How to Take Progressively Less Stupid Notes
Readers of my previous gestures of blogging may wonder at the first post of this new endeavor. For many years, I wrote blogs as a set of summaries of my own photography process, an exploration of the malleable line between images and words, and as prolonged artist statements about my own work. This first post is not really about photography, but it is about writing, and it begins to explain why I have had a hard time writing publicly for about three years.
If you are reading this with no prior knowledge of me or my work, welcome! Chances are this post was shared on a PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) related venue, such as the community surrounding Obsidian or other Zettalkasten related endeavor. The likelihood is high that you’ve read or watched videos on this topic before. I hope that a documentation of my process is helpful in your pursuits. If I had to assess some common through-line of PKM practitioners, it’s a willingness to discuss and read about process as much as the knowledge itself. I hope that this discussion can aid in your pursuits by bringing new insight or clarity.
What is PKM?
Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) is a topic I stumbled across in the spring of 2021 when I found the website “Everything I Know” by Nikita Voloboev. I was fascinated by the idea, and quickly found the software Obsidian, an often used software for managing PKM databases. I was interested in the idea of creating a centralized hub of writing which is curated, updated, and perhaps even published, and I slowly began trying to work out how to understand and use this system.
I could write an even longer article on all of my initial usage of Obsidian and the false starts and breakthroughs I made in the months that have passed since I started using it. By using it, I have sharpened and expanded my skills in Javascript and Regex, learned a small amount of SQL, read scores of blog posts and a book about writing and thinking, and worked to create something which can be a lasting and valuable compendium of my own research and writing. The experience I’ve had over these five months can be summarized simply as “going down the rabbit hole”.
Why spend time doing this?
The Information Action Ratio
It should be uncontroversial to the point of stating the obvious that we deal daily with an absolute deluge of information. Between news, social media, entertainment, advertising, even just talking with friends, we are confronted every day with a volume of information that would be cacophonous to someone that was not raised in acclimated to such a media landscape. This deluge comes with many opportunities and problems. While much could be said on the topic, I will speak only at the start of this discussion about the “information-action ratio” as defined by Neil Postman.
In his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman (in 1985!) spoke about similar issues with a deluge of information, and specifically critiqued our engagement with information through the television, as it conditions us to expect that all information ought to be presented in a way that is entertaining, unchallenging, and uncomplicated. One concept he laid out in the book was that the creation of the telegraph in the mid 19th century created, for the first time, the possibility of information traveling faster than people could carry it. In turn, this created a demand for information outside of a local context. The news wire was created, and suddenly, someone could be informed about things happening all over their country.
Before the telegraph and widely propagated news, most of the information people received was directly relevant to them in some way. Think of a farmer needing to know the weather or grain prices, or a businessman needing to know of the relationships in his immediate vicinity. People often had the ability to act on the information they received: let’s plant more wheat next year because the prices are rising. I’ll pay a visit to the Smiths because they may need my services.
However, after the telegraph and the inception of the so called “news of the day”, people were suddenly inundated with information they had very little opportunity to act upon. While it would be easy to search out historical examples, it should be even easier to draw examples from your daily life: scroll through your social media feeds and ask yourself what, if any, action you’re going to take in response to any given item you see. Exempting “pressing like”, “commenting”, and “saving this post” as meaningful actions, what meaningful actions will you take in response to any given item you come across?
More could, has, and should be said about our various responses and propensities based on what we see on social media. For many (including myself) the extent of response to reading the news of national politics and current events typically is reducible to anxiety or fear. My responses rarely rise above the level of emotions, and perhaps the most significant action that is ever taken in response to the news is simply voting for one person or another. Arguments about the democratic process aside, it should be permissible to say only that a single vote cast enacts very little directed and specific change on the state of the world that may have prompted a person to vote one way or the other. Rather, we get either the same or a new political leader or party which enacts policies which sweep in a whole new wave of emotion, positive or negative.
Beyond an emotional response, the action that can be taken in response to almost any stimulus is an intellectual one. I think of myself as a thoughtful person (there’s a thought!) Some of my earliest impulses towards art sprang out of a desire to make sense of the world and make meaningful connections between disparate information and ideas. To the extent that I think about the things that I see and read, I want to understand them, and in understanding them, I want to make connections between that understanding to form insight.
