The past few years have been a really wild journey for me that have led me to lean heavily into text and writing things down, like everything, all the time.
Here are a bunch of things I've learned in no specific order.
* Writing engages the pre-frontal cortex and suppresses activity in the amygdala. Net psychological effect of this is you become more rational, more methodical, more relaxed, less anxious/fearful
* Cognitive behavioral therapy has the best evidence for efficacy among the "talk therapies," and it's pretty much just a framework for writing down your negative assumptions and analyzing them, this helps you figure out which ones are correct and which ones aren't
* Certain software tools are essentially just environments which lower the friction of working with text buffers, emacs is probably the purest example of this philosophy, any code editor is an example, so are the 'second brain' apps like Obsidian or logseq, arguably a terminal is also an example
* Things we write when transformed to the correct format can change the outside world, e.g. you wrote down a piece of information and then later formatted it as an email or a blog post or as some code which you deployed and now the world outside is closer to what you want it to be, these transformations are potentially macros that you've written in text and versioned somewhere.
It's a radically different approach to thinking and computing than the mental model most people are walking around with in their head. Thinking as writing and writing as execution. Everything starts in the brain, write it down and loosely organize it, over time transform it into your work products, communication with others etc. We are simply moving thoughts down the pipeline from brain to reality, all through the same process, same simple set of tools etc. It is very very powerful for producing high quality ideas and outcomes in my experience.