Last updated on

time / programming / media / notes / journaling / technology

This is quite of a messy post and I may continue to edit and improve it, but I wanted to sort of timestamp how I feel right now.

In the last year or so, I’ve had this frequent internal conflict around the quantified-self-adjacent projects that I’ve written (Quantified Self is a weird overlap of technology, biometrics, and constant logging/reflection - to use technology to increase your self-knowledge through analyzing patterns of data you collect on yourself). This was what I did all the time from 2019-2022, mostly writing tools that scrape/parse GDPR exports and combine it a lifelog of sorts, to allow me to look back on what I was doing on particular days.

At the time, I didn’t have many strong philosophical ideas about the use of technology. In fact (for reasons that are abundantly clear to me now), I was pretty apathetic about most things.

Writing these data exporters made me much more capable at writing code in general, managing open source communities, and just figuring out how I want to spend my time.

I am happy to maintain the tools I still actively use, but I am not really writing many new tools. Nowadays, I will often just use an open source tool with an easy to parse storage format, or write my own instead of using a website (or… sometimes I just use pen & paper rather than trying to create a perfect searchable-tokenizable-backed-up system. Blasphemous!). There aren’t many other needs I have… I have messages from the few social media websites I use parsed, I have browser, CLI tool and music histories saved, I have markdown notes here and a good strategy for journaling using notebooks. I’m sort of done.

Still… I will sometimes look longingly at other peoples ‘digital gardens’ (an attempt to organize your digital notes/ideas in a interconnected/interesting way), but having given a shot at using the popular tools (e.g., Obsidian) and using one of my own creation a few times, I think the way my brain works doesn’t need all those features. I like the flat file structure in the notes tab here - I basically re-invented a wiki.

I like being able to just brain dump something onto physical paper instead of feeling I have to capture it ‘correctly’ or in a place that allows me to digitally search or recall things immediately. Its sort of fun to have to scroll through chronological notes and todos in my tiny notebook I take with me everywhere, it reminds me of what I was doing the day I took the note, even if its not ‘efficient’.

I think the glorification of ‘efficiency’ ruined my ability to enjoy things for a long time. ‘Efficiency’ for whom? I don’t know, I don’t think I have the answer to that yet. But I often catch myself wanting to optimize everything in my life, or optimize away labor, and have to pause to reconsider if what I’m doing is something I really want to do. I think this really was solidified for me watching the INTERLUDE: The Joy of Labor from this 3.5 hour RuneScape video essay:

Capitalism has taken labor and reduced it to this thing we all have to do to survive. To calculate the opportunity cost of doing anything that isn’t working for a wage. You have justify why its worth time mowing your lawn, or cleaning or house, or tending to your garden, or doing a hobby you enjoy. And we have to justify the time we spend to friends & family, and worst of all we have to justify it to ourselves. We could’ve been spending that time “bettering ourselves” and earning a wage. The system instills this toxic idea in all of us that labor isn’t something that can be done for its own sake, with its own joys - its something you have to do to survive.

Before falling into the rabbit hole of backing up all of my data, I used to spend a lot of time archiving/organizing data for media databases (see anime/databases). I still have some of those projects running, continually archiving deleted/denied database entries for posterity. Throughout my college years, I labored quite a bit (in retrospect, in a way that was enjoyable) creating spreadsheets, tagging every entry in the database with tags like ‘lost media’, ‘no subtitles’ or scanning through and translating Japanese TV Guides, to search for rare anime that might be broadcast once again to save it in the data archives.

In retrospect, one might argue the years of my life organizing & binging anime and dissociating playing OldSchool RuneScape were me wasting my youth away (and yes, it is true), but there are some silver linings. It gave me a online social circle when I had nothing, and I think it was useful for me to get into something that was incredibly niche (weird, arthouse short films). It gave me an opportunity to understand my relationship to media without outside influence (because no one else was writing or talking about these films). In some sense, it let me think my own thoughts, instead of just defaulting to the cultural zeitgeist.

I think exposing myself to that much media, animation, and film also just let me find things that really spoke to me, and changed my life for the better. The same themes or messages are probably present in books or film as well, but anime was the medium I attached myself to at the time. I’m glad I was able to find media that meant a lot to me, because generally positive and humanistic messages often acted as shields against my own apathy, and just inspired me to be better in my own relationships with others.

