It all starts with a blank, cold, empty, lonely page in a vault with no inhabitants. There is endless possibility, and there is optimism in the void. Every second brain starts with 0 bits in memory and no note to organise. The graph is just empty space. Nowhere to go, nowhere to look. But the art of creation requires little direction. A blank canvas is the easiest place to begin. There is no need to overthink your ideas, and no pressure to worry about misplacing thoughts.

The spark

All journalling starts with a desire to plan ahead and track the past. The moment I begin taking notes feels peaceful, but that peace quickly turns overwhelming as the days go on. This slow on-off cycle ends only when I return and begin a new train of daily notes.

There is always a spark before the habit. Sometimes it is guilt. Sometimes ambition. Sometimes just boredom on a quiet evening. Something in the mind decides that today deserves to be remembered. A thought feels too valuable to trust to memory alone. Journalling begins with optimism. This quiet belief that future-you will care about what present-you has to say. That these scattered fragments of today will someday become useful evidence. Proof that you existed in this exact state. Proof that your mind once moved like this.

At first it feels small. A sentence. A checklist. A complaint. A strange observation at 2am. Then slowly it becomes ritual. A private conversation with no audience and no need for performance. Just you trying to explain yourself to yourself. That is the spark. Not productivity. Not organisation. Just the deeply human fear that a meaningful thought might disappear forever if it is not written down.

Conversion

The physical book is an unconnected mess. The context for the future and the links to the past are easy to miss. References from the past quickly become a frantic search through pages. Photos need to be printed. Audio and video cannot be saved. Storing documents becomes heavy. Storage itself is prone to bugs, termites included.

All of this can be solved by a digital alternative. Most people divide into two camps. One tribe prays to the Notion gods not to read their deepest, darkest rants. The Obsidian clan prays that sync went through, and that there is no conflict between their phone and their computer. The difference between these two warring nations is a balance between privacy paranoia and the laziness to understand system design. The offline-first, extensible Obsidian life worries less about leaking secrets and more about you messing things up yourself. The polished Notion life is about storing everything in the cloud and hoping it never vanishes, or that the internet survives long enough for you to read an old camping checklist.

I have tried both, and I have chosen to be baptised into the Obsidian cult. This do-it-yourself style of journalling suits me best. The plugin market is abundant, and the bash + markdown combination is unbeatable when I decide to reshape old notes because I have grown bored with how they look. The Obsidian ecosystem works well with both Git and Syncthing.

Beautiful overcomplexity

Because of this life decision, there is a reason to set up a system to sync the files. The system varies for each person. Some build a simple pipeline with one sender and one receiver. The Abrahamic server. One supreme source of truth. One machine writes, another machine obeys. Others choose chaos. Every device sends, every device receives, and all of them negotiate silently in the background, hoping no two edits collide at the same time. The pagan pantheon. Where the conflict of devices is not a problem but an inherent feature.

Some surrender to the cloud completely. They let distant servers of GitHub and GitLab solve problems they do not wish to think about. Others refuse this arrangement entirely and build local-first fortresses of redundancy. Multiple backups. External drives. Git histories stretching back months. A Syncthing mesh spanning laptops, phones, and forgotten tablets. A few steps shy of setting up a TrueNAS server with multiple disks in a web of network cables and hundreds of daemons inside.

This is where journalling quietly stops being about writing and starts becoming systems design. You begin with a note-taking app and somehow end up reading about distributed systems at midnight. Conflict resolution becomes personal philosophy. Backup strategy becomes a personality trait.

And strangely, this overcomplexity is what the members of this nation yearn for. The notes are yours, but so is the machine built to protect them. The vault becomes more than a folder. It becomes infrastructure. Slightly absurd, mildly fragile, deeply satisfying.

But infrastructure is never enough. The machine must also look right. CSS themes are added. The window layout is designed to be the most optimal layout with a calendar on one side and the graph on the other.

My System

My own system lives somewhere between recklessness and paranoia. Syncthing runs on a phone, a laptop, and a tablet. All three have read and write permissions. No master. No slave. Pure democracy. Every device believes it has equal authority, and somehow peace is maintained.

