As I approach a quarter of a century I start to think more and more that one day I may appreciate having some recollections of my youth. I'm interested as to what techniques or practice anyone here brings to their own personal log, whether written or digital.
Any tips for keeping it up, or discussion on what kind of details you find important to include and those you don't bother with. Tell me about your journals.
When I was a nipper like you I used to keep personal blogs as diaries / records / places to emo whinge the fuck out on. The only thing I feel when looking back at them now is a deep and forlorn sense of hopelessness that time goes by so fast and that I'm almost always right.
Not quite as personal, but I do have notebooks going back around 6 years. Pen and paper is for me still the simplest way of getting a number or e-mail address, writing down names/events/places, a quick idea or a summary of something I've read. Sometimes I will record personal things if they are very meaningful to me, since no one reads the notes but me, and they're buried among mundane notes anyway. This is the only regular writing habit to have stuck with me, and I can see myself doing it for the rest of my life.
It sound a small thing but it's helped me a lot to be able to look back at a certain period of time and know what I was doing, what I was thinking about, and determine if I've actually made any progress.
When I finish a book, I go back through and summarise what I've achieved and the major events of that period. It's nice, as it reminds me I'm not just pissing away my life and that I am slowly building myself up.
I used to write in journals daily for a couple of years but then binned the lot after re reading years later.
Like most people that grow up and realise that they were a clueless naive stupid fucker, I didn't want writings to remind me that I was a clueless naive stupid fucker.
I kept a diary of all my nightly dreams for six months when I was 17. Sadly long since left at the parental house and chucked out. You had to write the dream down fast before it disappears or was forgotten and I remember doing that straight away every morning. It was an interesting discipline to try.
>>6520 That sounds exactly like my current notebook. There's more shopping lists and WiFi passwords in it than there are memories, so perhaps I'll carry on using it as such. Summarising books you've read sounds tedious to me, but perhaps I should try to reflect on what I read more; I eat my way through fiction and treat books as more of an escape than any way to challenge myself though, so perhaps it's not really translatable.
>>6522 I'm writing them in the knowledge that I'll grow up and find myself naive and pretentious. I'm alright with it, though it is rather cringe-inducing to read how I wrote even 5 years ago. But that's life, mate.
