I write a blog in Turkish. I write about current affairs and also other subjects that interests me. Once in a while I fall into Ecclesiastes type of borderline nihilism and I say to myself "Why write at all; all is vain; all is for naught." Then I stop writing for a while. I reason that writing is academic; it is useless. It changes nothing. It is so much better to do something useful like programming or building something and selling it. But now after reading the comments here I see that Tom Wolfe's writing changed so many people's life! In a positive way. Of course, it's a different thing that one needs to write well at that level. But it seems that writing is not that useless after all.