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I've been journalling for 10+ years. In addition to forcing me to actually write down what happened that day, reviewing old entries provides a feeling of histor
by jvanderbot 3y ago
I've been journalling for 10+ years. In addition to forcing me to actually write down what happened that day, reviewing old entries provides a feeling of history that makes life feel soooo long and so rich. I can review my now-wife's rocky courtship and feel grateful we made it. I looked back 3 years ago and found the day our children were conceived :D (we have twins). I can review the anxieties of my PhD years, etc etc.
For some reason, feeling like my past life has not been short helps me to feel that there's so much life left to live. Looking back at the phenomenal changes of the last 5 years (or 10), shows me that I can do a lot with the next 5 years.
Novelty and so on may help to "slow" time, but for me the perception of the shortness of life is best fought by reminding yourself that it is not short, and there is so much change coming - more than you could imagine.
(and I'm horrible at doing it every day, maybe every week or so during slumps)
We're at our computers all day every day. So I just lowered the barrier to entry with a few bash tricks. It's helped me keep the habit up.
https://jodavaho.io/tags/bullet-journal.html https://jodavaho.io/tags/bullet-journal.html
Now, I review 1, 5, and 10 years ago every day, to re-live my life from those years, so to speak:
# list dates from 10 years ago +/3 3 days
# get years and day range from args
echo "### $years years ago"
for i in `seq -w -$days $days`
do
olddate=`date -d "$years years ago $i days" +%Y-%m-%d`
longdate=`date -d "$years years ago $i days" +%A\ %B\ %d,\ %Y`
echo "### $olddate.md ($longdate)"
cat $olddate.md
done
- smm11 3y agoI've been using OneDrive for more than ten years for much the same purpose. Journal folders by year filled with weekly files since 2010, and accessible from any computer, tablet, phone, whatever. And in a folder I can download easily with TXT content. I'm at the point where everything is a dumb terminal again.
- paraschopra 3y agoIt's great to hear journaling helps you reflect on actual passed time. For me, I never get around to revisiting old entries regularly. How do you motivate yourself to do so?
- jvanderbot 3y agoI just lower the barrier enough that it's trivial. I'm at my terminal all day, and one bash command spits out X years ago +/- 3 days. Right now, I'm really curious to see why I took a trip 10 years ago to my hometown - all I see in my journal is my packing list, so someday the journal entry for that trip will pop up. That helps too.
- chasd00 3y agothat's really cool. I use to always have a small notebook with my at work to jot down notes and sketches. I had boxes and boxes of those notebooks saved over the years and would flip through old ones from time to time to see what i was up to back then. In a move I was very tired of carrying boxes so threw them all out instead of loading them up and transferring them to the next attic.. i really _really_ wish i hadn't.
- zubairq 3y agoGreat idea. i should try journaling more to make life feel longerr and richer too. Thanks
- jzm2k 3y agoI'd like to recommend giving Daylio [1] a try if you want to start journaling. Someone on HN recommended this two years ago and I decided to try it because all past attempts at journaling had failed miserably after few weeks. I'm now on a 700+ day streak and I'm really happy that I started doing this 2 years ago. So much has happened and it's all documented. It takes so little effort to add an entry for the day and reading past entries is fun because what actually happened past year is not just a blur but a detailed record of activities, words and photos. [1] https://daylio.net/ https://daylio.net/
- leokennis 3y agoI am trying journaling as well but most days I don't know what to write...most days I'm not really doing special things, I have no special feelings. These days are enjoyable because I like my work and love my family, but I don't get further than "went to work, afterwards cooked <some meal> and played <some game> with <one of my kids>, in the evening <watched some movie / read some book>"... What are you journaling on a daily basis?
- marginalien 3y ago3 bullets on „what I‘ve learned today“, followed by 3 bullets on „what I will do next“. This makes sense to me because a) content-wise I consider learning / making sense of what I experience in my life to be both intellectually and emotionally interesting and b) text-length-wise 6 bullets force you to really boil things down to the core
- zmgsabst 3y agoI keep a daily journal, usually: - “I could have handled X better by doing Y.” - “Seeing A made me curious about B; maybe look into that.” - “I really tried at K, but oof didn’t work out; let’s try L tomorrow!” - “I did really good at P, Q, and R today — I’ll get a treat tomorrow and start on S.” Mostly just internal monologue kinds of things, but there’s three benefits I’ve noticed: - I don’t think about frustrations as much if I write them down. - I am better at self-compassion when I externalize the monologue. - I slowly adjust my monologue to reflect how I word it in writing, eg how I choose to frame things or what kinds of things I notice.
