As is custom, I made a resolution for the new year. I had set myself the goal of writing a monthly essay based on some philosophical texts or works of art that I engaged in. Like most resolutions, I failed to plan well. In particular, I failed to realise that January is one of my busiest months, so I wouldn’t be able to find the time required to do the reading I had in mind.

Instead of giving up, I made a compromise, this piece. It’s not quite the analysis I had in mind, nor is it an exclusively autobiographical piece. It’s something that lives on the precipice of fiction and nonfiction, as I suppose all stories do.

My first instinct was to write about planning. Nothing quite like the new year to write about productivity and planning systems. I began drafting and very quickly concluded that this isn’t about planning. My experience with planning is inherently limited to myself and whatever advice I could offer has been offered a million times over, both for free and sold at ridiculous prices. Really, planning was an excuse to write about the act I associate with planning: keeping a notebook.

See, I had used a planner for 2024, but in such a haphazard manner that the record of my year is mostly preserved within google calendar. As the next year rolled around, I thought it would be nice to take some time and backfill the pages from last year, which lead me to wonder why I would ever want to do that.

The record is already there, synced across my devices. Moreover, I’ve kept a travel journal with ephemera from trips and other big events of the year, so to a limited extent I already have a physical record. Nonetheless, that did little to still the anxiety I felt at the thought of this year of my life being kept digitally.

Now, this isn’t a novel experience to me. However irrational it may be, I’m sure there are many other people, both those who keep and don’t keep notebooks, who recognize that sentiment. The digital world is built on quicksand. Though ubiquitously accessible and supposedly permanent (How many times have we been told that “When things are online they can never be erased”), that second quality has always been a lie. We have all traversed through the dead internet of broken links and removed products. We are all aware of how fragile products on streaming services are. You don’t want the entire record of your life to be at the mercy of digital landlords in an unstable world that is consuming more electricity than it can sustain.

Paper is fragile, we can burn it, drench it, tear it up and so much more. Ink fades, pencil marks smudge, writing is seldom waterproof or invariant under heavy sun exposure and it has a physical weight that we need to lug with us. But at no point will you wake up and discover it gone, taken possession of by some company without a face located in an unknown tax haven.

So, physical it is. But I already had some of those records physically. What particular value does it hold to copy these digital events into physical form when they have long transpired?

I quickly had an answer: Whatever records I had were the stories I told to myself, the narrative I painted of the day. Whereas the data in my google calendar was raw data about how I spent my day, without filter or perspective. This answer only prompted an endless torrent of questions.

Why do we keep physical records? Or perhaps, why do we record-keep at all? Why is it that we pursue a life that is preserved, whether through photos or text, by keeping everything we possess in pristine condition or wearing it down to the bone to prove that we have in fact used something, that we have possessed it. Or have we been possessed by it? Perhaps it boils down to the following question: why do we want to prove that we have lived? To whom do we want to prove that?

Whilst I may experience a degree of compulsion related to this that is unbecoming and has been, at times, detrimental. The desire to record-keep, to prove that we have in fact lived is universal. For centuries people have been avid diarist, scrapbookist and these days bloggers. We have not only always had the urge to record keep, but also to investigate the records others keep of themselves as shown by the List of Diarists on wikipedia [1]

When I think about these things, I am inevitably lead back to Jacob Geller’s “How can we bear to throw anything away?” [2]. The video essay is about a lot of things, from the preservation of our video game history to the impeding data apocalypse, the need to gather knowledge, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and the relatively arbitrary lines of collection and hoard. At some point he says

“To break … the illusion of professionalism or whatever. The topic of this video has somehow become the exact challenge of this script. I have read so many different things for this, there are so many different aspects that could go into the video, but they can’t ALL fit. What does ownership really mean, what’s the emotional cost of holding onto everything, what’s the environmental cost of keeping everything digitally preserved … But here I just keep trying to cram everything into a script that can’t support it, and now I feel trapped by all the stuff I collected.”

And the fact that, despite the context of this quote, it’s a sentiment that echoes wildly in all of our lives. How many of us have not become overwhelmed by our possessions’ at some point? In response, swapping consumerism for minimalism until a single thought pops back into our minds: “What if?”.

How is an entire society haunted by the drive to collect, archive, keep and preserve? Who are we keeping this all for? You can make many or few arguments defending or explaining your own collection, but this is not a personal affliction. It is a societal ill and natural consequence of modernity.

As Bruno Latour writes: “Since everything that passes is eliminated for ever, the moderns indeed sense time as an irreversible arrow, as capitalization, as progress. But since this temporality is imposed upon a temporal regime that works quite differently, the symptoms of discord are multiplied. As Nietzsche observed long ago, the moderns suffer from the illness of historicism. They want to keep everything, date everything, because they think they have definitively broken with their past. The more they accumulate revolutions, the more they save; the more they capitalize, the more they put on display in museums. Maniacal destruction is counterbalanced by an equally maniacal conservation” (trans. Catherine Porter) [3]

While you may not be an academic historian, we are all our own historians. We have all been reared in the age of ‘modernity’ and have succumbed to this perspective about ourselves and the world entire.

If you’ve ever spent five minutes looking online for advice about self-improvement, you’ll be told to break with the past and begin anew. To radically transform and change our self into a project. This is an uncompromising requisite in our society, we must be conceived of as a project. If we don’t, we run the risk of ostracization, of being a loser.

As explained by Byung-Chul Han: “today, the subject achieves liberation by turning itself into a project. Yet this amounts to another figure of constraint. Compulsion and constraint now take the form of performance, achievement, self-optimization, and auto-exploitation”. (trans. Erik Butler) [4]

Record keeping is the fundament of this auto-exploitation. To engage in our norm of self-optimization we need data upon which to improve, to brandish a new self. Such improvement requires numbers, the systematic reduction of our lives to data points in the service of shaping a new self. This new me is not a changed me, it’s a different me, fundamentally altered from that which came before. We break the chain of continuity not just within society but within our own lives, and by losing this link with the past we become obsessed with capturing it while it is the present, to preserve it.

But then I think about the diary I kept as a young child, and I assume many of you have as well. I didn’t really have a reason, it seemed like something cool to do. Any kind of book keeping, when approached from a certain perspective can quickly dissolve in a tool serving total self exploitation. But it doesn’t have to.

In “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, Joan Didion writes: “So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess.” [5]

The continuity and perspective we have imprinted upon time is one of many. We can change that. Instead of viewing clear barriers between that which was and that which we are and want to be, we can retrace the line and perhaps come to see that the line is a circle. You will never stop being who you were nor will you ever radically break from yourself. You are, after all, a continuous being. We can’t think of ourselves as discontinuous chapters on a line. And funnily enough the easiest way to rectify that error is by keeping a notebook in the same spirit as Joan Didion did.

“It all comes back. Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one’s self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. … It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about.” [5]

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References

[1] Wikipedia contributors. List of diarists — Wikipedia, the free en-
cyclopedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_
diarists&oldid=1270735451, 2025. [Online; accessed 20-January-2025].

[2] Jacob Geller. How can we bear to throw anything away? https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=ukJ_UA-JS5o, 2023. [Online; accessed 21-January-
2025].

[3] Bruno Latour (trans. Catherine Porter). We Have Never Been Modern.
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1993.

[4] Byung-Chul Han (trans. Erik Butler). In the swarm: digital prospects. The
MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2017.

[5]Joan Didion. Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Dell Publishing Co., Inc., New
York, New York, 2017.