Every so often, usually when I’m either a bit idle or a bit swamped, I get the urge to write something — because I really enjoy that feeling of thinking my way clear as I write.
When I’m idle, my mind relaxes and sharpens; it picks up on things worth mulling over. Idle time also means more reading, and reading always sets off a swarm of thoughts. Most end up as a few scribbled words in the margin, but some are thornier — the kind that has me wandering between several books before returning to pen and paper to piece an understanding together.
When I’m busy, there’s no room to think, and if that goes on long enough, questions start bubbling up out of nowhere. “Am I doing this right?” “Am I just drifting with the current?” “Have I actually thought this through?” It’s like pulling out of the driveway, getting a few blocks down the road, and suddenly wondering, “Did I leave a window open?”
So, here I am, wanting to write again.
For me, wanting to write doesn’t mean I know what I want to write. More often it’s: my head is a bit of a mess; maybe I should dump it all onto the page and sort it out.
I’ve written much less these past few years — I’ve been busy doing. I tend to think too much and do too little, and I was trying to correct for that. But over the last year or two, a lot has happened. This is going to sound like I’m pumping the AI bubble, but I genuinely believe we’re living through an enormous shift. My own emotional arc has gone from early FOMO, to giving up, to something more settled. Without putting down the work, I think now is exactly the time to think more deliberately — to think in public, to turn private thinking into part of a shared context. Because execution is getting cheap.
The essay is a well-suited form for this. But in the modern context, the word has drifted from its origins. Etymologically, essay comes from the French essai, from the verb essayer (to try), which traces further back to the Latin exagium, meaning “to weigh.” The essay as a modern form begins in the Renaissance, when the French thinker Michel de Montaigne published his Essais in 1580. What he did was, by the standards of his time, unorthodox — not the systematic argumentation of a philosophical treatise, not the complete narrative of a literary work, but taking the self as the object of study. The titles look scholarly, the sort of thing Cicero or Seneca might have written, but the writing itself is casual.1
From the very start, the essay wasn’t meant to prove a truth, but to:
take an idea out and try weighing it.
Modern education, though, has institutionalized the idea — it demands structure, thesis, argument. It has drifted far from Montaigne, and looks more like a mini paper.
I don’t care for that institutionalized essay. I prefer writing that’s subjective, exploratory, unsystematic, close to life. There’s no burden in writing it, and no strain in reading it.
I’ve been sitting on this domain for years now. I originally meant to make it a personal hub, and in fact I built a version of one. But I scrapped it and started over — I like things simple. Visitors don’t need to know my history or every side of me; having a look at what I’ve been thinking and doing lately is enough. This is just where I pile up my odds and ends of writing.
I don’t want readers holding my writing up to the standard of the institutionalized essay, so I’ve decided to call it something else. Coming from a STEM background, “delta” came naturally — each piece is an iteration and a record of my internal state; a subjective, exploratory, unsystematic, close-to-life new take on an old form.
- Michel de Montaigne’s essays: https://hyperessays.net ↩