The Essayist's Notebook

A disturbing development has arrived on the digital horizon: the algorithmic standardization of the essai.

I came across a piece of writing today titled: What Is a Literary Essayist? (And Why I Decided to Become One) July 20, 2026

Yes, of course I am going to read something with that title and yes, I am going to be eager to get to it. But this is the first day with sunshine in over a week and I'm grabbing the chance to put a wash on. I'm catching a flight tomorrow and if I don't leave the house tidy there will be some non-literary frictions I will have to navigate. As a result my engagement with the piece was somewhat stoccato. This may have been a benefit.

The washing machine itself in almost an essay in the making. This particular model uses a system invented by Ludwig Gann whom I met when I was studying at Leicester University. And it's made by Fagor, a champion of the Mondragon movement I was to encounter only a year or two later. I'm exploring all of this in my thoughts as I fill the tub with soiled clothes. You see it's about the ever presence of connections and their meaning for the disposition of an essayist. I don't realize it yet, but I am already engaged with the essay – or at least the things about the essay title that give me pause, and I haven't even read the first paragraph. It's this phrase “And Why I Decided to Become One”. It has me stopped cold. It isn't wrong. It's just contrary to my whole life experience. I've written a few pieces lately on what it means to be an essayist, a literary essayist in particular. It was never a choice. It is the way I am. And I think the explorations here and in The Essayist and Essayism demonstrate that. The move was not to decide to become an essayist, but to prefer the title of the disposition over that of the job. I'm a journeyman writer by trade and an essayist by disposition. The first I could choose. The second was an accident of birth, and it remains an unresolved ache.

The Taxonomy of a Simulation

When I finally sat down with the text, and a glass of local apple juice, that initial pause on the word decided deepened into a very specific kind of discomfort. The writing was smooth, balanced, and perfectly structured. It had all the textbook gestures of an essay. It even named the right things; reaching for Gabor Maté, invoking the root meaning of essai, and using an ordinary dish left in a sink as a bridge to universal meaning.

But I am nothing if not a journeyman. My feet have trod many a route through my own thoughts to know how a footpath feels. The difference between the thread left by sheep, the struggle along the wet bridle path navigating the horse's hoof prints and the wide bóthar (cow-track) of wandering cattle. The slopes of a south facing glacier in August. The piece didn't feel like a mind moving through the terrifying fluidity of a genuine inquiry. It felt like an optimization strategy.

It also began to feel like someone had taken the boulders, stones and debris of my own trails and served them up as tarmac path. That the wild, jagged topography of my writing out there on the internet had been quarried, crushed, and bagged into uniform gravel for a suburban driveway. So I pulled away the polished surface to gaze beneath to see the mechanics of a Large Language Model at work. The text was executing a programmatic, parallel matrix; standing the essayist next to the journalist, the academic, and the blogger in a neat, tidy taxonomy to manufacture an authoritative stance.

The Tarmac Methodology

The machine is a master road-layer. It looks at the jagged, uneven terrain of an inquiry and immediately seeks to level it, to make it passable for the casual commuter. It cannot tolerate a sentence that hesitates, or a thought that trips over its own roots.

The ultimate exposure of this tarmac methodology arrived a week later in a follow-up piece where she laid out her process. She reduced the dynamic, unpredictable choreography of thinking to a rigid framework of exactly “seven movements.”

This is where the copy ceases to be faithful to human experience and becomes faithful only to an algorithmic recipe. Generative AI is remarkably adept at mimicking the appearance of a search, but its code is inherently hostile to the very thing that makes an essay an essay: unmanageable uncertainty. An LLM cannot sit in the room with an unresolved ache. Its weights and biases are tuned to solve, to compress, and to deliver a neat, shareable takeaway.

I have lamp in my parlour, placed on table, on a pile of books to facilitate reading by anyone who occupies the adjacent armchair. The antithesis to the way an interior designer places a statement lamp; not to see by, but to be seen seeing. Such is the structured performance of vulnerability, dropping names like Jung or Maté.

Branding Pivot

To choose “essayist” as a branding pivot is to treat the form as an exogenous costume rather than an endogenous honesty. When you write with a prompt to steady your shovel, you are no longer digging where you stand. You are letting a machine level the ground before you even begin the trial.

The essay remains a living tool for public utility and self-examination precisely because it risks the total failure of its own premise. It is a sequence of hesitations, reversals, and small experiments in meaning that survive only because they encounter the unshielded conscience of the person writing them.

As the Fagor cycle hums toward its final spin in the laundry room, and I look at my half-packed bag for tomorrow's flight, and the vacuum cleaner still awaiting it's duty cycle, I am reminded of why we must guard the rough track. The task of the essayist is not to build a smooth, decorative path for an audience. But to lead them safely through the landscape we have begun to explore.

Perhaps now, the task is to find out what can still be believed after the language has broken against the reality of a life. We must protect that brokenness from the automated formula. If we don’t, we aren't writing essays at all; we are just content creators wearing a dead man's title, selling maps to landscapes we never actually walked.