I don’t really think I’m unique in these desires. Perhaps thoughtful reflection and a desire for broad understanding isn’t universal, but given the firehose of information many of us drink from every day, I think there is a real and common desire to understand at least some of it and act on it in meaningful, constructive ways. Taking smart notes and recording things in some standardized database is the best way I’ve yet found for accumulating and synthesizing information. This gesture, I believe, begins to add some weight back to the “action” side of the information action ratio, and has made me a more thoughtful consumer of content.
There are two pitfalls, however.
The Hoarder and the Filter Feeder.
There are two ditches when one starts trying to engage with what they’re reading in a constructive way. The hoarder and filter feeder are two propensities (which can happen separately or at the same time) when processing information. The hoarder attempts to hold onto information too tightly (and hold on to too much), and the filter feeder doesn’t engaging with it in a helpful way.
Hoarding is often the first step people take (myself included) towards meaningful engagement with the firehose. The simplest (and least effective) form of hoarding is bookmarking. We think if we can merely access information, it will be helpful. Another form this takes is services like Evernote which merely digitize notes, and then rely on your ability to remember where something was (or lean too heavily on a search feature- you have to know what to search for!) Without actually engaging with content, understanding it, and connecting it to existing knowledge, it serves little purpose. Furthermore, the best systems will bring relevant content close to you as part of the process, not relying on your ability to recall something in order for it to be found.
So, how do we engage with content? Make notes on it? Highlight it? Read a lot? These are often the steps we take, but try this- if you have a book that you’ve highlighted more than five years ago, go back to it and attempt to glean meaningful insight from any one of the highlights. The highlight may jog your memory on why that point was interesting, but chances are, unless you’ve been regularly using that information you’ve either forgotten it completely or have to struggle to remember the point that, at the time, you thought was so urgent it deserved a permanent mark on the book. Highlighting books, making notes in the margin, and just piling another book read in this way is a form of hoarding.
The other pitfall I call “filter feeding”- attempting to glean the necessary “nutrients” from a source only while reading it, and not even bothering trying to take any notes down. This may be the default state when drinking from the fire hose. Reading endless blogs, social media, or even books without challenging ourselves through writing and discussion can lead to the experience of feeling, as Postman describes, like we know “of” many things without really knowing about them.
Especially in the age of endless social media feeds, I think the detriment of filter feeding here is that we gradually lose the ability to truly engage with something. Reading comments or looking at something for more than 3 seconds can give us a titillating feeling of understanding, when in reality we are really just allowing ourselves to have an emotional reaction for longer. We are not gaining more understanding in twenty seconds than we do in three.
It’s worth mentioning here that things like making bookmarks, highlighting a sentence in a book, or even reading a book without making any notes are not bad things to do. In fact, much of what I will spend the rest of this post talking about are my own frustrations as I added unnecessarily restrictive, complicated, or poorly conceived systems when something simpler would have sufficed. Furthermore, by understanding what is worth the time of more complicated methods, you gain insight on what can be a leisurely and relaxing read, listen, or watch, and what is worth your time to engage with deeply.
Once again, the goal in view here is meaningfully adding “action” to the balance of the information-action ratio. If our passive state is letting waves of content washing over us, these can be our steps towards understanding how to tread water a bit in the midst of it.
Smart Notes
How to Take Smart Notes by Söhnke Ahrens is a book that comes up so often in posts like this that I’ll say this: if you have any familiarity with blog posts like this, skip to the next heading.
The “Smart Notes” system advocated for by Ahrens is really a summary and analysis of the work of Niklas Luhmann, a German sociologist working from the 60s to the 90s who developed a “card catalogue” system of taking down research notes. For everything that he read, he would create notes which distilled essential information into a single notecard. There was one idea per notecard, and the notecards were filed according to the subject matter on the notecard, not the outline of the author’s argument. That’s to say, everything he read went into one system that was organized organically and without predefined hierarchies.
There’s plenty of nuance to this system, but at its heart, it’s quite simple. The system is to read, summarize, atomize, and mingle your notes into a grand schema of notecards which are always proximate to related ideas, not necessarily from the same source.
