Francis Bacon’s chew-and-digest category of books can, upon reflection, be also extended to essays and shorter writings. If the writing is good, length doesn’t matter.

It was this idea that came up from the bottom of my subconscious well just now, but I’m not sure what else will turn up, so let’s go rummaging.

For starters, every now and then I happen to chance upon a very well-written writing, either an essay or a blog post, or even a paragraph (such as the ones found on Amazon when someone takes the trouble and time to review a book for our benefit–for which I am grateful), that I find either useful, or interesting, or mind-bending, even hilarious, or simply well-written, etc. etc. The point being that where there’s value in a writing, I feel I’ve had a proper return on my invested time and eye-ball depreciation, cognitive effort, and mental rent.

But beyond that, I also feel gratitude, and though this may appear ‘foolish’ to the followers of the Ayn Rand school of Philosophastery, I think many of us probably have discovered that feeling grateful is also beneficial to our own selves, as it firstly makes or keeps us wholly human, and secondarily, pushes us toward similar altruistic goals.

Now, why would altruistic goals be necessary in a world governed by boundedly-rational Homo ‘Economicus’ who anticipates that there’ no free lunch? In other words, why should I write something useful for free?

But such questions are simplistic and devoid of a good business sense. Altruism is not unlimited, and there are reasons for it, even though reasonless altruism is the best: you can be altruistic and yet do business. Many of us recall the fond memories of pre-Walmart-era street shops that treated us nicely, held conversations with us, or otherwise were a place of friendship and social comfort for us, though in the main they were a business selling stuff and we were the customers.

You can be hard-pressed to disagree that businesses that are genuinely customer-relationship-oriented always make more money both in the short and in the long run, and altruism needn’t just be of pecuniary nature. Going to a mall and getting a discount might make you somewhat ‘happy’ but the human element is gone and you’re merely a transactor. Therefore, altruism covers a wide spectrum of actions that are not mutually in conflict with economical gains. On the other hand, they usually if not always enhance economic gains.

The mom-and-pop shop that offered me a discount on the fruit I bought, and who were all smiles and treated me as a friend (by taking interest in my dog and asking me whatI’ve been doing lately) is definitely going to have repeat business from me; the shop incurrs some ‘costs’ but these are not intentionally done in order to secure my business. One should not forget that the seller, too, is human and they need customer’s humanity as much as the customer needs theirs.

That we create friendships with customers (or teacher with students, for instance as I was in the past) is therefore the main psychological contract (an implicit one of course) and the business side of things is just a given, by the way. That’s because money is a tool to enhance life, but it’s not the only tool for this task. Imagine a super-rich man who has no friends and no one to love them. He is lonely, and further assume all the ‘friends’ he has are fake and after his money. It is in such extreme situations that we can see how money alone is not everything, though I don’t deny that it has synergistic effects with other life-enhancing tools.

So how does this relate to writing?

As I stated earlier, the feelings of gratitude that we feel reading someone else’s useful, value-giving writing pushes us to do something similar, and the totality of such events creates a favorable social environment, a mini-version of which can be illustrated through Amazon book reviews. If you leave a useful review of a good book for me, I’d be inclined to do the same for others, and so a virtuous cycle leads to a large amount of useful data that we can all benefit from. It’s a very interesting case of personal altruism resulting in social benefit for all.

And that’s exactly why I write–not that the social benefit I alluded to is my primary goal. The benefits, as I expounded, are secondary, just like profits at the mom-and-pop shop are. The main gains are less tangible and of a psycho-social nature: it makes me remain human, and helps my self-image see me as wholly human, as someone capable of participating in altruistic activities, for which I may or may not receive any gratitude (and couldn’t care less about, in fact).

In short, the experience itself is economically rational for me on several fronts, but I will not prolong this essay more than it has become. It will suffice to consider that I write it once, but it can be read many times by many people who chance upon it–including my future self (or even my kids). Thus, from an economic point of view, it’s a fixed-cost, variable-revenue situation, and therefore I will be behaving rationally if I wrote.

And if we all maximize our rationality, then the totality of it would definitely make our world a better place than otherwise.

And that’s why I write.