Do you keep a journal? Why/Why not?
If so, in what format (online, paper, other)? For how long have you kept at it? How honest/full-disclosure are you?
I’m an over-50 gay man thinking about taking it up again.
Thanks
Yes, though not a “traditional” one. I’ve got a voice recorder, I use it when I’m walking my dog to ramble on about whatever’s on my mind. The day’s events, my personal thoughts, to-do lists and notes, whatever. When I get home I dump the recording into a folder where some scripts I’ve written process the audio to produce a transcript (using the Whisper model from OpenAI) and then an LLM to create summaries and subject tags and so forth from it (currently Qwen3), entirely local on my computer. I’ve got an index for searching through them based on those AI-generated tags and summaries so I can more easily find old stuff if I need them or am curious for whatever reason.
I use entirely local AI because I am completely open and honest in there. Probably a bunch of blackmail material to be found if you dug deeply enough. I’m very careful with data security, none of this ever leaves my local systems.
I’ve been doing this for over ten years now, almost daily. I’ve always had a vague plan that someday I’d feed it all into an AI, it;s only just the past two years where that’s actually started to become a reality. This weekend I’m going to experiment with upgrading my transcription AI to WhisperX, if it does a significantly better job I may have to rerun the whole dang thing through it all. Could take weeks, maybe months. I’m almost hoping it doesn’t work. :)
How much storage does it take up? How much ram does the llm use?
My main recordings folder is 175 GB, for a little over ten years worth of recordings. That’s not really all that much - consider how much a terabyte hard drive costs these days, it’s a trivial expense. Even when you include the various backups I keep (definitely don’t want a crash to take all that out).
My GPU’s reasonably hefty, an RTX 4090 with 24GB of VRAM. But AI is a rapidly changing technology right now so who knows what the next six months will bring. Someone might come out with an awesome lightweight model, someone might announce they’re going to be selling a cheap AI-specific card. My view has always been “save the data now because you can’t save it later if you didn’t save it now. You can process it any time.”
How often do you find a yourself searching through your memos?
Not that often, but my search tools aren’t very refined yet so it’s probably a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. The technology is advancing rapidly right now so I’m not putting a whole lot of effort into polish yet, since in six months some dramatic new tool might come out that invalidates everything I did so far. Like that potential WhisperX switch.
Most recently, I remember a situation where I didn’t remember the name of some NPCs from a roleplaying game that were only in one or two adventures. I did a little searching and found them in a transcript from 2017. That was fun.
I’ve tried keeping an offline journal, but it’s never worked out really. I still feel embarrassed of putting my thoughts onto paper for some reason, and I also felt that I didn’t have enough interesting things happen that’d be worth noting. I write a lot of poetry, and I feel the same there. It’s gotten a bit better, but it’s weird how embarrassing it still feels to make your feelings “known” in a different way. Especially because I never doubt my feelings or feel embarrassed about them as long as they stay inside my brain haha.
It’s nice to sit down and just write about your week, like talking to an old friend/family member about what’s new. You never know what comes out. I use an old Kindle Scribe that I don’t do anything else with. It sounds like you have privacy concerns?
Privacy concerns: YES
Nosy parents found my teenage journals before I came out and that set me up for ‘don’t be gay’ therapy.
you could use standart notes
you could even turn sync off
Yeah, I’ve had a continuous blog since… 1999? Since before “blog” was a word. Self-hosted since 2003, write my own blogging software in 2007.
These days I also have a bullet journal for notes and tasks.
I’ve journaled before, but more of a snapshot fashion (once a month or so). Doing this made me realize that I’m never in a good headspace when I feel like journaling, and now I use the urge to journal as a canary to get help.
Point is, journaling might help beyond just getting your feelings out. Twas the case for me.
I started a free writing journal to help generate ideas and learn to get a little more creative. It’s basically just a regular journal at this point, I just write in it whenever I have a thought that I feel I should keep. It’s been invaluable for coping with mental health stuff too. I don’t think I’ll ever stop, it’s not something I have to force myself to do any more.
I have tried journaling numerous times, particularly for mental health reasons as it is supposed to be helpful, and it has never worked for me as something helpful to do. It just makes me ruminate even more.
My journal is electronic (offline) and I have been doing it for 10 years or so.
I’ve tried. I want to be a journaler so bad, but I can’t keep it up at all. I either get bored or I get too detailed and it takes too long to write down one entry, so I stopped trying.
I was better at bullet journaling, but only slightly.
Same. I’ve been journaling intermittently from 2019 on, but I’ve barely filled a whole journal with how often I just give up.
I have digital one and it almost runs three years already. Obsidian + syncthing works good enough for me.
I journal intermittently for mental health reasons. I put down my feelings to get rid of them. I works wonders.
I quasi-journal at work, just to remember what I’ve done and why I did it. I do so using markdown files.
This is why I started my blog. But I haven’t started it back up again because or some kind of dependency issue on my website
I had really good success doing a daily page of A5, few months ago tried to upgrade to doing art least 1 page of A4 per day. I’ve slightly fallen off the habit.
I kept a Livejournal for many years. I closed it when the Russian government basically took it over for propaganda, but mirrored it to Dreamdwidth. It’s hard to read in places, but it’s helped me a lot regarding ending my relationship and why I’m not crazy.
I have always wanted to but I have too much to say and have too little time. I was never consistent (I wanted to do daily). Too much of a chore for me unfortunately though I love the idea of being able to look back and reflect.