- xahrepap 3y agoSlightly different angle: I’ve been digitizing my grandparents’ journals. Something I’ve appreciated is the mundane. “Had a headache. Went to bed early” seeing how often my grandpa was sick was very eye opening to me. “Got the X repaired/replaced. Cost me $Y and it took Z days to finish” “I sat and just visited with $Child. What a good kid. He’s just a teen. He told me about his friends and school” Etc. I don’t know. I guess reading a normal life makes me feel better. Growing up I thought they were perfect. Seeing they were people just like me with very similar struggles is actually fun.
- ozzydave 3y agoI journal ~daily since having kids. I feel the same way - it gives me peace knowing I can look back in time later and relive just a little what I was feeling today.
- stephen_g 3y agoI don’t have the motivation to journal, but I do get a fair bit of this kind of feeling scrolling back through my camera roll. I just take quick photos of all sorts of random stuff that happens or places I go, and it’s amazing the rush of memories that come back looking over them.
- RaoulP 3y agoThis! For all my lack of journaling consistency, my habit of taking these kind of quick photos of anything noteworthy has given me lots of joy when looking back - although I do feel it can be slightly neurotic “in the moment”.
- _thisdot 3y agoIt’s amazing how quick we forget things we thought at the moment were so important. Not in the same vein as journaling, but I’d been keeping a list of Notion entries on things I found important enough to keep notes on at work for the past 2-3 years. It’s different from my JIRA work log or Todoist list of completed tasks in that these are not everything I did, but just the important items. The things where I ran the risk of getting stuck Come appraisal process, I’ll have forgotten most things I worked on in the year. My imposter syndrome creeps in, but this Notion page keeps me sane! With this proof in hand, I’ve started journaling. I use the Apple Journal app. And it’s doing a good job of prompting me!
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago> reviewing old entries provides a feeling of history that makes life feel soooo long and so rich. I don't disagree. But I think the flavor of the richness depends on the quality of the days. It is my experience that decades can also be built from days that ought not be preserved. Or at least not without strong curation and editorial treatments.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoI have semi-regular journal notes going back over a decade, and my experience was opposite to GP - instead of discovering how many things happened in that time, I discovered my mind has been spinning in circles, trying to find solutions to the same problems, and despite feeling otherwise day-to-day, no actual progress has been made. It was an important discovery for me, though not much came of it anyway.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y agoUgh. I hadn't considered that. I had kids, a biz and a disabled wife. I had to achieve. Even then, some days I wasn't much capable. Other days I forced out results but at a high cost.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoSorry to hear that; I hope you're all doing well now! I suppose I had too much time to dwell, not enough external pressure to keep my shit together. I have kids now too, but the end result is that I rarely journal anymore - there's always something else I need or want to do, and then suddenly I'm dead tired; rinse, repeat.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y agoAdderall reshuffled the deck for me and I started being dealt better hands. Most importantly, I could finally turn realizations into persistent changes. The changes still took years but having effort pay off was a new thing.
- simpletone 3y ago> reviewing old entries provides a feeling of history that makes life feel soooo long and so rich. This doesn't sound right at all. For me, and I suspect for most people, it has the opposite effect. It makes life feel short, fleeting and mundane. Looking back to 2014, I can't believe how quickly the past 10 years has gone. Heck just looking back 4 years, the pandemic years seems to have flown by. It's like a distant memory now. > but for me the perception of the shortness of life is best fought by reminding yourself that it is not short So it isn't journaling at all. You are just rationalizing. Life is precious because it is short and fleeting. And it's why people keep a journal. To keep track of precious time. It's also why parents keep a scrapbook of their kids. Because in a blink of an eye, the kids grow up and leave the nest. If you truly thought life wasn't short, you wouldn't keep a journal. You'd just live and not keep track of time.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Aerbil313 3y ago> Life is precious because it is short and fleeting. Here's another viewpoint. Life is not precious at all because it is short and fleeting. Muslim here. We believe only the parts of this life which pertain to afterlife are precious, as afterlife is eternal instead of temporary. This life is merely an end to a means. It doesn't need to be a goal in and of itself because there's another life after it.
