3 ms·
There's only one of these Good Things I regret never having succeeded at starting, and that's journaling. As I'm getting older, I realize there are more and mor
by wkjagt 3y ago
There's only one of these Good Things I regret never having succeeded at starting, and that's journaling. As I'm getting older, I realize there are more and more years during which I've been alive and it's getting harder to look back at them and make sense of them, or remember when a particular thing happened. I'm 45 now, which really isn't that old, but also not that young anymore. When I was younger, say 25, I had 5 years of (somewhat) adult life behind me, and they formed a relatively coherent and linear story. I now look back at 25 years of being an adult, and that story is now five times as long, way less coherent, and no longer linear, so remembering it all is becoming almost impossible. But the longer I live, the more often I find myself wanting to remember when a certain thing happened, or what my state of mind was at a certain point. I also have a wife and have three kids, so those add more stories to remember (or more characters in my own story).
I've been thinking of catching up. To start an Excel sheet, with years in the left column, and then start filling in events that I can remember or verify with certainty (marriage, births of kids, buying the house, jobs, projects, travels). Hopefully this would trigger more and more memories that I can then fit into that context, until I get to a somewhat complete and coherent story of what's been going on until now.
I think this might also make starting journaling easier because I would be continuing a story, instead of starting to write one at a random point in time.
- Wronnay 3y agoThat's one of the reasons why I started journaling back in 2018. I started trading with stocks in 2014, made some good gains but forgot how or why I initially invested in a specific stock. I mostly started journaling to analyse my own thought process in a later stage. I am now 27, started my own company last year and hope that my desendends one day can use my journal to see what things worked and which didn't - that way they may have it easier in their own life as they will know what to avoid and what can lead to success. I see it as a way to accelerate the trial-and-error process and this thought that it can be helpful for future generations of my family is something which motivates me more than anything else.
- j7ake 3y agoI found the https://1secondeveryday.com/ https://1secondeveryday.com/ app to be great for recording snippets of my day which I can look back on and quickly remember. There is a lot of information that can be captured in a one second video of your life every day for 25 years.
- nunez 3y agoYay! Something I can contribute to! I've been journaling for over ten years. However, the last two years are MUCH more active than the first eight. Why? I _insisted_ on having my journals be digitally handwritten instead of just typing them. I spent years looking for the perfect digital notebook. It started with this absolute unit of a convertible tablet that was really crappy but had a Wacom digitizer built into the screen. I got a Surface almost immediately on release, then did the same when the big iPad Pro dropped. Yet I hardly wrote on them. Why? After a long day of working, the last thing I wanted to do was spend thirty minutes writing. Two years ago, a mildly traumatic event happened to me. Nothing devastating, but it was enough for me to do _anything_ to track my mood. I found an app that did this perfectly. As a result, Ive been contributing an entry to it every day since. Sometimes I even record my entry with Voice Memos. (AMAZING built-in app. Works flawlessly and syncs via iCloud with zero thought.) I remember much more of my life because of this. It is awesome getting a pop-up on my phone about something awesome that happened six months ago. As it happens, getting it down, no matter how, is much more important than getting it down fancily.