Posted by MrVandemar 3 days ago
The thing i found about most of my notes was that they quickly got irrelevant, "PHP and MySQL best practices, on Windows..."? First, the notes that were referred to often, they quickly got upgraded to a script or stuck to my first brain so that note wasn't needed any more. Second, finding it through Google was easier than searching through my personal notes, and would often yield some new insight I wasn't aware of. Learning how to read official documentation rather than blog posts was a large part of this journey as well, now I trust that no voodoo tricks are needed to get things flying if you just follow the standard process. Being savvy enough to debug and lookup anything helps. Third, the tools, or their best practices, got superseded by others.
Articles that might be interesting to read (or re-read) one rainy day. Forget about it. Stop the wishful thinking. Every week there are new ones, more up-to-date and equally insightful. Your future self will also have other interests. This was by far the most liberating.
Nowadays, the few things I keep are topics that don't change, that I know will be difficult to remember between the rare occasion I need it (annual domain renewal, spare part number for oil filter). One final thing i still like to hoard is material from experts about recurring religious topics. So that next time someone at work starts arguing about monolith vs microservices again, I can just link to authoritative source instead of having to reiterate the same old arguments and prove my expertise in the area again.
The better answer here would have been to make some time to go back and reflect and write more.
Not necessarily to throw it all away.
The goal should have been to reflect deeply, and write more on the most interesting topics therein.
> Worse, the architecture began to shape my attention. I started reading to extract. Listening to summarize. Thinking in formats I could file. Every experience became fodder. I stopped wondering and started processing.
Summarization could now be done by LLMs.
You don’t know the author, don’t know their mind, and clearly do not understand their thought process.
This post is a personal reflection. The author’s actions affect exactly one person: themselves. The “better answer” is unambiguously the one which works out best for the author. Period. They are better equipped than any of us to know what that is.
Thinking and processing and making connections is a dynamic and amorphous experience that can’t be put into static notes. It’s always changing, based on your mood, recent experiences, and new knowledge acquired.
Write down things you can’t remember, but keep the thinking in your head.
Like the same person would write completely opposite in the same style ten years ago, but now that PKM are all the rage they need to reassert themselves as “not-like-the-other” by burning everything to the ground?
I myself threw out about 3000 notes last year
This whole "philosophical" article that basically says "I've removed my notes because they were giving me anxiety" is a confirmation that this is just yet another phase in author's life.
You don’t get to define that. The author does, it’s their life.
The action taken here was not just the deletion, it was the reflecting, the identification of a problem, the thinking of a solution, the courage to follow through with something irreversible, the willingness to try something.
Do you know that this person was writing the opposite ten years ago? And even if they did, people can’t try something and then change their mind? Is that worthy of ridicule now?
Frankly, making fun of someone for being “hipster” says more about the person doing the comment than the target of it. It’s a basic, meaningless insult.
I also think that mental clarity comes from a lean, blank sheet of paper, instead of a useless pile of accumulated knowledge. I'm still familiar with the act of deleting, which is liberatory: destroying drawings, writings, trashing things from the past, pictures, and deleting graffiti.
I don't want to be productive, I don't care about being able to access a thought from 7 years ago to do...what? I don't want to summarize, I don't want a stupid LLM to dictate my knowledge. I'm a human being, I change, I forget, I can fail, I'll die, and that's it.
I use a paper notebook, which comes with the built in assumption that most of your notes are going to be permanently put on the shelf and forgotten. A couple pages can be marked somehow or another if anything really useful somehow ends up on them.
Writing things out is an important part of the process… I’d be a bit worried about obtaining a default assumption where those notes become anything other than ephemera.
Throughout my 20’s I’ve accumulated a huge amount of mental models, diary entries, ambitions, goals, knowledge, thoughts, interests and everything in-between.
It helped me a lot and truly let me excel in some things – surprisingly enough.
Since I turned 30 last year I’ve almost sort of been afraid to look into that repository whatsoever. It’s a mix of amusement and anxiety. What felt like unlimited potential and a nearing of the “apex”, my motivation is still there somewhere in my head, but I’ve suppressed it and opened my eyes to almost half of my life being lived.
Sometimes I’m even afraid to stop and think deeply like I tended to do before. I distract myself.
Was that a some sort of a religion carrying me week by week month to month?
I take it step-by-step, day by day now and try to worry less while bringing back the focus of what I’d want to achieve. I calm myself down and work on things more gradually, cutting myself some slack.
Nonetheless, I wouldn’t just delete it all.
Instead I’m just using it less and less, only adding some truly profound things and thoughts when I come across them. My reading list keeps filling up… I fulfill some of my ambitions, but also leave many of them undone by the time I thought I should’ve been done with them trying not to not feel bad about it.
This techno-masochistic models-oriented mega-productive way of living is already perhaps disillusioning a lot of people out there, and we are entering the next stage.
Feels like end of an era, at least for me personally.