- fufufu123 3y agoYou're apparently in a good place so looking back is your path to your joyful present. I'm in a bad place so looking back is my seeing back when I was still hopeful for my various life goals. I'd meet someone and have someone to share my life with, do activities with, travel with, raise kids with, etc. I never met that person and now at 60+ that's nearly impossible so looking back hurts. It hurts a-lot. Seeing the opportunities I missed, the time I squandered, the naiveté that "it will happen when it happens" etc.. I absolutely want to strangle Google/Apple/Facebook when they shove "memories" in my face. I didn't ask for it, piss off! As for the topic itself. The obvious reason time passes faster when we're older to me is that each day is less of my life. At 1 week old a day is 1/7th of my entire existence. At 60 one day would be 1/22000th of my life. I also feel it in terms of time left. When you have $1000 in your wallet, splurging on a $50 meal might seem fine. When you've got $75 in your wallet you're unlikely to blow $50 of it on a meal (unless you've got a supply elsewhere). In the same way, when I've have got 20yrs left in my life, some of them probably not in the best of health, then committing 10 of them to move to a foreign country to immerse myself in a new language feels very different than when I've got 60 years left (20yrs old). Seeing your life left clock go down 1/60th (1yr at 20yrs old) feels slower than seeing it go down 1/20th (1yr at 60yrs old). that's 3x faster.
- popularonion 3y agoThank you for expressing what myself and so many others can’t put into words.
- EEMac 3y agoI hope things get better for you. If it helps: https://www.7cups.com/ https://www.7cups.com/
- overtomanu 3y agoMaybe you are better off than people in bad marriage's.
- nuancebydefault 3y agoSorry to hear that things did not turn out as expected for such a long time. If I may provide a suggestion... search for a serious website that is about dating (not tinder or something the like) in your area and connect to people and try to date (meet in person for at least an hour or so) at least one person once a week. Don't spend too much effort in people who just want to stick to online conversations or fooling around, just move on. If at the meetup there's no click, you have a good evening or at least you built up experience in dating. You will need to get probably seriously out of your comfort zone but it becomes easier each time! Practice makes perfect!
- overtomanu 3y agosimilar to google photos memories notifications.
- 6B 3y agoThank you for the inspiration. I'll start journaling again. And I miss it too.
- barbs 3y agoJust wanted to post a quick comment - I really appreciate your simple and elegant journalling solution. I think I want to implement something similar. Thanks!
- insonable 3y agoI do something similar, but with photos. I have a 4k display on the wall with a rpi/python script that picks photos from today +/- 15 days for all years, then makes collages to display, 1 per minute. So the photos are from the same time of year, but for years past, and every day new photos cycle in and out. Another neat way to stir up memories of old, if you have a pile of photos around.
- nunez 3y agoSame. Journaling adds another dimension to my memories that makes them even richer and more enjoyable. It also prevents me from forgetting memories, which I'm very prone to doing! I started journaling back in 2012 (or 1999 depending on whether you count a Pokemon notebook that I barely wrote in!). I used to handwrite my journal entries. I refused to type them because they didn't feel personal enough. How foolish of me that was. I discovered Daylio while looking for a mood journal back in 2021. It's easily one of the best apps I've ever purchased. I've journaled daily since getting it, and it (with therapy) helped me understand and better control my introversion and mood swings. I eventually moved all of those entries over to Day One two months ago. Day One is even better. You can add recordings! From your Apple Watch! And everything syncs nicely via iCloud! No more talking into the ether!
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago"# get years and day range from args" What are example initial values of $days and $years in "args".
- type0 3y ago> but for me the perception of the shortness of life is best fought by reminding yourself that it is not short Memento mori
- munksbeer 3y agoThank you very much for this helpful comment and sharing your experience. It is really encouraging me to resume journaling, as I've made several efforts over the years but always fade away after a few months. I'm sorry you've received negative comments in reply, it is weird that people feel the need to be so negative to someone trying to help. I just sometimes have a hard time understanding their mindset.