It was only recently that I started posting a lot more of my content on this website. Some of it represents new ideas that I started thinking about in the past few months, while other posts reflect writings that have been sitting on my laptop for months or years, where I then reconsider the ideas with my modern knowledge and frame of mind. This has felt liberating for a number of reasons, one of which is something I have been recently thinking about: the power of records.
In my opinion, we tend to take for granted today the existence of technology that allows us to record content in all sorts of media. We have writing instruments and writing materials to record words, we have cameras to take pictures and videos, and so on. This ability to record represents a massive shift in the affordances given to us and in what we are now able to do.
Now, if we are talking about the existence of records in the context of historical development (at a vast “macro” scale), then this is not really a surprise to anyone — it is well-recognized that the development of writing was a massive boon for our civilization and our abilities to study history, chronicle and spread knowledge, and so on. But this is also true in a more “micro” and personal or individual sense. In the past, I had many ideas sitting in my head that would only occasionally come out when specially prompted in a conversation, where maybe two or three people would hear it. Now, though, with the ability to record those thoughts (say via writing them down), I can express and spread them to anyone, including people who I’ve never even talked to or met before.
This ability is part of what feels so liberating to me about having a website like this. In fact, not only is a website great because it can serve as a system of record, it is also great because of the fact that it is part of a vast, global network connecting billions of computers with each other — namely, the Internet. This means that not only do I have a record of content that I can show later to anyone at any point, but I also have a really easy way of performing the sharing: I just send a link.
The ability to record thoughts especially helps me because I sometimes tend to have ideas that I then forget when my mind moves on to other topics. (I suspect this to be the case for many other people as well.) Recording my content helps me reassure my mind that what I’m working on won’t be lost, which is something that I tended to get FOMO over in the past. To this end, I’ve gotten into the habit of writing down even small summaries of my thoughts and notes that allow me to know exactly what I meant, so that later on I can come back to that topic and start where I left off. This also allows me to avoid jumping into a rabbit hole immediately for every idea I come up with, which helps me better manage my time, giving me control over when I want to focus on one thing versus another.
Additionally, it’s been really fun to read my own past thoughts that I haven’t considered in a while. You can often gain insight about an idea by taking a break and coming back to it later; you’d have generally learned more in the meantime, and our minds also tend to think “passively” in the background about subjects and ideas. (Neurobiologists and psychologists would presumably be able to speak more about why this happens, but I have definitely noticed this effect in myself.) It’s been awesome to see how far I’ve come, say for example in learning math and science, when I can reconsider my past writings and frame them under new knowledge or insights I have gained since.
Another benefit of keeping records is that you don’t need to replicate the effort of putting together all the words, which for some subjects (like math) can be substantial. This is another advantage of keeping summaries and notes too: it avoids a lot of that effort in the moment, allowing you to exert it sometime later when you have the time and focus to do so.
Personally, I have gotten into the mindset of writing everything down that I’m thinking about, and I’ve now been putting more of those thoughts out there, like on this website. This ability to record my ideas, and easily share them too, is a powerful one, enabled today by the combination of many incredible technologies, and it is an ability we should take full advantage of and not take for granted.