In the past two years or so, I have become a lot less terminally online compared to my teenage/early 20s. No longer am I on discord 24x7, optimizing my life around how to play as much RuneScape or watch as much anime as possible.

Not to say I don’t have media binges, but it doesn’t consume 8-10 hours of my day like it used to. It is still pretty complicated for my brain to parse out what a ‘healthy’ amount of dissociation is. Is me going home after a day of work and watching an hour or two of YouTube or a movie okay?

When I engage with it at all, my brain makes me feel like I’m falling into negative patterns I’ve existed in in the past. If I don’t catch myself, or force myself to go out and hang out with friends or do something not defined my algorithmic engagement, I can end up spending many hours doomscrolling. It’s still something I’m trying to figure out the balance for, though having friends that I love and who love me really motivates me to go and do things with them.

I never really did give the biometrics of ‘Quantified Self’ a full chance, it felt a bit too Sci-Fi for me, in a way I wasn’t really comfortable with. It also felt as if most of the data that would be useful to make important decisions was too qualitative, and on some level it felt I was deluding myself into self-selecting data that would confirm whatever gut feeling I initially had.

Once I started collecting data on myself, it was incredibly easy for me to fall into a trap of wanting to collect everything, even if it may not be useful. I think calorie counting was very useful for me for about a year (I grasped a good understanding of nutrition labels, protein content, what foods were good/bad for me), but after that it was just an additional burden. I would pull out my phone everywhere to track food & water because having everything ‘organized’ or ‘tracked’ gave me some satisfaction, but often these little things I would impose on myself would prevent me from feeling or thinking what I was doing in the moment.

Collecting the data was also fun for me. It was a programming problem to solve - how do I get data off of this app or website, what can I do with the IP addresses, how can I possibly relate/combine this with other data I already have.

It was hard for my brain to not go off the deep end, when there are obvious benefits for all of these things. Understanding nutritional labels, backing up your data, using open source and local tools instead of websites which sell and trap your data — are all generally good things to do. There are lots of good reasons to be a bit proactive with this. It is probably partly my addictive tendencies that made me spiral and continue to collect data when I should have been reconsidering if the data itself was useful to me.

I do find a lot of happiness and satisfaction in being able to combine all these disparate data sources into my feed, and being able to search/filter/sort through them.

I would highly recommend journaling with a physical notebook. It sounds cliche, but forcing myself to not be on technology all the time - especially when I was just trying to think my own thoughts - feels like it gave me way more clarity about what I actually felt. I’ve had three ways of capturing journal entries that I still use all the time, depending on what feels like the least amount of friction/most useful:

  • write with my fountain pen in my little notebook (it being a little notebook is important! If you have a big journal you won’t carry it with you everywhere; get a small field notes or one of the spiral bound flip notebook and carry that with you)
  • recording myself with my phone, often rambling for 20 minutes to just get everything out of my head (with a few post-processing scripts using a whisper script to get subtitles so they’re a bit more searchable)
  • with a script that just opens a new text file on my laptop

In my subjective experience, personal reflection (with my journal or talking with friends), while keeping track of mid/long term goals over longer span of time works much better for my brain. Whenever I’ve experimented with trying to improve my behaviour using data in the short term, I end up with too many false positives and end up with alarm fatigue.

I suppose if this post has a conclusion, it would be to journal, and to find friends in the real world who share your values (and maybe figure out your values!). Online friends are a good simulacrum and are good if you have no other alternative, but nothing really beats the oxytocin of a hug from a good friend.

I guess I’ll end with a quote:

It’s the age of mass-produced entertainment. Just as you demand food that’s delicious, I hope you’ll choose entertainment that has wisdom and passion… You can choose [art] for the characters, or for the technique. See as many foreign and experimental films as you can. Some entertainment is very slick, but its empty. Some of it is made without any attention to detail. We don’t need rules about what’s good and what isn’t. That’s something for each of you to decide. But I hope you’ll be discriminating consumers. - Joy in Motion, Yasuo Otsuka