The vault is just:

• Daily notes for surviving the present.

• Notes for pretending thoughts are permanent.

• Yappery for everything too unstructured to deserve a better name.

• Academic stuff for deadlines and guilt.

• Web clippings for links I swear I will revisit.

• Templates for the illusion of consistency.

The interface is designed as:

• The file tree stays on the left, usually collapsed, like a cupboard I only open when absolutely necessary.

• The calendar and graph sit on the right, quietly judging my consistency and reminding me of all the days I forgot to write.

The plugin list is deliberately short. Calendar, because time exists. Syncthing integration, because the rarest of the conflicts need to be handled. Excalidraw, because sometimes thought refuses to become text and demands to be drawn instead.

This is not an elegant system. It is not even particularly clever. But it works. And in personal infrastructure, that is as close to perfection as one can reasonably expect.

The trap and its escape

After fixing the pipeline the real issue of journalling begins. How should you write things down? This is not a question of your language but of structure. How should you organise your files and how should you write things in those files? Templates are sought for. And evenings are spent watching guides for the most optimal setup. Plugins are installed and the build is now heavier.

Soon the fiddling begins. Little time is spent on writing the note and the structure is focused. Journalling now feels like a chore and you’re Sisyphus, customising your setup every day just to change it more than you create new notes.

The optimisation spiral is subtle because it feels productive. You tell yourself that a better system will create better thoughts. That cleaner folders will create cleaner writing. That one more plugin, one better template, one slightly improved workflow will finally unlock consistency. But the perfect note is a trap. It asks for polish before thought. It demands formatting before honesty.

Soon the note is no longer the point. The note-taking becomes the hobby. The journalling app becomes a construction site that never opens to the public. Walls are painted. Furniture is moved. The foundations are rebuilt. But nobody lives in the house. Missing one day feels harmless. Missing a week feels normal. The vault that once felt alive slowly turns into a museum. Half-finished daily notes. Empty templates waiting to be filled. Folder structures that made perfect sense three months ago and now look like archaeological ruins.

Carefully engineered, beautifully themed, completely unused.

The escape is embarrassingly simple. Notes are means, not ends. They exist to serve thought, not to replace it. The vault is supposed to support your life, not become your life. Life must happen before documentation. Something worth writing has to happen before something can be written. Thought comes before system. Always. The system can only organise what already exists. It cannot create meaning by itself. A bad note written today is infinitely more valuable than the perfect template prepared for tomorrow. At some point you stop trying to build the ideal machine for thinking. You accept the messy note. The unfinished sentence. The badly linked page. And strangely, that is when the journalling starts working again.

A note on optimism

Optimism is the real reason journalling survives. Every new note is a quiet act of belief in tomorrow. It assumes there will be a future version of you who will return, read, reflect, and continue the thread. It is a small promise made repeatedly to a person you have not yet become.

There is faith hidden in maintenance. Updating links. Renaming folders. Fixing broken embeds. None of it is urgent, yet all of it assumes the vault is worth preserving. You do not maintain things you plan to abandon. Maintenance is belief made visible. A note written in confusion today can become clarity years later. A sentence typed in frustration can become evidence of growth. The graph slowly expands, not as proof of productivity, but as proof of persistence.

A growing archive of ordinary days. A collection of unfinished thoughts trusted to survive longer than memory. A quiet machine that keeps accepting your notes without judgement, always ready for the next one.

But at some point this stops being about software at all.

A philosophy of maintenance

The folders, the plugins, the sync pipeline, the graph. These are only the visible parts of something much older. This is philosophy disguised as infrastructure.

The Stoics would have understood this instinct. Marcus Aurelius wrote daily reflections not because the page itself mattered, but because the practice mattered. He did not write Meditations for publication. He wrote to reorder his own mind. To remind himself how to live. A daily note is not very different. It is less literature and more ritual. Less archive and more exercise. Open the vault. Write the note. Close the vault. Repeat. Over time this stops being productivity and becomes a habit of attention, a way of noticing your own life closely enough to preserve it.