If you want a better explanation than that, I recommend buying Ahrens’ book, because he does a better job than I would at summarizing the system and advocating for its benefits. I will summarize a few benefits briefly:
By summarizing others’ ideas, you are forced to contend with whether you have actually understood them.
By mingling the notes among all other research you’ve done, you are front-loading the work of making meaningful connections- writing flows out of this (you should never have to start with a truly “blank page” to write something, but can draw from notes which are already in your own words).
By sorting notes only based on their relevance to notes around them, you avoid the friction of having to restrict notes to predefined categories.
By allowing cards to be freely associated, you don’t have to remember what specific book a point comes from. You may even be surprised by unexpected connections between proximate notes. This surprise allows for unexpected insight and fruitful mental work in the areas that actually matter.
Your memory is not burdened with remembering great quantities of arguments, details, who wrote them, etc.- it is freed to to do the work of forming connections about the broadly understood topics and let the work of writing notes be the details, which gain value over time and as more are added.
Ahrens’ book goes into more detail and more thoroughly explains research into the nature of learning, memory, and thinking which meshes well with this strategy of research and writing, so I will heartily recommend his book if the topic is interesting.
But how do I do this?
Ahrens’ book is not exactly a how-to manual, though. If you were interested in using the strategy pioneered by the 1960s German sociologist, it may be enough to read that book. Luhmann’s system in many ways anticipated the structure of the internet with interlocking pages connected via hyperlinks. Yet Ahrens’ book, despite being published in 2017 and thus existing well within the reality of the internet as it exists today, does not go much into detail about ways in which researchers have expanded on Luhmann’s ideas with digital technology. Ahrens advocates at some points in the book for simple pen and paper methods, which I agree with, but to the extent that he is teaching a system, he teaches (or, more accurately, describes) Luhmann’s system alone: notecards, pen, and filing cabinet.
I came away from Ahrens’ book with a strong desire to use this system and relatively little insight on how to do it. I had already been using Obsidian for a month or so, so I knew I wanted to use that to house the thing- but I wasn’t sure what steps to take. I read a few blogs, reflected on what I had read in Ahrens, and plunged right in.
This blog post is not going to be an exhaustive summary of my PKM or a thorough accounting of everything I have tried. Rather, I want to summarize and show photos of some of the early steps I tried, what I learned, and (finally!) why it matters for photography and writing- two of the main ends for which I am attempting to leverage all of this action.
Proto-notes: All the Dumb Stuff
Here are several examples of ways that I have taken notes in the past. While the points of application vary from example to example, they all have one thing in common: this was the end product. The defining feature of “Smart Notes” as described by Ahrens is that you move from a “fleeting note” (a note taken while reading, meant only to spur your thinking again and remind you of a specific detail) and, within a reasonable amount of time, you translate that to a “permanent note”
If you’ve read How to Take Smart Notes, NB: Ahrens actually describes fleeting notes, lit notes, and permanent notes (or Slipbox notes), but I have reduced my process (basically) to a system that focuses on fleeting notes and permanent notes, with “lit notes” being an “annotated bibliography” entry for each source that summarizes the source and serves as a ‘map’ to the singular notes that came out of that source.
Let’s look at some of the dead-end attempts that I used over the years.
Orphaned notes all alone on a sea of thought.
Separate Notes, but that’s it
Here’s probably the oldest of my notes we’ll look at. Dated 11-16-16, this was from the fall semester of my senior year in college. I found it in a folder of readings and notes that I had tucked away in a filing cabinet, and reading this is basically like reading the notes of a stranger. After almost five years, I have not interacted with this sheet of notes since I took them.
That’s not to say that the thoughts are foreign to me. I had always found resonance (and still do, to some extent) with the idea that individual readings are like meals. We don’t necessarily remember every meal we eat, yet the quantity and quality of the things we eat (or read) has a strong effect on what kind of lives we live.
I have always considered myself someone who thinks better and makes memories / impressions more solid by writing things down. For example, through most of high school and college I took lecture notes by hand but rarely referred to them in studying- taking notes down by hand was a sufficient aid to the level of recall I needed to pass a test within a couple weeks.
