I Couldn’t Write Yesterday Because I Had to Read the Two Best Blog Posts I Ever Discovered

It is not often that you discover content on the Internet that captivates you so much that you forget everything else. This happened to me yesterday with two blog posts from Tim Urban’s blog, “Wait but Why.” Everyone should read these groundbreaking articles.

Have you ever thought about our future? I’m talking about the future of all humanity. Where will the technology that is being developed today take us, and how fast will we change?

Do you ever think about death or what makes a person human? Do you ever wonder if we will either become extinct or immortal?

These are questions that Tim Urban pursues in the two articles I have read, among others. Urban does not examine these questions in isolation but rather integrated into a broader context.

I won’t summarize the two articles here, because you should definitely read them yourself. At the end of the article, I will link both blog posts.

Who is Tim Urban?

It isn’t easy to find personal information about Tim Urban. There is no article about him on Wikipedia. Instead, his blog “Wait but Why” is covered in a relatively short piece.

This is surprising because Urban is one of the most successful and well-known bloggers worldwide. On the other hand, it’s not essential to know where Urban comes from, how old he is, and his personal history. His content speaks for itself, and that is what every blogger should strive for.

Tim Urban keeps himself in the background and tells the story he has to tell. He obviously doesn’t want to present himself, but instead conveys content and lets his readers participate in the fascinating insights he stumbles upon during his research.

How does Tim Urban write?

The first article I read yesterday was about the future of artificial intelligence and the second about how Elon Musk’s company Neuralink will change the world.

Tim Urban explores these questions in an incredibly entertaining way. He writes about artificial intelligence, the technological singularity, body-machine interfaces, evolution, and various ways in which humanity will evolve over the next few decades without ever overburdening the reader intellectually.

He does this because he is not an expert in the disciplines he writes about. Tim Urban takes a topic that fascinates him and then reads everything he can get his hands on. He interviews leading experts from various scientific disciplines and summarizes the state of science in such a compensated and generally understandable way that everyone can understand it.

His articles are enriched with numerous animations, graphics, and tables. Most entertaining are his own illustrations, which he uses in every blog post to present incredibly complex issues playfully. Urban is truly not a master draftsman. He uses simple stick figure drawings. These clumsy and straightforward drawings are so charming that one generously overlooks that they are on the level of a fourth-grader. This is not meant to be pejorative at all. Urban himself is continually flirting with the fact that he can’t draw.

The most striking characteristic of his blog posts is unambiguously their length. He could easily sell any of his articles as short books on Amazon.

When I read his article on Neuralink, hours had passed. Because I was curious, I copied the entire piece into a Word document to see how many words the article actually had.

It’s hard to believe, but the entire article is 36,556 words long. The thrillers I write are only 20,000 words longer on average. So a blog post by Tim Urban is more than half as long as a full-fledged 350-page novel.

What bloggers can learn from Tim Tim Urban

Urban monetizes his blog, mainly about Patreon. He also sells, together with his partner Andrew Finn, PDF versions of his articles and runs a webshop with merchandising articles related to his blog.

A blog with the reach of “Wait but Why” could undoubtedly be monetized much more aggressively. The fact that Urban and Flinn don’t do that suggests that Urban is not motivated by money, but really has a passion for blogging.

He could easily divide each of his blog posts into several shorter articles and promote them separately. He chooses not to do so, and instead, he puts the reader through articles that take several hours to read. Nevertheless, “Wait but Why” is immensely popular. I would go so far as to say that the blog is so popular precisely because of its long-form articles.

Tim Urban’s articles are the opposite of quick to consume and quick to forget content bites. Urban does not consider his readers to be impatient or stupid. He trusts them to follow him through the shallows of the world’s most complex topics and manages to be entertaining and motivating.

Tim Urban’s epic articles thwart the idea of the always hurrying and rushing internet user. People are still always ready to drop everything if they meet someone who really has something to tell.

It’s the big issues that affect everyone, whether people are aware of it or not, that Tim Urban takes up on “Wait but Why.” He is really interested in the questions he raises, really burning. It almost seems as if he writes only for himself.

I’m sure Urban would continue to get to the bottom of the big questions of our time and our future even without a reader.

Probably the big secret of Tim Urban’s popularity is that he doesn’t care about reputation. He is interested in questions and the answers to them. Curiosity and wonder drive him more than fame and money. There is no other way to see such masterpieces as he writes them.

Read these two articles — and then all the others that Tim Urban has written.

The first article by Tim Urban, which I discovered and read yesterday, is about how Elon Musk’s company Neuralink will change the world. You don’t have to be a fan of Musk to read this blog post with fascination. Before Elon Musk is even mentioned once, Urban first guides his readers through the history of the development of the human brain.

I read article number two right after the first one. It kept me up late into the night and is responsible for the fact that yesterday, for the first time in months, I didn’t write a word myself.

The article about the upcoming developments in the field of artificial intelligence has two parts. I link part one here. At the end of part one, you can smoothly go on to part two.

I wish that you would forget the time while reading these articles as I did. I hope to see you here again soon.

René Junge a published author writing on ILLUMINATION.

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