I write a journal and recently i have been organizing my photo archive with embedded captions, tags, gps, etc…

I dont think anyone will ever care to read this stuff. Maybe some llm in the future will be able to digest all of this so a curious descendant might be able to ask questions to it like what did Terminal do for work or some such thing.

It is presumptuous to assume that my life is important enough to need documentation.

I’ve been trying to find a good way to do so, but I’m still not there. I usually struggle with the fact that my memory is completely horrible, and I often worry about living without even noticing what has been going on with my life.

I’m currently trying to stick to a daily entry on obsidian, but it does not seem to be working yet 😢

A follow-up question on this topic, how often do you guys go back and check out these memories? Because I seemed to have developed an habit of clicking videos and photos but never checking them and when I check them after a long while, I literally have 0 memory of that scene.

I think It’s one thing to have these memories stored somewhere digitally and one thing to have them registered in our heads. It’s an odd feeling when you look a old video and feel “did I really do that?” Does anybody else relate to this?

I mostly don’t. Maybe this isn’t the kind of answer you were interested in. I think memorable experiences are transient and are more beautiful the more fleeting they are. The more I try to immortalize some moment, the less I feel I’m able to enjoy it in the moment. There are some exceptions. I keep recipes in Google keep. Most of them I just know how to make but I might need my memory jogged for a measurement or temp setting. I also have a small notebook I use as a gym journal. “Journalling” seems like a stretch for the chicken-scratch numbers, though. It’s mostly so I know how much weight to use next time I go.

I take pictures of the architecture around me.

The mundane stuff that no one bothers to document and won’t make it into historical architecture books.

I have over a hundred gigabytes of liminal space photos I’m debating whether I should share on Lemmy or not.

I have a personal MediaWiki installation on my computer (same software as Wikipedia). Been running it since 2022. Most recent offsite backup is from the start of December. I also have a very Wikipedia-like writing style as a result, too.

Any of my descendants, if they will ever exist, will probably have a great time going through great-grandpa’s writings 🙂

Hell, this month I made it into a Kiwix Zim file that I can read when away, but of course that doesn’t support writing to it, so I sometimes write in a physical logbook when I’m away from my computer

I’ll take pics sometimes. 🤷

Mainly my shitty memory. I have photos of events like family meetings, birthdays, holidays on my phones SD card. I manually save things like contacts, not-so-important notes to my SD card. Copy my stuff to my PC every now and then (2 mo. usually). My important notes are on paper written with a several-thousand-year-old script.

I use a digital journal (Logseq) backed by write-only git repositories, syncthing and the 3-2-1 backup rule. This contains info about my days, struggles, friends and family and regular introspection.

Photos and videos usually get carried over from one phone to the other, synced with my home server, also 3-2-1 backup rule, and every 3y I’ll archive stuff to free up space.

Interesting knowledge usually gets shared by me via https://wiki.tilde.fun/. I often link it to friends and colleagues when they ask me to explain stuff. Sometimes I also copy articles I write for corporate knowledge bases after work into my wiki in a more sophisticated form. I tend to not cater to 5-year-olds in my personal wiki, but it’s inevitable in a corpo setting where you have people with no experience at all.

How do you do it?