We constantly forget that teenagers are not just demons from hell, but they are living in it. Just like every teenager at that age, I did hate my life. It was tough being an atheist feminist boy at an all boys high school in Iran with undiagnosed ADHD without any athletics or social skills.

The first year of middle school our Literature teacher encouraged us to write longer form stories. And I started doing that. The whole of that year, I presented my continued stories to class.

They were written in first person. In those stories I had two brothers. And for whatever reason we escaped home and went on adventures. Very cheesy stuff. But notebook after notebook I filled with my stories. I draw poor illustrations of objects. And I spend more time on those stories than on my school works. They became my refuge, my escape. For a few years that was my safe place.

Because of that, I sometimes thought I would become a writer, which of course, did not happen.

During most of my 20s I used to read a lot. A lot of philosophy, environmental sciences, art, architecture, and design. And later a lot of books related to cognitive sciences, psychology, neuroscience, and biology. A lot of them straight up textbooks or original publications. Some years up to a hundred books per year!

During all of these times I used to take a huge amount of notes and journals. I had a lot of information and I needed to organize them, go through them, relate them, and come up with ideas and questions.

I merged a lot of systems like Zettelkasten, PARA, and bullet journals. Along with reference management systems. And different forms of indexes.

These days, I don’t.

And for the longest time I thought it was because I could not enjoy my writing experience. Note apps all suck in one way or another.1

I spend tens of hours and a lot of money trying different apps and services. And the “sucking”, still stands.

But now I think it’s not the apps. It not the writing experience that is preventing me to write and take notes like I used to. The culprit is my changed life.

I don’t read as much.2 My informational input is not as much. I’m mostly learning skills. Team work, software architecture and designing software. Some guitar here. And a lot of adult stuff like taxes and insurances and learning German. Stuff that usually doesn’t come with a lot of note-taking3.

I guess these days, I don’t need as much note-taking as I used to. I just need a minimally good writing experience with low-ish friction for sending stuff here. Perhaps a first draft in the Ulysses app on the iOS, committing it and then doing the final work in Linux is fine.

Well, let’s just see.

  1. I don’t like to write by hand. I have a hard time writing in a legible format.↩︎

  2. Well, I do. But they are not stuff that I like to take notes of. Reading a blog post about the way you can deploy Kubernetes cluster locally on a Raspberry Pie 5 is hardly something that I really want to take notes on.↩︎

  3. Of course, document keeping is a bitch. But that is usually a lot of photos and pictures and not a lot of writing.↩︎