Yet, one point I will drive home repeatedly (and many in the PKM community would advocate for) is that to make meaningful long term connections, there needs to be a system of having unexpeccted pieces of information collide despite being separated by weeks, months, or years. Every step forward in this blog post has been an attempt to streamline the process of generating notes that can have that utility.
So, by just taking notes on this page that were separate from the reading, I may have felt like I was generating insight, but that insight was orphaned in time. It may have come through in the work I was making at the time, but it had very little long term value.
Arguing with the text and doing little constructive work.
Marginalia + Highlighting
Another reading from my senior year of college. I remember struggling with this text- it was a long textbook serving as a survey of critical perspectives on photography. I wrestled, disagreed, had strong opinions, was challenged, got mad, had some eureka moments, felt like it was relevant to the work I was doing- everything you want out of reading a text.
The only problem is I don’t really remember any of it.
Reading through the margin notes, I have to compare the margin note to the text, and that is at least a “guidepost” for entering back into the text. There may well be some interesting threads of thought in the marginalia, but the only issue is that I would basically have to re-read the text to even begin to work with this text and arguments again. Furthermore, all of my responses, insights, questions, comments, summaries- they’re all “locked inside” the physical book itself. I am not one who argues that physical books are inferior to e-books, or that handwritten notes are inherently inferior. It’s just that the entire structure of my thought and response to this text runs alongside the text, and is bound up in the order and flow of the text.
You’ll see the digital equivalent of this in a few examples, but for now, it’s just worth saying that to really write useful notes that have long-lasting value, it’s important to spring them out of the books in some meaningful way and collect them into a central database, where you can put them to work by being associated with other streams of thought.
Making books colorful and little else.
Highlights only
I can keep this section brief- my current opinion on highlighting a text only is that it’s closer to book art than a meaningful improvement on the book in any way. Seeing as this (or underlines) is probably the most popular method for annotating books, if you have found good reasons of doing it, more power to you. It has not worked for me.
I can think of a few examples where it might be helpful. If you’re leading a discussion on a book, it may help you by quickly calling out certain passages that you want to mention specifically. If you’re analytically dissecting a complicated body of text, you may find some value in many colored highlighters. If your brain works in colors generally, you might find a reason to highlight extensively.
Highlighting feels good. It feels like you’re sifting through the text to find the meaningful nuggets and making them accessible. However, if you’re stopping there, then you’re merely hoarding information and lowering the resale value of your book. Without the step of looking back on those highlights, considering their relevance, and acting on them in a meaningful way, they are likely to just be smudges in a book you will have largely forgotten the details of within a year or so.
Just trying to adopt what I learned in grade school was not especially helpful.
“Book Reports”
In my years after college, I tried a variety of different strategies to try to increase my motivation for reading and improve my retention and ability to connect information. One strategy I did for maybe 10 books or so over 3-4 years was writing small book reports of about 1000 words or less. It was another attempt to rehash the methods I had learned in school towards the end of improving recall, motivation, and generate the ability to form meaningful connections between what I was reading.
It didn’t really work.
Again, while it’s perhaps better than doing nothing after finishing a book (or… not reading at all). It would be another thing if I were publishing these somewhere, but since these reports were just collecting virtual dust on my hard drive, there’s little to recommend this approach. While it may remind me of some thought I had at the time or make me want to read the book again, reading an unpublished 1000 word summary of the entire book does little work that’s helpful in the long term.
When I say helpful here, what I have in view is the ability to use specific ideas from the text without having to drag the text back out, re-read the section, and jog your memory on exactly what the author was saying. If you’ve generated a note which allows you to at least use and cite the idea with confidence that you’re faithfully representing the view and argument of the author, or the facts presented in a certain work, then you’re doing a huge amount of heavy lifting on the front end that you don’t need to do when you sit down to write. The book report above is a great tool for jogging your memory on the overall book, but any specific insights or facts that I came across when reading the book are basically lost if all I’m doing is trying to summarize the book from memory shortly after reading it.
Long, time consuming, and difficult to find single pieces of information.
