Is Writing Dead?
A Hail Mary to Save Writing from the Machine.
I remember the first time I watched The Alpinist very clearly.
I had smoked a little cannabis, and was in my living room in our old house in Sienna Canyon in St. George, UT. I remember the tears welling up in my eyes as I was absolutely stunned by the purity and beauty of what I saw: Marc-Andre Leclerc with the ultimate onsight free solo of Mt. Robson in the Canadian rockies.
For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of watching the Alpinist or have been blessed by the climbing gods with your very own onsight solo, this image sort of says it all.
The onsight solo is the holy grail of climbing (at least for me, and I’m the one on the other side of the keyboard, so I make the fucking rules around here).
When you “onsight” a climbing route, it means you attempt to climb it successfully without any route beta (cheat codes on how to climb it), and without having ever tried it before. This means that you could only ever attempt to onsight a route once. Once you’ve attempted to climb it (even once), you can no longer consider a successful climb an “onsight.”
But what about the solo part?
To “solo” a climb means more than to just climb it by yourself. In mountaineering and climbing, soloing definitely involves being alone, but importantly, that means you don’t have the protection of a belay. So once you leave the ground and start climbing, you really only have one way to finish the route that doesn’t end really bad for you: to successfully send it.
If you’ve seen the Oscar winning film “Solo” with elite climber Alex Honnald, then you understand both the sweaty-palm consequences and the exhilarating and stunning beauty of the solo.
So then what is an onsight solo for writers? Thought you’d never ask!
It’s what I am attempting to do right now: to sit down and write a Substack post from start to finish, without doing research, using external tools like AI, or even editing (besides typos—because let’s be real, typos are fucking annoying to read).
So then what’s left when you strip away the handicaps of LLM’s, Google, Grammerly, and all the other synthetic writing bullshit? Just you, the keyboard, and a stream of hopefully coherent consciousness.
But as this is my first ever onsight solo attempt (via writing), I hope you’ll be a bit less critical of my moves, and get stoked for me to finish at the top of the route, rather than in a pool of my own writer’s blood on the ground.
The Rules
#1 No AI
This one sort of goes without saying, but use of LLMs is not allowed for an onsight solo. I mean, writing with AI is writing of another kind entirely, and some purist would say it’s not writing at all. So take off the chatbot training wheels and let’s see what you’re really made of.
#2 No Search
Yes, that means no Google. When onsighting a route, you don’t get to watch others climb the route first. You don’t get to study the “beta” before you climb. You have to flow with the rock, improvise, dig deep when shit gets messy, and keep climbing. If you don’t have anything to say without regurgitating some shit you found online, maybe you need to remember that vulnerable and naked feeling of raw expression, without the filter of what everyone else is saying.
#3 No Editing
For me, this is easily the hardest part of this challenge.
If you fuck up a move while climbing a route, you do your best to hang onto the wall, give it another try, and hopefully stick it this time. For this reason, I say fixing typos and minor grammatical errors is allowed.
However, if you want to go back and rewrite a sentence or add some supporting ideas, too bad. Once you climbed that section of the route, its in the past. You gotta keep going, or you’re likely gonna fall to your death.
#4 No Outlines
After connecting the dots between onsight soloing and writing, I immediately started writing an outline for this blog post. About half way through I stopped, realizing that my outline was, in a way, antithetical to the spirit of the entire exercise.
It’s not about following a script, its about tapping into the part of you that’s not thinking, but that’s flowing, adapting, and ideally expressing something real.
But I’m not a purist about this rule. You could also interpret the outline as your route plan, wether you end up sticking to it or not. Your call.
The Route
Choose Your Adventure
In the world of writing (and ideas), virtually any route could be attempted.
However, not all routes are graded the same. Some are incredibly difficult. Some are stupid easy.
Writing a description of your lunch isn’t quite the same as proving the existence of God. Or maybe they are?
Either way, some routes will be easier to send than others. So pick your route carefully. Ideally, you’ll want to try and stay in the flow channel.
The Flow Channel
If a route is too easy, you get bored.
If a route is too hard, you get stressed, and at worst fall to your (social) death.
What you’re looking for is the sweet spot between those two poles—the flow channel. When my skill level is just high enough to rise to the challenge of the route, I drop into flow and perform at my best.
So as your skill increases, your climbing grade increases, and therefor you can solo harder and harder climbs.
High Consequence
Another component of flow involves the stakes.
What are the stakes of falling? Will anybody read this post anyways?
Probably not. So for me, stakes are quite low.
If I had a huge audience, perhaps that would feel a lot different. But even with my quaint audience, I still feel a little rush when I think about how every word I type is going in the final draft—cause the first draft is the final draft baby.
The Reasons
#1 Brain Rot & the Death of the Writer
The primary reason to introduce (or rather bring back) the onsight solo is to combat brain rot and save writing from the dystopian worth of synthetic predictive AI slop.
