For years, I had been building what technologists and lifehackers call a “second brain.” The premise: capture everything, forget nothing. Store your thinking in a networked archive so vast and recursive it can answer questions before you know to ask them. It promises clarity. Control. Mental leverage.
But over time, my second brain became a mausoleum. A dusty collection of old selves, old interests, old compulsions, piled on top of each other like geological strata. Instead of accelerating my thinking, it began to replace it. Instead of aiding memory, it froze my curiosity into static categories.
And so…
Well, I killed the whole thing.
Understood. I had my first PC in 1990, always kept some notes.txt and info.txt over the years, from 5¼ floppy to 3½ floppy to HDD to SDD, for more than 30 years, a collection of texts, pictures, notes of interest, hobbies, research I did on stuffs etc.
I deleted everything a few years ago, in a way, it was useless I never needed it.
Interesting article. I wonder if just deleting this was the right move tho. Maybe they could have stored it away somewhere and ignored it indefinitely.
PKM systems promise coherence, but they often deliver a kind of abstracted confusion. The more I wrote into my vault, the less I felt. A quote would spark an insight, I’d clip it, tag it, link it - and move on. But the insight was never lived. It was stored. Like food vacuum-sealed and never eaten, while any nutritional value slips away.
I’m not really familiar with these tools, but it seems like they’re not being used as the type of constraint that enables exploration and creative expression. Dunno if that’s a fundamental characteristic of the tool.
In trying to remember everything, I outsourced the act of reflection. I didn’t revisit ideas. I didn’t interrogate them
One of the most useful insights I came across in the digital humanities was that meaningful language use was performative, as well as subjective and situated.
The more my system grew, the more I deferred the work of thought to some future self who would sort, tag, distill, and extract the gold.
Reminds me a bit of Casaubon in Middlemarch.
Nietzsche burned early drafts. Michelangelo destroyed sketches. Leonardo left thousands of pages unfinished. The act of deletion is not a failure of recordkeeping. It is a reassertion of agency.
There’s this approach to creativity where you force yourself to do a first draft (even if it sucks), to make sure your brain knows what you want it to produce. Then you get rid of the first draft, take a little bit of time off so your brain can work on the problem “in the background”, and then start working on the real draft.
Great read, thanks.
