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I was going to say something similar. Journaling has been way more valuable to me than I realized before. Among the many notes I jot down to myself every day, I write blog-like entries where I dump out my current thoughts, including very intimate ones. Surprisingly, I get about as much enjoyment as I got out of blogging but without the need to consider an audience besides myself, especially when it comes to making sure that I won't be misunderstood. The act of writing down my thoughts has been really helpful in processing them, coming up with new ideas, understanding my emotions, and planning for the future.

People can get the same thing out of blogging, but I came to really dislike the nature of online content today, and all the considerations one has to take in order to make one's blog "readable" undermines the personal benefit one can get from the act of writing.

It was one thing back in the early days of the web when a blog could be scrappy and written in a very personal way. Those days are long gone. If you want to write a public journal in a personal and informal way, and interact with an audience, then be prepared to have some malcontents tell you to "cite your sources" about the most trivial shit, despite you never having made the promise of writing academically. If you're not making money, why bother listening to the peanut gallery? And let's say you want to make money off your blog; first off, blogs are not easy to monetize, and with money in the picture you now have to think about the voice you use, the structure of your writing, whether you're being too offensive, etc. In other words, you now have a shitty job on top of your day job!

Yeah, count me out. I know some people get enjoyment and profit out of blogging, but the wild west of the blogging is in the past, and the current state of the internet is largely not for me as someone who might otherwise want to produce content. The only content I generate is here in HN comment sections.

In case anyone reading this is interested in getting started journaling, what I do is use Apple Notes and encrypt all my notes. The nice thing about the encryption is that the notes aren't easily searchable, and the Notes app will lock the notes after a few minutes if you aren't interacting with them. The safety of the encryption allows me to write virtually anything to myself, which I've found to be a really good thing for my mental health. My more formal entries are just a title, a date, bullet points for what I've achieved that day, bullet points for things I still need to do, and a "debriefing" section where I can just write about whatever I'm thinking about the current or previous day.




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