Resist the urge to act as though you're absolutely right.
• Read essays; consume centropic content. 📚 Your capacity for meaning-making is shaped by what you take in. You can't expect your "For You" page to serve you this kind of content. You have to actively search, curate, and tend to your digital feed.
• Build a body of work, not a content calendar. 🗓️➡️📖 People don't follow creators because of a single piece of content. They follow because of a consistent body of work. Each essay builds on the last. AI cannot replicate a coherent philosophy built through years of genuine thinking.

Where should you start? Koe recommends X (formerly Twitter) or Substack—the only two platforms, he says, that prioritize long-form writing and thinking. He's written about this at length elsewhere and leaves the elaboration there.

Conclusion 🚀

Dan Koe's piece makes a forceful case for essay writing as the way to protect and develop our own capacity for thought amid today's information overload. His warning that the epidemic of "fake thinking" and the contamination of the "epistemic commons"—driven by social media and AI—can devastate individual lives and threaten the whole of society is unsettling, to say the least. Against this backdrop, he argues that essays are far more than a writing format: they are a powerful tool for cultivating the ability to understand a complex world and for creating meaning through ordered consciousness. He reminds us that becoming a value creator through slow content—building a distinctive perspective and philosophy through essay writing—is the wisest investment we can make for the future. May we all write more essays, grow through the practice, and find ways to make a positive difference in the world. ✨