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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.

If it feels like this post doesn’t have a conclusion, its sort of because it doesn’t. Its sort of a journal entry that I edited to make public, in hopes that maybe someone else gets something useful from any of my inconsequential revelations — a collection of ideas of how I currently feel about using my time — how I use understand my relationship to collecting/scraping data from websites, media, notes, journaling, and technology.

In the last year or so, I’ve had this minor internal conflict pretty regularly around the quantified-self-adjacent projects I’ve written. This was what I did all the time from 2019-2022, mostly writing tools that scrape/parse GDPR exports and combine it into a unified stream (HPI)

At the time, I didn’t have many strong philosophical ideas about the use of technology. In fact, I was apathetic about most things.

Writing these data exporters made me much more capable at writing code in general, managing open source ‘communities’ (for whatever small following my tools have), 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.

Sidenote: I mostly credit plaintext-productivity, using todo.txt (see related-post) and the CJ the x ‘7 deadly art sins’ video for my want to just use the most obvious solution possible. The last one may seem unrelated, but I think since a lot of the quantified-self/self-help discussion happens online, the ways we think about art and how people present on social media are sort of linked. Their web 1.5 essay is great as well.

Sometimes I look longingly at other peoples ‘digital gardens’, but having given a shot at using the popular tools 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 few years. ‘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 the fun out of life, or optimize away labor, and have to pause to reconsider if what I’m doing is something I really want to do. I don’t think I can adequately summarize it, but I think about the INTERLUDE: The Joy of Labor from this 3.5 hour RuneScape video essay quite often.

Before falling into this rabbit hole, 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.

In retrospect, one might argue the years of my life binging anime and dissociating were me wasting my youth away (and sure, it is partly true), but 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). It taught me to be intentional with my time, and always be considering what is actually bringing me joy or teaching me something and what is just noise.

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 years. Not to say I don’t have media binges - but my random YouTube binges are more intentional than they used to be, instead of that being my ‘default’ state.

I never really did give Quantified Self a full chance (using biometrics/technology to optimize your life), I think its just a bit too much for me. It 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 you start collecting data on yourself its very easy 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, 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.

It’s hard to advocate for a ‘reasonable’ amount of moderation when there are obvious benefits for all of these things. Understanding calorie counts/nutritional labels, backing up your data, saving your info from websites because they will eventually go down. There are lots of good reasons to be a bit proactive with this, and maybe its partly just my addictive personality that made me spiral and continue to collect data when I should have been reconsidering if it was useful to me.

I do think I 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.

And to say the obvious, being proactive with backing up data from every major site I use and having multiple backups (using restic) means that when companies stopped storing my history (or my browser database became full), or I switched computers, I was still able to get find things I read or watched 7 years ago that otherwise I might’ve lost forever.

I would still 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
  • 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

… and I guess that’s the end of the post. I suppose I’ll end it 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

Addendum

I thought I would add a bit of a revelation I’ve now internalized regarding this post after I discussed this blog post with @karlicoss.

One of the obvious reasons that I had not considered as to why I back up/collect all this data on myself but I don’t “use” it as often, is that:

  • collecting the data from a website/service is a programming problem. Its a puzzle to solve - a concrete goal that has a definite end - one which gives me a hit of dopamine when I do so.
  • analyzing and deciding how to use it is a human behavioural analysis problem:
    • what kind of data do I need to inform accurate decisions?
    • how much does personal bias play into this?
    • what kind of science or psychology exist about this subject?

That is a much more complicated problem because it involves my goals, desires, time, and is heavily biased, as I am a sample size of 1.

It does mean that when I do make measurable goals I have access to more data, but I am still weary of me self-selecting data. 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.

A nice middle ground I’ve found that does work for me is my reminder-sink tool, which does remind me of things I should be doing, but its much less obtrusive in my day to day life.