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Comment by Fraterkes | Hacker News Reader

This is what I find appealing about journaling, but I just find the thought that someone might find mu journal and read all my thoughts over the years kinda scary. Do you do anything to protect your journal?

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I sometimes write in encrypted files through vim for this reason. :X does the trick.

It feels juvenile to hide it when I know no one will care, but the idea that it can be entirely personal opens the option to being more honest. Future self can still be judgemental, but the only way to avoid that is to pipe it to /dev/null instead.

Nice, I didn't know about that vim feature, thanks!

And the equivalent for emacs is?

You can encrypt org files pretty easily. http://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/encrypting-files.html

Start writing public blog posts, but don't pimp them, notice nobody cares to read any of those (or at least not all) so who would care to read your journal? That should help with fear. (Though I guess it's possible people will want to read everything if you have an interesting life and write well, but then you'll deal with the fear through gaining confidence instead of apathy.) I have a private journal I update every few weeks to a few months that I wouldn't really want to have in the public, I don't go to great lengths to keep it private though. It exists in a txt file on one machine, that's good enough, but if I cared more it wouldn't be hard to stick it in an encrypted folder or just aes decrypt/encrypt whenever I want to update it.

Edit: I had a handwritten journal once when I was 13 or so, it disappeared, probably my mom finding and reading and destroying it. Just do it on a computer. Besides for me I can barely stand handwriting anything longer than a page anymore.

> Edit: I had a handwritten journal once when I was 13 or so, it disappeared, probably my mom finding and reading and destroying it.

That is the most awful thing I've read today.

A lot of parents read their kids' text messages and email. I never have done it myself, but I can sort of see the rationale. Teenagers don't have the best judgment and the relative permanence and ease of redistribution of electronic communication creates consequences that paper note-passing or phone calls didn't in prior generations.

Once I started living on my own - and the risk of prying eyes dropped near zero - I've preferred hand-writing my journal. Some combination of the tactile nature of pen-on-paper and the portability (I hate typing for any length of time on my phone) hits the sweet spot for me. Plus, I can add illustrations.

Inside the front cover of my journals, I have written "You wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do."

I snatched that from GoodQuotes. I'm no poet, but I feel like it carries a lot of truth. If somebody wanted to rob my house, if all of my most private thoughts and truths were stacked on the coffee table in the front room, they would still make off with my TV, and those books would still be sitting there when I came back to the aftermath.

The best advice I ever got about journalling was something to the effect of removing the fear-block by not journalling about anything I wouldn't say in person. It was enough to get me started. By getting started like that I learned that journalling changes you. These days I don't worry about someone finding my journal and I pretty much write whatever comes into my head.

I learned a different script for English and write in that.

I don't (yet) read it as quickly as I read normal English, though; if you're interested in self-reflection and review, this tradeoff won't be an obvious win.

What did you pick? I learned Shavian, and that was fun. It took less time than I'd expected.

Which one, please elaborate.

I've seen Ford shorthand system which replaces alphabets with easier to write variants. It could also be used to write faster and provides some obscurity from the uninitiated.

http://www.fordshorthand.com/

Same. And my tactic over the years is removing pages (I prefer actual writing to anything electronic. I like nice pens and good paper).

Write honestly, review periodically, and discard what's really just mental or psychological dead-weight. It's surprising how much of that, once on paper, can be just let go and be done with.

I've used mostly moleskines for their range and availability, particularly the hard covers. Those all now have huge sections of sliced out pages so I'm trying their Valence line where every page is perforated.

I'd also be afraid of your future self, because annoyance is the typical reaction to past self, at least it is in this article.

I already feel annoyance with my past self reading my old code. For example, "Why did you code it this way? Are you an idiot?" I've since added more comments explaining certain decisions after thinking something was a bug, but it was just a bit unintuitive in the hope that I annoy my future self less.

Honestly, I do the bare minimum. I keep it tucked under my bed.. so if anyone goes that far to invade my privacy, then that is their problem at that point.

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