I get that, and I think that distinction is healthy.
“Knowledge base” can imply objective truth and completeness, which creates pressure. For a lot of us, what we store is really a snapshot of attention, curiosity, anxiety, and identity at a moment in time — more like a personal log than a database.
One framing that helps me is: the archive isn’t “truth”, it’s “evidence of what I cared about”, and it’s only useful when it reduces friction for a real moment (re-entry, reflection, or a concrete next step). Otherwise it’s just noise.
Do you find it more useful as a mirror (patterns about yourself), or as a tool (helping you make decisions / take action)?
Sometimes the writing itself is useful, like when I realise that I've been stressing about something minor for a few days, or when I hesitate to write down how I _really_ feel about something. In other cases it forces me to actually understand what I'm feeling in order to put it into words. In a sense those notes could be write-only and still be useful.
In other cases these notes are a complement to my photos. They show a different aspect of my life at a given moment. My photos don't show that on September 4, 2015, I had a massive crush on someone. I have built a timeline that combines my journals, photos, sketches, geolocation, Google searches and other things. It reveals a far more nuanced picture of me at a given time.
I also have more technical notes. Those are a bit of a "collection of facts". It's a bit like putting all the parts on the table, and slowly organising them into a coherent structure. This is how I approach bigger topics before I understand them fully. Then my notes act as a sort of medium-term memory. When I finish a project, I usually have a bunch of leftover notes and todos that I don't intend to ever finish. That's why I say that notes are not an obligation.
That’s a really thoughtful distinction. I like how you separate “write-only but still valuable” (emotional clarity / self-understanding) from “collection of facts” (laying pieces on the table until a structure emerges).
The “notes aren’t an obligation” line also resonates — treating them as medium-term memory rather than a forever archive removes a lot of pressure.
When you finish a project and you have leftover notes/todos you don’t intend to finish, do you actively prune/close them (mark done/obsolete), or do you just let them fade and trust that what matters will resurface naturally?
“Knowledge base” can imply objective truth and completeness, which creates pressure. For a lot of us, what we store is really a snapshot of attention, curiosity, anxiety, and identity at a moment in time — more like a personal log than a database.
One framing that helps me is: the archive isn’t “truth”, it’s “evidence of what I cared about”, and it’s only useful when it reduces friction for a real moment (re-entry, reflection, or a concrete next step). Otherwise it’s just noise.
Do you find it more useful as a mirror (patterns about yourself), or as a tool (helping you make decisions / take action)?