It is terrifying to write at the best of times. If you’re at all conscientious — if you care about the quality and rigor of the prose you’re inflicting on your audience — then writing probably should scare you, at least a little bit. (Writers with so much self-confidence that they never second-guess themselves are not to be trusted. Run away from them.) And yet it’s easy for that fear to become paralysis: The terror of not finding the right words, of expressing yourself poorly, of wasting a reader’s time can all become excuses for not writing at all.

Recently, a writer who I like and respect wrote about the abject horror of the viral Studio Ghibli–style images produced by OpenAI’s new image generator. It was a good, thoughtful essay. But what has stayed with me the most was a throwaway line with little relevance to actual substance of the piece. The line was something like (and I’m paraphrasing here): “There’s a lot of awfulness in the world right now and this probably seems like a really inconsequential thing to be talking about.”

I’ve been thinking about that line because it spoke to my own anxieties. These are not the best of times, and it sometimes feels to me that writing about anything but how terrible things are is some sort of betrayal. Why write if you’re not talking about The Very Important Things happening around you? Why bother if you aren’t bearing witness to the latest carnage unleashed by the careless authoritarians currently running the government? I can’t escape these questions because, as someone without a particular intellectual niche or beat, I tend to write about whatever is obsessing me at any particular moment. So when bad things are happening every moment of every day, it can be hard to think about much else.

I hope this is just a me problem. Plenty of writers are still producing amazing work about “inconsequential” subjects just because they find those subjects cool and interesting and I love that for them. But I want to offer this reminder to everyone else, myself most of all: It’s okay to write about whatever you want, whenever you want, regardless of how important and urgent it feels. There’s still value in writing about minor annoyances and silly trends and weird historical rabbit holes and films from twenty years ago that everyone else has forgotten about except for you. I want to read about all of that stuff. So I hope you write about it (and make a fun little website for yourself while you’re at it).