Who Writes This

I write to open myself up to myself. To make my inner world accessible to me. Afterwards I feel like after exercise, relieved and free. Writing is not my profession, it is how I think.

Over the years I attended writing seminars and practiced writing meditations. Sinking deeply into a context and truly feeling it became easier through that. When I write, I process and understand things better that were not so clear to me before. The act of writing triggers an inner process that brings me closer to answers, step by step.

Reading, on the other hand, has never really worked for me. Reports, non-fiction texts, I forget them quickly. Stories tend to stick better. Writing, by contrast, is my best way into learning. I engage deeply with topics and the more I dig, the more I enjoy it. It triggers bursts of creativity and while I am still writing about one topic, I am already making notes about the next.

What comes out stays that way, because my patience for major revision rounds is limited anyway. I do not use editors or writing tools either, because it is not so much about the output as it is about the thinking process. I write in German because it is my mother tongue and the sentences flow out of me much better than in English. I then have translations done by tools like Deepl and increasingly by AI like Claude. The tools are so good that I revise the translations less and less.

The State

Once I am in it, I cannot stop. The sentences come, one thought leads to the next. It is a state that many describe as flow. I do not experience it that way. For me it feels above all exhausting. I sense that it demands a lot of patience from me. Experience I have enough, since I have been writing extensively for work for 30 years, but still no technique ever developed that I could switch on or off. Writing and thinking merge into one and that is exactly what makes it so exhausting. The constant holding of context, the not drifting off, keeping the logic, refilling coffee, staying seated. Not getting up and losing it because I am taking far too long for one sentence and the next sentence keeps drifting further away. Flow feels different.

This state, or rather process, is very fragile. Every small interruption has the potential to set everything back by hours. Switching tabs, looking for a document, checking a number or reference, coming back, eating, drinking. I even put off going to the bathroom until the very last moment. Because thoughts can disappear faster than they appear and you run the risk of having to start over from much further back.

During the last twenty years, when I commuted a lot between the US, Europe and Asia for work, it was my job to analyze markets, identify trends, develop sales and marketing strategies. That happened through writing and as a result much of it is very precisely documented. It was always a need of mine to write up my insights from all those thousands of documents. Because I recognized that all the bad decisions that had happened over the course of my career gave rise to a big Why. And since technology provided extremely fast access to numbers, sources, analyses, I first sank into that. And never made it back to the text. Often the context was gone and the flow anyway. When AI came along I discovered the field of ontology for myself, since I had always done it intuitively, but manually. It was the system I had, but never developed further in a way that would help me better.

What AI Actually Does

Like everyone else, AI became an indispensable tool. Research that used to take days was now a matter of the right question, packaged in a prompt, then a few minutes of waiting. Many of my texts would not have been possible without this ease of getting to information so quickly. I could now combine direct APIs to knowledge databases with all the texts I had written and collected over the years. AI helps me manage all this data and information and make it accessible to me when I need it. When I need a number in the middle of a thought or sentence, there is a database running alongside me that searches through what I have written and delivers the data. It would be tempting to have the texts written by LLMs directly, but then my process of learning, understanding and making progress in my thinking would be completely lost. But the writing process was suddenly on steroids.

The Wrong Question

An estimated 99% of content on the internet is now synthetic. The debate revolves around who wrote all of it. To me the question is irrelevant. What matters much more: Who was the content made for?

For me the answer was not hard. Because I recognized early that I write primarily for myself. For my understanding, my learning and my processing of information. Only later came feedback that my texts and analyses were also valuable to other people. So essays became the optimal format for me, because they made the content symbiotically valuable for me and for others. For me in writing, for others in reading. AI helps me make my own and external knowledge accessible in the exact moment I need it.

My conclusion from this: authorship is not typing, but taking responsibility for what is written. Whoever decides what is relevant is the author. The tool beside it does not play a central role.

Every one of these texts was created this way. I wrote, the AI fed me my own experiences.