I'm Begging You To Write More Essays
Dan Koe · 2026
"Essays are one of the last forms of content that actually require thinking, and the distinction matters civilizationally: articles package existing knowledge, but essays are an act of thinking that changes the author's (and reader's) beliefs — something AI, by definition, cannot originate."
Koe distinguishes 'fast content' (listicles, rage tweets, AI summaries — conclusions delivered without requiring thought) from 'slow content' (essays, genuine long-form thinking) and argues the former is quietly poisoning what he calls the 'epistemic commons' — the shared information environment everyone draws on to make sense of the world. His core distinction: articles are answers, essays are arguments; articles start with the conclusion, essays figure it out; articles inform, essays think.
The mechanism connects to Csikszentmihalyi-style flow psychology: meaning is 'the experience of ordered consciousness' — when attention is fragmented across competing inputs, that's psychic entropy (anxiety, restlessness); when attention is invested in a complex, challenging activity, that's psychic negentropy (flow, purpose). Fast content skips this ordering process and delivers pre-digested conclusions, leaving the reader 'informed but empty.' Slow content forces both writer and reader through the actual ordering process, which is why an essay can shift how someone thinks in a way a summary never does — and why Koe argues AI cannot write a genuine essay, since it lacks the situated, evolving point of view an essay is built from.
How does Koe distinguish an 'essay' from an 'article'?
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- I'm Begging You To Write More EssaysX (Article)
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