Camus wrote about the absurd condition of building meaning in a world that guarantees none. Journalling feels strangely similar. You write notes knowing many will never be read again. You maintain links knowing some will break. You organise thoughts knowing memory itself will eventually fail. You create backups knowing that even your hardware will decay. And yet you do it anyway.

That persistence is not efficiency. It is defiance. Every new note is a small rebellion against forgetting. Every repaired link is a refusal to let the past disappear. Every daily note is a wager that tomorrow deserves preparation. This is maintenance not as labour, but as hope.

Even the system design itself carries a philosophy. Backups are an admission of fragility. Tags are an admission that thought resists hierarchy. Folders are an attempt to impose order on experience. Graph view is an aesthetic claim that relationships matter more than categories. Every design decision quietly answers a philosophical question: what deserves to be remembered, and how?

The vault is not just a tool for memory. It is an argument about how to live. That your thoughts are worth preserving. That your days are worth recording. That your future self is worth helping. That ordinary life deserves archival dignity.

And perhaps that is the final purpose of all this beautiful overcomplexity. Not better notes. Not cleaner systems. Just a quieter way of saying: I expect to be here tomorrow.

Kurt Cobain is an obvious example. Nirvana reached a level of cultural dominance that few artists ever experience. The dream, at least externally, was realised. Yet the recognition did not resolve his internal conflict. Fame intensified his discomfort with identity, expectation, and authenticity. The success did not align with the self that had formed in pursuit of it.

Many people have described a sense of void after their success. This emptiness leads to a misery of the soul. All your life was focused on one dream, but reaching it made you feel hollow.

There is a sort of comfort in working towards something. Aiming and working towards a goal seems more romantic to the mind than mundane reality. We see the archetype often in the media. There is always a story to tell about a young man working hard for his dream, and the most we see of his success is the answer to why he started the journey. “Why he did it?” takes precedence over “What does he do next?”

Although not common, this reality is explored exclusively with a melancholic tone. A sense of sadness and regret takes over the glitter of a new-found life. This is not lazy writing or an attempt to claim moral high ground. It mirrors reality. We have seen people going all in for their “one true purpose”, but life does not stop when the goal is reached. Life goes on.

This reality strikes hard. No amount of “What’s next?” can prepare a person for the aftermath. There has to be a way to explore this emptiness without becoming trapped in the romanticised struggle or the hollow glamour of success without substance.

Every person who has reached their “one true purpose” has ultimately tried to distance themselves from the process. The decisions they made and the sacrifices they endured stand clearer in their mind than the success they now live in. Their new life is simply another ordinary day. The choices made, and the choices left behind feel like an entire life they now have to reconcile with.

A new life they must strive for. A missed portion of existence they somehow have to reclaim. The life they gained now feels bland, absorbed into routine.

The old life feels more comforting. The mind wants to revise the chosen path, even if it comes at the cost of the present.

A person changes when life changes them. The self that once chased the dream is not the same self that eventually attains it. In the process of striving, enduring, sacrificing and adapting, something fundamental shifts. By the time the goal is reached, the pursuit has already reshaped the dreamer. The reality they step into is new, but so are they.

The difficulty lies here: the dream was built by a former version of the self. When it is finally realised, the current self no longer relates to it with the same intensity. The obsession fades, not because the dream was false, but because the person who once needed it has evolved. What once felt urgent now feels ordinary.

Cobain’s struggle reflects this divide. The person who wrote songs in obscurity was not the same person placed under relentless visibility. The industry rewarded him, but the reward required inhabiting a version of himself that felt increasingly distant. The dream had evolved. So had he.

Change is most visible when life appears still. Only in the quiet after achievement does one recognise how much has been altered. Yet change feels comfortable only when it requires no further sacrifice, when it does not threaten what has already been secured. At the top, however, stability and growth often stand in opposition. To preserve what has been gained may mean stagnation. To continue evolving may mean letting go again.

This tension is the true dilemma of reaching the top.

Everyone who reaches the top has let go of something intimate, something personal. Some things cannot be reclaimed with the fruits of struggle. The mind downplays its own hardship in search of an imagined life where no sacrifices were required. The problem feels poetic and beautiful in abstraction, but in flesh and bone it is not.

