Ask Lemmy

I never thought about it much but this post sparked the process so here it goes:

My family became poor when I was around 4; I've got quite a lot of photos from before then (early 90s), which was our main/only way of documenting life events. The price of a photo film and the film processing services resulted in our family abandoning the medium and throughout most of my childhood/adolescent life, the idea of documenting my life didn't "ingrain" in me. I also never "got" the purpose of making journals, which I found as a time wasted, since I didn't think there was anything worth documenting.

At some point, everybody got their phones with digital cameras and at a later point I got mine too, but it was always the low-end model with the "potato-lens" which discouraged me from using it, especially when in groups where anyone could take better photos with their superior cameras.

I've tried using calendars and notebooks at some point to put my life in an order of some sorts (mostly for keeping dates, not journaling per se) but couldn't remember to keep them on person and use them consistently. (Got diagnosed with AD[H]D as an adult a couple of years ago so it kinda tracks)

I also never had the drive to post my own stuff on social media (so in my teenage years, instead of posting photos or writing stuff, I ususally just put links to songs I liked on youtube). There was an urge to post since "everybody did that" but it was hard for me to convince myself that whatever I wanted to post was "good enough".

Now, in my adult life, I've noticed at some point that I don't have that "trigger" that would make me pull out my phone to document events in my life or write down my thoughts on matters. Most photos I have in my camera roll (and stored on hard drives) are either some documents or things I needed to refer to during some work. Meeting my wife has changed that a bit; I've got much more photos of us together since I've met her, but the aforementioned trigger isn't there in me anyway.

I've got my childhood photos stored in a small envelope. Whatever photos/videos I took since my first phone with camera are stored both in a cloud and on a couple of HDDs. I don't find myself going back to them, though. If I ever do, it's because I'm searching for something specific and have to sift through the stuff.

Writing a post/comment like this is something rare for me and gotta say I didn't do it for a long time. Thanks for the inspiration.

Keep it in my memory? Brother in Christ I can't remember worth shit

I write everywhere all the time. I have a sketchbook where I doodle, I have a small notebook for notes, songs, poems and ideas. I have comp books for drafting, designing and longer form working things out. I use grapheme notepad and have like 15 different folders for organizing all different ideas, from recipes and meal prep, to quotes from authors that I like, article ideas, social media posts ive written I want to repurposed, all sorts of shit. I also have a fuck load of google docs, I do a lot of formal writing, like proposals, analysis, sometimes I just brain dump 15-20 pages, edit it down to like 9-12, and then never share it.

I had a friend who kept one of those little moleskine books and I thought it was cool so I got one and started writing ideas in it. My ideas were bad, but I was trying to learn and develop myself. Years later I'm still jotting and journaling, and my ideas have gotten better, I'm more successful, I taught myself how to write articles, and I can always go back and read old notebooks for ideas and old insights. Its also neat to see me trying to put the pieces together on something I feel like I have a good grasp of now, sometimes the way I'm framing questions or notions and attitudes was pretty insightful.