for the first 25 years of my life, i was fundamentally opposed to taking notes.

my entire academic career, i was that kid. the one who showed up to school with empty hands and only picked up a pen on exam day. back in CM2, i literally got "detention" multiple times for refusing to write down the lessons (s/o m. sarr and ms. souare). people thought i was either a "genius" or just arrogant.

the truth is, my memory just hard-carried me. i have what i call schrödinger's memory. it is simultaneously the best and the worst memory of all time. i can recall the exact date of a niche historical event, but i will forget the beginning of my own sentence while i’m speaking. i will lose my keys while holding them. (long story short: i have adhd).

the only thing i ever wrote down were my dreams. a weird exercise, but you end up with these chaotic stories that have no head or tail, yet feel completely authentic.(try that one day its actually really cool) beyond that? zero notes.

father time

then i turned 25.

combine a quarter-century of aging with a not so healthy lifestyle of 4-hour nights of sleep, and suddenly, my RAM is completely cooked. my memory is turning to ash. if the fate of the universe was on the line and what would save us was a three-digit code you told me yesterday, we are all cooked. (if you feel like im exaggerating a bit, remember 50=infinite )

it took me a quarter of a century to realize that ... drum rolllllll ... people were right: writing things down so you don't forget them is actually a good idea. shocking

the "second brain"

right around the time my brain started failing, a friend of mine introduced me to obsidian.

if you hang out in dev circles, you know the pitch. zettelkasten. bidirectional linking. building a second brain. they show you these beautiful, cosmic graphs where every thought is perfectly tagged and connected.

at the beginning of the year, i had a mindset shift. i wanted to become a new person, even if it meant changing my core habits. so i bought into the hype. i started writing things down day by day.

it was atrocious.

if you have the most unorganized mind on the planet, giving yourself a tool with infinite organizational freedom is self-sabotage. i tried to use tags. i tried to build the fancy graph. my adhd brain looked at the structure and immediately short-circuited.

"i-word"

to understand why it failed, you have to understand how my brain processes an ide*.

to me, the word "idea" is practically a slur. it is a curse. i generate about 1,000 ideas per minute. here is the funnel:

  • 990 of them are forgotten within the exact same minute.

  • 9 of them survive long enough for me to hyper-fixate on them. i research them, i hype myself up, i decide this is going to be the project that changes everything. then, i forget about them an hour later.

  • 1 of them makes it to the editor. i vibe-code it intensely for a week. and then? straight to purgatory. abandoned forever.

a beautiful mess

when you plug that specific idea-funnel into a system like obsidian, you don't get a "second brain." you get a digital graveyard.

so, i gave up on the system. goodbye zettelkasten. goodbye perfectly structured tags. i am back to rawdogging plain text notes. i don't organize them. i just dump them in and hope the search bar can save me later.

(look at this beautiful mess. holy god.)

Illustration

i failed at building a second brain. but honestly? looking at that chaotic, tangled, unstructured web of dead ideas and random thoughts... it’s exactly what my first brain looks like anyway.