The Writer’s Dream Is Hijacked.

On the 11th of May, 2025, I lost nearly three years’ worth of notes.

This isn’t just a sentence; it’s an earthquake. One with a shattering, deafening sound. The kind of personal tragedy only those who write from the core of their being can truly understand. The kind that leaves you gasping for air, not just because your words are gone, but because a part of your identity feels gone too.

Inside those notes were the roots of my poems, the bones of my essays, the seeds of my books to come. Quotes, thoughts, raw, scattered emotions, drafts and notes I held closely, as vines to the tree that’s me.

And when all that vanished in a cloud of iCloud’s misfortune, I mourned. I felt the weight of grief so heavy in my chest that I was catapulted to the same pain I felt when I lost a loved one. And I sat once again with grief.

I wrote them for safekeeping, believing the lie that digital meant indestructible. I wrote extensively. Obsessively. Emotionally. I connect with writing on a level that even I struggle to explain. I don’t just write to record; I write to exist. To make sense of myself. Sometimes I go back to my notes just to remember who I am. Sometimes the act of reading my own clumsy phrasing helps me remember that I am.

So when I opened my notes app and saw emptiness, I cried heavy tears. I needed to go back to my poems that morning. I was anxious and doubtful while preparing for an exam. I was juggling far too much. I needed to read one of my lines to remind me that I had overcome once before, to affirm the prophecies I had spoken over myself.

But it was all gone, in just a single click.

And yes, it may sound foolish to store the core of my creativity on an iPhone. But it was easy, convenient, the way everyone does it. I too fell into that trap of fast over foundational, cloud over concrete. Once upon a time, I used to keep physical copies: handwritten poems, scribbled journals, tangible echoes of my thoughts on paper.

I had always told myself that digital could disappear, but I didn’t believe it could vanish like this. I didn’t think I would be so careless as to let it happen to me.

People say paper can burn, which is true. But books have survived fires. Pages have withstood time. Bibles have been found relatively unscathed, on countless occasions, amidst the ruins of a burnt down house. But in the digital world, one click or glitch and it is gone.

And worse still, you must pay to even have the illusion of security.

We now live in a world where we are forced to subscribe to protect our memories. Our creativity is held hostage by capitalism. You rent your music, your iCloud, your storage, your streaming all on a monthly basis.

Calculate what that costs over a lifetime and multiply that by millions of people doing the same. Who profits? Who owns it in the end?

This isn’t just a technical error up for reevaluation. It is a systemic failure we must pay attention to, a subtle kind of theft lurking behind the guise of technological advancement.

Writers today are told to write for clicks, to monetize our minds, to become content machines. But writing for many of us was never about income. It was about introspection.

I recently read an article by Tim Denning on Substack. He claimed the writer’s dream is dead. But I disagree. The writer’s dream was never about going viral. The true writer’s dream lives in every half-formed idea we watch blossom into butterflies, every journal we keep just for ourselves, every line of marginalia we once scrawled in the quiet. The dream is self-expansion, reflection, and growth.

For me and maybe for you too, writing is a way to explore who I am. It is how I engage with the world, how I question it, challenge it, and transform myself in the process.

If writing is your livelihood, of course you must adapt. But if writing is your calling, then it can never die. Because the true writer has never been powered by algorithms or likes. The true writer does not stop when no one is watching. They do not stop when the world moves on. They write because they must.

If you ever thought writing would make you rich, maybe you were chasing the wrong dream. Writing, real writing, rarely pays well. And if you see it only as a job, perhaps it is time to reconsider. Because art was never meant to serve commerce. It was meant to serve humanity.

Digital platforms might glitch. Social media might crumble. AI might copy our syntax but never our soul. We say AI is taking over, but only the parts of us that were already machine: the templated, the algorithmic, the lifeless content. AI can never replicate the sacred chaos of our emotions. The handwritten mess of a poem scrawled at 3 a.m., half asleep, half awake, desperately trying to catch the whispers of creativity that only visit in the dark. It cannot coin metaphors that teleports a reader to a shared space in time, allowing them to bask in the stimulus that fueled the spilling of ink.

So the writer remains.

Because the writer is human. And the human spirit, no matter how bruised, is not so easily erased.

And yes, maybe only two people will read what you write. But those two people might be changed. And you, in writing it, have already been transformed.

So if the world says the writer’s dream is dead, maybe it is not the writer we have lost. Maybe it is the world. Maybe what is dying is the part of humanity that can no longer sit still long enough to read, to feel, to listen.

But you and I, we are still here.

We are still writing.

And that means the dream lives on.

My lost notes taught me something brutal:

That digital convenience is a lie sold at premium.

That art needs grounding, sometimes literally on paper.

So this is my call, not just to grieve, but to resist.

To return to the roots.

To print again.

To create.

To publish books.

To handwrite.

To back up on stone if we must.

To reclaim the rawness of our craft.

Because the writer’s dream is not dead.

But we must fight to keep it alive.

References-

https://open.substack.com/pub/timdenning/p/the-writers-dream-is-dead?r=3htr8g&utm_medium=ios