It is awful.
It is awful to yourself.
It is awful to those around you.
It is awful to every decision that built the success you now inhabit.

There is no easy escape from this reality. The decisions you make are what you will live with and what you will judge yourself by. Results are abstract. Decisions are real. You can justify or resent your decisions, but you cannot do the same with outcomes, because outcomes are interpretations layered over action.

Once a person recognises this inherent dilemma, dreams begin to look shallower, less grand. But dreams are not pursued for their grandeur. They are pursued for the everyday movement towards them. The process matters more than the proclamation. Saying you won a billion-dollar lottery means nothing compared to earning a million through building something of your own. We realise that the process is more important to us than the result.

And yet, this is not an argument to abandon dreaming. It is an argument to dream differently.

Dreams are not destinations. They are instruments.

They give direction to otherwise drifting time. Dreams shape discipline, character, resilience, and identity long before they yield outcomes. A fulfilled dream dissolves into normality, but the person built in pursuit of it remains.

To abandon dreaming because of the emptiness that follows achievement is to misinterpret the function of a dream. A dream is not a vessel designed to hold your fulfilment. It is not a final answer to the question of who you are. It is a direction. It becomes a force that compels movement. Its value does not lie in its ability to complete you, but in its capacity to draw you forward into effort, uncertainty, and growth.

No external accomplishment has the structural integrity to sustain a human life indefinitely. Completion is momentary. Satisfaction stabilises and then dissolves into normality. What endures is not the applause, nor the title, nor the milestone. What endures is the reshaped character formed in pursuit of it. The identity formed by the journey remains.

The summit is finite. The climb is formative.

To pursue a dream purely for the outcome is to reduce it to a transaction: sacrifice in exchange for reward. But striving is not transactional. It is developmental. In working towards something demanding, you construct capacities that remain long after the initial objective loses its shine. You become more capable of enduring difficulty, of committing to long horizons, of tolerating ambiguity. These are not by-products. They are the true returns.

Success does not guarantee meaning. Meaning emerges from sustained engagement. From effort chosen repeatedly. From progress that is earned rather than granted. A lottery win may alter circumstances overnight, but it does not alter the architecture of the self. Building something slowly does.

Outcomes will eventually integrate into routine. What once felt extraordinary becomes part of the everyday. This is not a failure of the dream. It is the nature of adaptation. The human mind normalises achievement. But the process of striving imprints itself more deeply. It becomes part of your habits, your standards, your expectations of yourself.

The dream was never meant to be a permanent source of fulfilment. It was meant to be a catalyst.

So pursue your dreams with clarity. Not because they will finalise your identity, but because they will refine it. Not because arrival will secure lasting satisfaction, but because movement will prevent stagnation. The outcome may fade into memory. The person shaped in pursuit will remain.

Cobain’s story is often framed purely as tragedy. It is also a stark reminder that achievement does not stabilise identity. External validation cannot reconcile internal fragmentation. Success can magnify unresolved tension rather than resolve it.

Dreams are remembered more vividly than they are lived. What endures is not the moment of arrival, but the reshaping that occurred on the way there.

Technologies do not win because they are pure, correct, or morally superior. They win because they solve a problem well enough for long enough. Everything else is commentary written by the losers.

Tech feels political. Sometimes theological. That is not accidental. Wherever humans build systems that outlast individuals, belief creeps in. Rules harden. Camps form. Loyalty replaces judgement. Practicality becomes heresy.

This is not a bug. It is the default state of human systems.

The Birth of Ideological Tech

When tools become beliefs

Early tech cultures are pragmatic by necessity. Nothing works. Everything is fragile. Learning is constant. The only metric that matters is survival.

Then a system starts working.

At that moment, ideology is born.

The moment a tool proves itself useful, people stop questioning why it works and start defending that it works. The tool stops being a means and becomes an identity. Criticism becomes betrayal. Alternatives become threats.

This is where tech starts to resemble religion.

