Why is it important to write

I think that writing is one of the most important things that a person can do. In time, almost everything that a person does disappears, except for what they write. The oldest civilizations in the world left a jumble of confusing relics, that contain mostly ambiguous meanings. Light is shed on ancient peoples to a far greater degree when they have developed a higher level of literacy. The oldest cuneiform tablets are just lists of goods traded, and shed little light on anything other than the economic lives of their writers. Eventually things like Hammurabi's code, and the Epic of Gilgamesh shed some light on the legal and mythological systems of the period.

In other civilizations, writing became more advanced, with works such as the Egyptian Book of the Dead, with its detailed instructions for mummification and burial, or in the tragedies and philosophical writings of ancient Greece, as well as the works of Homer, Herodotus, and Thucydides. By the time of Christ, the world was lousy with things people wrote down, and even though only a small fraction of that material still exists, we know a great deal about the ancient world because of it. As history catches up with the present, more and more writings exist, until 1453 AD, when the movable type printing press was invented, after which time, nearly anyone could publish just about whatever they wanted to, provided that they had the will and the economic means to do so.

In todays age of the interweb, that is still true, but now all that you need is a computer and an internet connection, and you can put whatever you care to share out there for anyone who cares to read it. Many people even use blogs, just like this one. The difference between most of those people and me is that they think that people actually care what they have to say. I'm just trying to practice writing and purge all the stored up crap that is preventing me from writing all the stuff in my head that I think that people might actually care about someday.