Personal Cliffs Notes
After starting in Obsidian but prior to reading How to Take Smart Notes, this was my gesture towards what I thought was a better way of taking notes. I thought I could lean on the many shiny features and success that others were having with the program to naively wade in and attempt to harness it towards my own ends and in my own way.
It didn’t really work. But, as we wrap up the section of my pre “smart notes” attempts, I will say this: trying something is almost always better than not trying it, and the thoughtful consideration of where there are issues in a process will help you refine the process.
The aspect of this which created the most friction was the sheer volume of writing. I was undertaking this process by copying down every chapter title, heading, and subheading into a document and then attempting to summarizing every salient point within each section. I finished a book of about 200 pages using this note taking method the whole way through. The book may have had about 120,000 words based on the number of pages, and my summary ended up being 12,000 words. Put another way, I had just paraphrased a worse version of the book I had just read at 1/10th of the length.
This may not be the worst exercise in the world, but after putting tremendous amounts of work into this process for a couple books, I realized a few things:
The book was taking forever to read, because I couldn’t read except for when I had a computer or tablet with me, and I was stopping throughout each section to write a thorough summary.
I was having a very hard time relating pieces of the text to any other book I was reading. Obsidian supports block references, but many of the tools and features built into the program (which I don’t have space to detail here) are set up to deal with information on a full-document level. For example, Obsidian has a beautiful graph feature which shows the links between documents visually- yet they are based on entire notes. So, it doesn’t mean much to just show one book linked to another- why are they linked?
I don’t trust my own comprehension of the book enough to really trust that this is a fair summary of the entire book or entire substance of an author’s argument. In other words, if I truly wanted an “abridged” version of a text in my own writing, it would take far more time to edit, rewrite, compare to the source text, and feel confident that I had really encapsulated the source text down enough to ensure that I didn’t really need to go back to the source text.
These last three points guided my next steps. At this point, I picked up and read Ahrens’ book, and realized that I had exhausted myself on almost every kind of “bad” note taking technique that he cites in the book. Getting some guidance and inspiration from Ahrens, I set out to adapt the note taking system of Niklas Luhmann to my own way of working.
Smart Notes Attempt #1: Making Marginalia Mildly More Manageable
My first efforts at taking the fabled Smart Notes of Ahrens’ book. Not so smart, though.
As already mentioned, the workflow that Luhmann used and Ahrens advocates for is a process of going from “fleeting note” to “permanent note”. He does mention in the book that the notes ought to be “processed” in this manner within a few days of reading the text, but… I ignored this at my own peril.
My first attempt to take smart notes was to bring a small notebook with me when I read and to parcel out the chapters, making notes as I read. You may realize that this is basically taking the margin notes out of the margins, and you’re right. I would read, and if I saw something I wanted to make a note on, I would make a dot or mark in the margins and then write a note in my notebook. It helped the writing move faster than my summary efforts, and it kept the book cleaner, but it presented a few issues straight away.
The first and most important was that I was not turning them into “permanent notes” fast enough. This will be a recurring theme until the very end, my current process. I believe that it’s important to insulate processes from one another- writing a permanent note is a different activity than reading. If I stopped to write a permanent note on every point I thought were relevant, I would never get my reading done in any meaningful timeframe, and furthermore, I would run the risk of beginning to lose the forest for the trees. For this reason, I thought it would be better to read the entire book before writing any permanent notes.
However, to my dismay, I realized that getting to the end of the book I both lost track of the pages the notes were on, but I also began to lose the threads of why a particular point was interesting to me. And to compound my misery, I had a mountain of handwritten notes to work through.
So, I would copy everything into my “annotated bibliography” note under chapter headings, summarizing the handwritten notes and adding the page number. Then I would reflect on that and decide what to turn into a permanent note.
This was a tremendous chore. At the end of the day, work is work, but in self-guided, personal research you need to develop a pretty fine-toothed understanding of what’s fruitful work and what’s busywork. Or, in other words, when working without a deadline or specific end goal immediately in view, you need to figure out how to decrease friction enough to where you can continue on in the work without losing face.
