If you can talk, you can leave a book about yourself

For most of history, leaving a written record of your life took something most people don't have: the patience and skill to write it, or the money to hire someone who could. So the people who got remembered in their own words were a narrow slice — the famous, the wealthy, the unusually literary. Everyone else got remembered in fragments, secondhand, by people doing their best from memory.

I find that unfair, and for the first time it doesn't have to be true.

The only thing you actually need now is the ability to have a conversation. That's it. If you can sit and talk — about your childhood, your work, the people you loved, the ordinary Tuesday you still think about for no reason — you can leave behind a real record of who you were. The writing, the part that used to stop everyone, isn't your job anymore.

It's a bigger deal than it sounds. The memoir is no longer reserved for important people. Your grandmother who never wrote a word in her life can leave a book. The uncle who left school at sixteen can leave a book. You can leave a book, and you don't have to turn into a more disciplined, more eloquent version of yourself to do it.

There's also a reason to do it now, specifically — not five years from now, after you've kept meaning to. The technology that takes the writing off your plate only showed up recently. But the people whose stories you most want are not getting younger. Those two facts point at the same narrow window. The tools are finally here, and the people are still here. Both of those won't be true forever.

I'm not trying to make you anxious. I just notice that most people assume this is hard, expensive, and something to handle later — and all three of those used to be true and quietly stopped being true.

You can talk. That used to not be enough. Now it is.

— Jeff

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