Welcome :)

Thanks!

That’s smart. I try to write daily too but I don’t really.

I’ve been journaling for 50 years and beside a few short periods I don’t think I ever managed to do it daily.

When I started, I knew I needed to make it a habit or the time between entries would grow until I’d basically stopped. They say to form a habit, start really small. If you want to make a habit of flossing your teeth, you don’t have to do them all, start small. Do just one tooth, but do it every day. It’s the regularity that’s important not the extent to which you do it. So I started with the rule to do it every day with no specific length, and it has worked for me.

Alas, I cannot check since for decades I regularly destroyed my journal. Something I quickly learned to do as a child in order to escapee my mother… inquisitorial habits and her not liking what I was writing in it; and what I was telling about myself. I don’t have much regrets in life—not that I’m that faultless perfect nice guy that never do any wrong, I’m not but I also tend to assume all my poor choices as well as the bad things I may have done—but this regular burning of my journals is one of the two things I regret doing in my life and wish I would be able to undo traveling back in time.

It doesn’t sound like you had much choice, but at least you can change it going forward 🙂

Any specific reason to make you thing it doesn’t help? I mean, I consider writing the best help to train my memory right after having long (interesting) discussions with (interesting) people.

Just that my memory didn’t get any better 😅. I can’t tell you what I did last week any more than I could when I started. Except now I can look it up because I kept a record. I have very few memories from my childhood, but if someone says the right thing then suddenly a whole memory will come flooding into my head, full of detail. It’s something about how my brain works that I’ve just accepted.

Text files are great, and they’re very reliable in the long-term so, since you’re making backups, there is little risk of you not being able to read them in the future.

This was my thinking when deciding to use text files. As a bonus, with advances in AI I figure it won’t be too long before I’ll be able to feed in all my entries and ask it about what I did on a particular day, what some interesting things were from that year, or what were some key moments in my life. I think the technology for this would exist now if I put the effort in, but I think I might appreciate it more in another 20 or 30 years.

The meaningful parts of my journal ends up indexed in that Zettelkasten so I know I will be able to find it, in no time be it tomorrow or in a few years.

One of the things I don’t much like about physical medium is the risk of losing it, whether by misplacing it or by having my house burn down. The ability to make virtually unlimited copies and spread them around means I feel more comfortable with that risk. Text files are not very big so I don’t have to worry about storage costs. I also make many copies of photos and videos but they are large and therefore much more expensive to store.

What I’m pretty sure of is that the more people decide to participate and contribute content, the more new users could be tempted to participate themselves ;)

I don’t think I ever followed r/journaling, so I’m not sure what kind of content was common. But I have subscribed here and will try to contribute where I can, though I’m more of a commenter than a poster 🙂