For those that want to write or even just be better readers, the ability to chew small bites every day is vital. I’ve relied on huge bursts of energy to try to rapidly attack big projects and get them done quickly, but the best means of getting meaningful things done is to take small bites every day. Making sure there’s the least amount of fat and the most meat in each bite is the best means to grow.
Attempt #2: Basically the same thing, just shinier.
Shinier technology always improves things, right?
I realized that I had the tools to address at least one of the issues with the previous technique. By moving my note taking over to my iPad with a stylus, I was able to use the (excellent) app Nebo to convert the handwritten notes over to typed text at the end of the process. Even with my chicken scratch handwriting, it did a pretty good job of capturing it accurately. I also added page numbers to my notes to make tracking down the source text easier.
The output of this was, again, an “annotated bibliography” note which contained the converted handwritten notes separated into chapter headings, and then this document was used to create permanent notes after I had finished the entire book.
Although I was adding a piece of technology back into the reading process, this felt less disruptive than having to type in my notes as I was reading. Furthermore, because I’m a much slower writer than typist, I was forced to be selective on what I wrote and keep the note brief. As I’m sure you can tell, I have a hard time keeping typed words brief!
For another book of about 250 pages (let’s call it 150,000 words) I was able to get the wordcount of this “lit note” document down to about 2,500 words. A vast improvement from 120,00 to 12,000! Still, I generated a bit over 100 individual “fleeting” notes- things that could potentially be turned into individual permanent notes.
And here is a good time to talk about what making a permanent note really means.
As I’ve come to use them, I have several goals for a permanent note. Roughly in order of importance, they are:
Summarize an author’s argument in my own words thoroughly enough that someone else could read the note and not need to see the source text in order to understand the author’s argument.
Create the mechanisms by which relevant arguments or information can be associated with the note, and contextualized in a meaningful way (writing links to other notes, and using tags to group together relevant notes.
Record any original thoughts I have in response to information.
Add enough information so that I can track down the original citation, as well as any sources the author quoted.
How permanent notes are written, how much context to bring in, how many to write, how to add tags, links, & etc. could be the topic of another long post. I’ll end with a brief summary, but for now, let’s continue looking at a one more method of how I wrote fleeting notes.
Attempt #3: More Atomic, Loops Still Unclosed
Changing the form doesn’t necessarily change the content.
Having switched over my tools and media for the third time now, I came across a realization that should have been extremely obvious in retrospect, but is the kind of thing which only really gets learned after living into it for a while: merely changing the form that certain writing takes will have no necessary profound alteration of the broader process it fits into, and minimal impact on its content. There are some limits to this- writing on a small piece of paper (pictured above) does limit the amount of writing that can be done on any one topic. Handwriting (rather than typing) did make the overall volume of notes smaller. However, just taking notes in one manner and another doesn’t have a necessary impact on the broader process and mentality of taking notes.
More specifically, I realized after about three different attempts that I had a loop-closing problem.
One topic Ahrens book brings up is that brains like closed loops. For example- you trust a to-do list more if you manage to regularly add and cross things off the list. For example, if you can break tasks down into discrete, concrete steps and actually accomplish them incrementally, you have a higher likelihood of finishing things, and finishing more things.
This is a hacky summarization of Ahrens’ point, which is in turn an adaptation of the general concepts of Get Things Done. The point is an important one, though- turn big things into small tasks, and do them.
With all three attempts I had made up until then, I was failing for the simple reason that I was not closing loops. This wasn’t really an innovation- Ahrens’ book makes the point of saying that fleeting notes should be turned into permanent notes and then be discarded. The value of the fleeting note is in spurring you on in writing the permanent note.
With these flimsy pieces of paper, there is very little danger of wanting to archive the entire thing. Sure, I could try to copy down the contents of each note, but they have greater value when used as brief indicators of the thought I was having, and then closing the loop by acting on that note in some way. Either using it to help write a lit note, summarizing the source, or turning it into a permanent note with the four goals stated above.
Do it promptly
Even in the span of one book, I made one final adjustment. I had finally realized that I really needed to follow Ahrens’ advice- process the notes on the same day or on the next day. Trying to finish books quickly just to say they were done, but leaving behind a pile of notes was not helpful to me. In fact, I ended up right back where I started- with a long list of half-finished notes that were “locked” within one document pertaining the source. There was no value generated by turning notes into singular ideas that could be linked together- the notes were stagnant and latent- but I had made a mountain of work that was quite daunting to address.