• Cross-camp interaction becomes contamination

• Loyalty outweighs outcomes

• Alignment matters more than results

• Failure stops being educational and becomes moral

Learning slows. Dogma accelerates.

The Tech Compass

Pragmatism versus purity

Every technical ecosystem eventually discovers a compass it refuses to admit exists.

On one axis: idealism versus pragmatism.
On the other: outcomes versus alignment.

No one admits where they stand. Everyone claims to be “practical”. Few actually are.

Pragmatism is not centrism. It is not indecision. It is not fence-sitting. It is the uncomfortable act of choosing what survives over what feels correct.

Hardened Beliefs

How systems stop learning

Once ideology sets in, certain beliefs calcify:

• Learning stops because answers are already known

• Alignment becomes more important than outcomes

• “Fail fast” quietly exits the building

• Anything impure loses the right to exist

At this stage, systems do not compete on usefulness anymore. They compete on moral posture. The strongest argument wins, not the strongest solution.

This is how tools die while feeling virtuous about it.

Linux and the Original Sin of Pragmatism

When usefulness beat ideology

Linux made a choice that many still resent.

It allowed corporations in. It accepted proprietary firmware. (mostly) It tolerated ugly drivers. It chose working systems over ideological cleanliness.

This was not a philosophical victory. It was a survival decision.

The result is not subtle.

• Linux runs servers

• Linux runs Android

• Linux runs infrastructure

• Linux survived

Purity was compromised. Reach exploded.

The war was not won in mailing lists. It was won in data centres.

The GNU Cult

Technically right, strategically irrelevant

GNU represents the opposite extreme.

Foundational. Rigid. Ethically consistent. Ideologically tight.

Its tools are excellent. Its reach is limited.

• Ethics are bound directly to tooling

• Rules are strict and non-negotiable

• Purity is enforced over adoption

• Strategy is sacrificed for correctness

This is not a technical failure. It is a strategic one.

Being right does not matter if no one is listening.

Modern Tech Theology

Arguments without context

Current debates repeat the same pattern with new vocabulary.

• AI should be open or closed

• Cloud versus local

• JavaScript everywhere or nowhere

• Capability is assumed, not discussed

• Context is optional

Positions harden instantly. Nuance is seen as weakness. Trade-offs are ignored. The question “what actually works here?” is replaced with “what camp are you in?”

Belief precedes evidence.

The Pragmatic Approach

Quiet, effective, mildly heretical

Pragmatism does not announce itself. It does not argue on the internet. It does not win moral victories.

It does the following instead:

• Mixes tools shamelessly

• Breaks dogma without apology

• Optimises for real constraints

• Revisits beliefs periodically

• Chooses survival over symbolism

Pragmatism is boring. That is its greatest strength.

Pragmatism in Action

Outcome beats method

A pragmatic system is not neutral or indecisive. It makes hard choices quickly and lives with them honestly.

• Outcome matters more than method

• Trade-offs are acknowledged, not hidden

• Decisions are revisited when constraints change

• Ideology serves systems, not the other way around

There is no claim of moral purity here. Only responsibility.

The Lifecycle of a Tech Ideology

Stages

1. Birth: A tool solves a real problem under pressure

2. Success: Adoption grows, identity forms

3. Hardening: Rules replace reasoning

4. Decline: Reality changes, ideology does not

Most ideologies die in stage four. Not because they are wrong, but because they refuse to adapt.

Survival Through Utility

The systems that survive are not the most elegant or ethical. They are the ones that remain useful.

This is uncomfortable. It feels unfair. It is also true.

Conclusion

Technology does not reward righteousness. It rewards adaptability.

The systems that last are not those that shout the loudest about principles, but those that quietly solve problems while everyone else is arguing.

Instead of asking: “Is this the right way to build software?”

Ask: “Does this survive contact with reality?”

Pragmatism is not cowardice. It is respect for constraints.

It is not ideological emptiness. It is disciplined honesty.

It is not compromise for its own sake. It is choosing what works and living with the cost.

Technology does not need belief.

It needs systems that survive.

Everything else is just theology with better keyboards.

This post is also available on my website.