Why write when none will read?
Writing is a tool for learning; it does not matter if none will read it. Essay comes from the French essayer—to try, to attempt. At its core, an essay is not a performance but a practice. It is a space where thought is tested, shaped, and sometimes proven wrong. If anything, the essay exists to collate and establish information that the creator has researched or experienced. Everything we see, read, or study began this way: as a tentative attempt that later evolved into a script, a book, or even a production. Writing, long before it becomes communication, is cognition.
To write is to slow thinking down. Thoughts in the mind are fast, slippery, and forgiving; they blur contradictions and skip details. On the page ideas must stand in sequence; they must justify themselves. Writing exposes gaps in understanding that thought and contemplation can hide. When no one else is watching, this exposure is safer. The private page becomes a laboratory rather than a stage, a place to fail without consequence. In that sense, unread writing may be the most honest kind.
There is also a mistaken assumption embedded in the question itself: that writing’s value depends on readership. This assumption treats writing as a product rather than a process. But many of the most important uses of writing are instrumental, not expressive. Notes, drafts, and journals are not meant to persuade others; they are meant to persuade the writer. They clarify knowledge, ideas, theories, and most importantly what is not yet understood. Even if a text is never shared, it has already done its work.
Writing when none will read also resists the pressure to perform. An imagined audience can be a useful guide, but it can also become a censor. When we write for approval, we edit rough edges, change voice, and blindly grasp for conclusions. Writing in private allows uncertainty to remain unresolved. It allows the writer to ask bad questions, to follow strange associations, and to contradict themselves. These are not flaws in thinking, but instead a sign of thinking in motion.
Historically, this private function of writing has always existed alongside its public one. Scientists fill notebooks with calculations that lead nowhere. Philosophers draft arguments they later abandon. Artists sketch ideas that never become finished works. These attempts are not wasteful; they help guide and inform development. What survives into publication is only the visible tip of a much larger, unseen mass of writing. To write only when an audience is guaranteed would be to cut off the conditions that make good work possible in the first place.
There is also a quieter, more personal reason to write unread words. Memory is selective and unstable. Writing records not only what we thought, but how we thought at a particular moment in time. Returning to old writing can be uncomfortable or surprising, but it reveals growth. Even if no one else ever encounters those words, the writer does. The act of writing becomes a dialogue with yourself, spread out across time and thought, a way of recognising change and guiding progress.
Writing without readers affirms that not everything must be optimised or crafted for visibility, engagement or in modern media: bait. In a culture that rewards broadcasting and metrics, unread writing is an act of resistance. It insists that meaning does not require validation. Some thoughts exist simply because they need to be worked through, and not because they need to be consumed.
So why write when none will read? Because writing is not a message sent outward but a method turned inward. It is an attempt, an essai, to understand. And that attempt has value long before it reaches an audience.