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Comment by fortylove | Hacker News Reader

Power to the OP, but does anyone else find this knowledge mapping exercise mildly depressing, especially as it pertains to notes about friendships? I can’t quite find the words to describe how I feel about it, but I don’t particularly like the idea of reducing all my thoughts and emotions into text and links between texts. Maybe forcing text makes me aware of details more consciously, but I feel like it might reduce the rawness of life, reducing the resolution to fit into text space. When in reality, maybe the raw emotions are more human? Again, not really sure how to describe my feelings here. Am I alone with this view?

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People have been diarizing for as long as there's been paper, so I assume that putting events, interactions, feelings, etc on paper is a pretty common human impulse, but perhaps not for everyone.

One thing I've personally found about maintaining relationships is how much the fact that someone bothered to write something down about me is meaningful. There's a lot to be said for the clerical role in friendships. Noting someone's birthday, the things they like, their family life, etc. so you can write a card or just drop them a note on their birthday is quite the opposite of "reducing" someone to text in my opinion.

This is just an additional tool. Use it if it works for you. For years I used to dump my interesting product/research ideas in individual files - now I moved them in obsidian. Even before then I used to put them in a computation notebook with light green graph paper pages. Writing, sketching, drawing pictures on paper is certainly more creative and freeing (for me) but searching through old notes is harder. Now with Apple pencil (or equivalent) you can get some features of both worlds in one place, with OCR and such. There is a recent free app called collanote that seems quite promising. Still, I’d prefer a cross platform app.

> reducing ... into text.

Are you though? You can just view the text as memories. Same as taking pictures on vacations: "reducing vacations to pictures" sounds like a pretty bad vacation/more like photography work. "Taking pictures of cherished moments and places" sounds like something you might look at again from time to time to fondly remember.

Nope. Using a CRM to keep in touch also rubs me the wrong way.

You should only note things you find noteworthy.

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