And, catastrophe being painful and all, we start to rely on pessimism as a stabilizer. Thus far Dykman. But evidence is a matter of data recollection as well as collection. Conscious prodding of memory teaches us just how malleable memory is, especially as we try to reconcile it with that unpredictable external evidence. And then if there was only some way to fix them, to make them better.
Writing is the fix.
Of course, once you get words down in a somewhat-publicly accessible medium, you're potentially dealing with a whole new set of those damned external reactions again. But still, what a relief to have them down. This is another association that seems less mysterious if you reverse the implied causality. Many more people can write than are writers. Writing is a unreliable way of making a living or inflating an ego, and most talented people decide, more or less early on, more or less reluctantly, that it's not worth the hassle.