On the Vanity of the Essayist

I shared in my February 2026 mind dump an innate desire to document my life over time. At its core, it speaks to something I cannot quite shake - a desire to know my time here is real and to leave a marker on the timeline. Like the modern “Instagram dump”, it is ultimately a proof of life. I have decided to express that ancient drive in this form. I want a digital footprint. Albeit not my most prized pursuit, I count it as a noble cause in this transient age. It is additional proof in centuries to come that I existed and that my mind was active. Hopefully, I produced useful insights. At the very least, I’ll settle for “interesting”. Maybe, just maybe, someone will collect these scattered records in later generations and publish them like Blaise Pascal’s Pensées.¹

Allow me to be explicit about what is really driving this. I have an innate desire to be perceived as deeply intellectual, and I am not always sure whether that desire serves me or controls me. It is one I am still learning what to do with, and this is not a redemptive post so much as it is a confessional one, to protect myself. There is a genesis to this, but I will skip the exploration of its origins. It would be unfair to myself to leave out the other half. My mind lights up listening to Michael Sugrue’s lectures² or watching Tom Holland,³ and I cannot help but desire to be like them, talk like them, think like them, and share in the same depth they do. I do not for one second think this is unique to me.

We know the old adage about power corrupting. I submit that eloquence captivates, and absolute eloquence captivates absolutely. When you encounter someone with profound insight and the rhetorical prowess to deliver it, you get caught in their web. If you are not careful, a sufficiently convincing speaker can make even a half-truth sound like a gospel. If you enjoy a particular topic, you will naturally gravitate to listening almost religiously to someone who has command of the field and combines that with speech prowess.

This is the image I secretly aspire to: the trap of the Renaissance Man, a seductive pull that has me stuck between a rock and a hard place. I want to have the ability to discuss these fascinating topics with that same effortless command. I want to be able to explain why Tchaikovsky’s 6th Symphony is a masterpiece, quote Hamlet, discuss Nietzsche’s Amor Fati,⁴ and crown it all with a proper exegesis of Ephesians. Educate yourself on the Western Canon, they say. The allure of being able to discuss these topics, coming off as deeply intellectual is intoxicating. I secretly desire to sound like I am delivering a Michael Sugrue lecture in Princeton on Kant.

Yet, the moment I try to articulate any of these subjects, a paralysing imposter syndrome sets in. I feel exactly like Ken in John Logan’s play Red,⁵ standing under the crushing gaze of Mark Rothko. Rothko demands to know if his young assistant has “earned the right” to discuss art, interrogating him on whether he has read Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Shakespeare. I look at the towering thinkers and the vastness of what they mastered, and I realise I have not put in the decades of rigorous study. I feel like an absolute fraud daring to speak on these matters.

This discomfort sharpens when I turn to my faith. Christianity is a fiercely intellectual religion; its historical realities alone form a mind-blowing tapestry that rivals any classical epic. Naturally, I want to study my Bible with the exact same ravenous curiosity I apply to the Western Canon. But if I look at the ledger of my time, there is an imbalance. I find myself eagerly chasing the depths of the Canon, happily losing sleep to devour history and philosophy, yet treating the reading of my Bible as something I should do rather than something I want to do. My heart has simply not caught up yet. I am drawn to the immediate thrill of earthly intellectualism, and the Divine ancient text has not yet taken hold of me in the same way.

This creates an active, daily battle. There is an old theological proverb that says the longest journey a human will ever take is the eighteen inches from the head to the heart. The Word must travel that distance. If I only study for intellectual stimulation, I end up with a bloated mind and a starved soul. The text has to transcend academic fascination and settle into genuine conviction.

This internal wrestling is difficult enough to experience in silence. Articulating it to the world is an entirely different battle. Here, I find myself trapped. I possess these exciting thoughts about history, theology, and the human condition. I feel their weight deeply. Yet, to make the reader feel the same weight, the language must be precise. The syntax must get out of the way so the idea can breathe. I am still building my proficiency as a writer. If I rely solely on my current grammatical limits, the idea gets lost in clumsy translation.

This brings me to a necessary confession about how these essays come to life. In an era flooded with synthetic thoughts, I feel a deep need to defend the authenticity of this digital footprint. I realised I needed to write a manifesto taking ownership of my voice and setting the record straight.

Here is the exact reality of my writing process. Every essay begins in Obsidian as a collection of scattered thoughts, fragmented arguments, and raw drafts. I wrestle with the concepts and attempt to polish them as best I can. Then, I bring those messy thoughts to an AI. I do not, however, accept its outputs wholesale. Instead, I step into a boxing ring with my Chief Editor. I utilise it purely as a sparring partner and a structural sounding board. I have it role-play as my reader, organise my sprawling ideas, and draw out thematic patterns I might have missed. When it inevitably tries to sanitise my voice, I reject the edits. It rewires my clumsy grammar, but the final, frictional cut is always mine.

There is, however, a looming fear that this process will stunt my growth. I worry that relying on a tool will prevent me from becoming a better writer, because true mastery is forged in the wrestling. It is in fighting with my own output, staring blankly at a screen until I find the exact right word without a machine handing it to me, that the actual skill is built.

This fear is the cost of my circular dependency, and it forces me to define a strict relationship with this tool. If I use it to generate the polish simply because I want you to marvel at my intellect, I have fallen right back into the trap of the Renaissance Man. It feeds the exact vanity I am trying to starve. Instead, I am making a pact, a boundary for my own heart and an assurance to anyone reading this.

The wrestling, the sudden realisations, the core arguments, and the human friction are entirely mine. I supply the raw material and the soul. The AI acts strictly as my Chief Editor. It supplies the grammatical scaffolding so my mind can be accessed clearly. Praise the ideas, the curiosity, the theology, if you will; those belong to me. The flawless grammar is just my editor doing its job.

This leaves me with one final question. If I have not earned the authority, still need a machine to help me say it clearly, and am not yet sure my motives are pure, what right do I have to publish these essays at all?

The closest thing I have to an answer lives in the literal origin of the word itself. The word “essay” derives from the French verb essayer, which simply means “to try” or “to attempt”.⁶ I am abandoning the pedestal of the master entirely. I am not offering you a neat resolution, a five-step guide to humility, or a flawless academic treatise. I am just trying. I am putting thoughts on paper to see if they hold weight. I am writing to untangle the knots in my own head and inviting you to witness me try. I am fighting the vanity of the intellect and trying to get the words right. The essays are simply my attempt.

Footnotes

1. Blaise Pascal, Pensées (1670). A collection of fragments on theology, philosophy, and the human condition, published posthumously. ↩

2. Michael Sugrue (1957–2024) was an American professor whose lecture series Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition, recorded at the Teaching Company, became widely popular on YouTube. ↩

3. Tom Holland, the historian and author of Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind (London: Little, Brown, 2019). ↩

4. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §276 (1882). Amor Fati - “love of fate” - Nietzsche’s formula for human greatness: the desire to have nothing different, not merely to bear what is necessary but to love it. ↩

5. John Logan, Red (2009). A two-hander play set in Mark Rothko’s studio, exploring the tension between artistic integrity and commercial success. ↩

6. Michel de Montaigne coined the literary form with his Essais (1580), deliberately naming them “attempts” to signal their exploratory, non-definitive nature. ↩