Instead, I tried to force myself to process notes the same day or next day. It was easy to excuse putting off working with the notes as “more efficient”, as if the filter of a bit of time would reveal to me what was most important. But, fleeting notes being what they are (taken with as little friction as possible in the writing process), they were not of much value as they were. So, I had to spend a good bit of time reading over the section of the book again to make sure I captured what was most important. This isn’t a bad thing inherently, but I think that just moving the processing up closer in time helps the relevant details stay a bit closer at hand while you’re summarizing them into a concise note.
Furthermore, by doing it promptly, you’re keeping a short to-do list. The “loop” between what you wrote as a “fleeting” note and what gets turned into helpful long term information is a lot tighter- you have the instant feedback of “this didn’t turn out to be as useful as I thought it might” or “I actually need to bring in a lot more information for this to make sense”.
So what’s next? And why did you write about this?
Much more could be written about the gradual evolution of what the actual “permanent” notes look like. I’m sure I could add another few thousand words to the already robust discourse about whether to use tags or links, using Dataview, and all the other stuff Obsidian users like myself like to talk about endlessly. Perhaps I will add a few more words to that discourse. But for now, I wanted to at least document my own gestures towards that first step of turning thoughts sparked from reading into permanent reference material for myself.
I have tried for a long time to figure out how to read and synthesize information from varied sources. The human brain is a wonderfully made tool for forming interesting connections between all sorts of different things. Articulating these moments of synthesis is one of the joys of any creative enterprise, and being able to do so with precision and robust illustration is the skill every writer and thinker tries to develop. The first steps towards doing this can be extremely messy. They have been for me, and I think they will continue to be rather messy.
An idea is never as amazing to us as when it’s in our heads. Trying to form it into words or a photograph or a painting introduces the frustrating friction formed by attempting to move our own robust, colorful, pleasing thoughts into the imprecise and restrictive world of material. Whether that material is words on a page, words out of our mouths, images made with our hands, or any other number of things- the imprecision will always be there. The insecurity of thinking that our thoughts were perhaps not as good as when we first thought them is introduced. It can be discouraging and frustrating.
Furthermore, I believe that human beings with the tendency to want to understand broadly, when faced with the internet, attempt to enlarge our capacity beyond our actual frames. If you think about it, scrolling through Facebook or Instagram should be a rather jarring experience. One image is hard enough to form an opinion and response to, yet how many do you pass even in five minutes of scrolling? We may think we are forming an opinion or interacting in some way, yet it may be that we are only becoming more and more numb to a capacity to engage something in meaningful depth. We claim to become wise in our “broad” understanding, but we really just grow restless and discontent. We become agitated and ready to merely judge on an emotional level.
Yet, by being diligent and chipping away at the work of thinking in material, I think it is possible to make headway, even now. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t have great works of writing or art or music to reference and reflect on. The writing that other people have made is a gift prepared through the labor of thought and research. By spending our time working to organize others’ thoughts and use them for the testing of our own thoughts, held up in the light of the reality of the world, we can (perhaps) add in a meaningful way to the discourse of our chosen field of study.
That is why I have not written in public, almost at all, for three years.
As I left school and as I spent more time in the world after school, without an in-built audience for my thoughts and my work, I suddenly realized that my own offerings of thought and photography were rather meager in the larger critical discourse of art and photography. A journal, even one written in public, can be of personal or communal value. However, I was beginning to feel tapped out of the creative impulse to continue writing what I was increasingly realizing was simply a journal written for the public to see.
While this blog post has certainly not been free from the personal narrative (in fact, clearly, it comprises most of the post), it was motivated in large part from the work I have done in trying to understand and handle others’ ideas. From Neil Postman and Söhnke Ahrens to all the other authors that I have been mulling over, the impulse to write has come back. There is a big world of ideas out there, human beings can know truth, and I intend to add value to the understands that come out of that intersect.
Pictures? Man, that’s a whole other story- but it’s one I’m working on!
