During my time in high school I was introduced to a “Socratic method” of distilling knowledge. Personally, I like the russian word for it “Майевтика” more, which if we translate from greek (μαιευτική /ek.sé.ta.sis/) means , literally, the art of helping in giving birth. It’s a method of asking questions and filtering through ideas by critical thinking, by doubting every answer and sifting through them. It can be a conversation with yourself or between several individuals. An author explains his thesis and defends criticism from others.

As a teenager, this method helped me greatly with figuring out my problems by myself, simply by asking questions and trying to answer them. I believe that it also helps to gain agency, by getting used to relying on yourself. One thing that socratic method lacks is rigorosity, which can be complemented with writing. Imagine you start to talk with yourself inside your head. You start with a question and drift through thoughts until a satisfactory answer is obtained. And not all of those thoughts are converted into words. When we convert thoughts into words, the brain has to work hard and try to compress all the complexities into word space. So usually, when we think we are in a thought space, rather than word space.(bias alert!) But thought space lacks rigorosity and oftentimes is influenced by subliminal signals, which we are not aware of. And let’s be honest most humans have endless list of cognitive biases. I suggest that by using a socratic method we can get an outline of our anwer, but to truly dig into it we must write it on paper.

Writing is not only laying your thoughts in words, but it can actually be a way of creating new ideas. Often I catch myself getting stuck in the middle of the sentence and brainstorming through ideas, and suddenly I end up making an insight that I was not aware of before. It’s a magical moment and a massive dopamine surge, that I am constantly seeking.

Other times, you might have a mess in your head, different ideas and facts just mixed without any relationship. You might even think that you understand something and gained intuition about the topic, but oftentimes it’s false. To truly understand a topic, one must break it up into fundamentals and build up whole from respective parts. After that, one must be able to explain it to someone in the simplest manner, as in Feynman’s method. That is my definition of
“understanding”</br>. I believe if you proceed to do all the steps in the end you will have a deep understanding of a topic. So binding this process with writing: writing will accomplish both steps. First in a process of figuring out how to formulate your thoughts, you will inadvertently learn about the relationship between various ideas you are trying to write. You are put in a position, where you have to build a mind map of all concepts and present it in an understandable way. Such a task forces us to see “bigger picture” and knit your story into a common context.

In the end, writing can benefit you tremendously, but only if you endure this unbearable lightness of being.

P.S. This post was written to justify why I started writing.