I am always recommending to people that they ought to journal. Keep a diary, write your memoirs, it doesn’t really precisely matter what the form is. Keep a vlog if that’s what you prefer. Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages works perfectly: 3 pages, in the morning, for your eyes only, about anything, done by hand.

A word to the wise is sufficient. Henry David Thoreau asked Emerson “Do you keep a journal?”

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(2024nov24) What do you write in a journal? Honestly, it doesn’t really matter. The interestingness of a journal tends to be in the ‘meta-data’ – it’s less about what you wrote, and more about what you were thinking when you wrote it, what the context was, what your mood was, etc. The most valuable things in hindsight will rarely be the literal text of what you wrote, but rather when you notice things like “wow, I was really upset about this”, and then reflect on why that was, or what the implications of that are, and so on. So I particularly encourage stream-of-consciousness journalling. Empty out whatever’s on your mind, whatever’s bothering you, whatever’s puzzling you. A surprising number of seemingly intractable problems in one’s mind turn out to have amusingly straightforward solutions… once you write them down and see them for what they are.

to be updated