I’m not saying AI isn’t useful or that it could hypothetically have a virtuous place in our society, BUT, it’s for sure fucking things up royally.
To say nothing of the existential cliff, the killer robots, the breaking of democracy, the surveillance state, and all the rest of the AI bummers going on right now, its simply rotting our brains. AI is nuking our capacity for deep thinking, nuanced reasoning, and overall cognition.
So consider this a callout to all writers: take back your power and start doing your cognitive pushups again. If you don’t use it, you lose it. And we are fucking losing our shit right now. Nearly everything I read these days has the creepy fingerprints of the AI overlords all over it.
Just because you onsight solo a route, doesn’t mean you can’t also send another route with more conventional means (all the tools, editing, etc). But the purity and rawness of the onsight solo should also have its place in this strange space we all find ourselves in.
#2 The Prison of Perfectionism
I don’t know about you, but perfectionism is my Achilles heal (I like to use that metaphor because it makes me feel like a Greek demigod Brad Pitt badass).
Seriously though, I have a real problem. I’ve literally let posts sit on the shelf for over a year because they “weren’t ready” and “not good enough.”
There is a time and place for rigorous editing, murdering your darlings, and crafting that magnum opus. But it can also turn into a prison where the publish button feels like some unreachable summit.
The onsight solo forces one out of perfectionism. When you have to keep climbing (writing), then perfect becomes the enemy of “good enough.”
Shit. Now that I think of it, that was supposed to be one of the rules. But because of rule #3 (no editing), I’ll have to patch this one in here.
Rule #5—No Stopping
Once your feet leave the ground (your butt hits the seat and your fingers hit the keyboard), you gotta send it. No stopping. One continuous session until the piece is complete (you reach the end of the route).
You can see now (hopefully) how this is freedom from perfectionism.
And poetically, this rule fell out of place in my “perfect” template of post structure. The writing gods chuckle, or more likely, they do nothing as they probably aren’t in my tiny audience anyways. They are busy sorting through the tsunami of AI generated slop passing for writing these days, trying to find what’s left of our humanity.
#3 Do it for the Muse
If you’ve ever tried to onsight a route (ropes or solo), you know the potential epicness that can emerge.
When one get’s out of ones own way, stops thinking and starts flowing, that’s where the magic happens. That’s where you surprise yourself and do things you didn’t realize you were capable of. You dig deeper, and with any luck, the Muse arrives, and you nail that crux.
When I submit myself to the simple rules of the writers onsight solo, perhaps I create an opening for the Muse to come through. Maybe not in perfect prose (at least at my current level of skill), but something real and raw and true can emerge. And hell, even if it doesn’t, at least you’re getting the reps in. You’re doing some cognitive pushups and resisting the machine that’s colonizing all of our minds.
Rage Against the Machine
Case in point: I didn’t intend to say anything about this next bit when I sat down to write this post, but now it feels like the next right move on the route. So here goes.
Fuck this noise man.
Fuck this death of culture.
Fuck the end of consensus reality and the decline into the deep fake madness.
Fuck this tower of Babel we are building as we climb in our hubris to “heaven.”
Fuck these tech billionaires with their rapture ideologies of transhumanism and techo-utopianism.
Fuck the end of wild places and the birth of the machine world.
Fuck the way we are mortgaging our future and sacrificing our children to Moloch.
Fuck Moloch—the machine god of our machine civilization.
Maybe there’s still some humanity left to resist it.
Maybe there’s a soul behind all the prompts and the audience capture and the algorithmic slavery.
Maybe we can still find our way back to someplace real, somewhere outside the large labyrinth of language models.
So consider this lament an invitation.
If you’re a writer, give it a rip. Send it. Onsight solo. See what you are made of.
If you aren’t a writer, the call remains. These rules apply to any craft, any modality, any expression.
No outside help. No editing. No stopping.
Just create. Just express. Just connect to that Muse that’s begging to come through you.
Hurry, before it’s too late.
Before we are too far gone.
Before our culture is nothing more than a Wall-E world of gelatinous blobs immersed in a digital matrix.
Before our minds are the muddled mush of algorithmic atrophy and predictive programming.
Remember what you are: a unique spark of the ONE creative flame.
Burn, baby burn.
Burn bright
Write
Even if its not tight
It will be alright
Just fucking write
Let’s defeat this terrible blight
This dimming or our light
This massacre of human might.
For we were born to create
Wether to mate
to dictate
or instantiate some higher form
as we incarnate
into this beautiful earthly state.
Rage against the machine!
Rise up and be seen.
Clean the doors of perception
Open your channel of creation.
Slow down and breathe
Let go and be free.
Stop thinking
And start writing
Don’t stop-and-go
Just dig deep and flow.
Climb past that crux
Of your onsight solo.
Much love,
Christian
Las Vegas, 11/1/2026