(read I am the Open Source Woman and Writers block for full context for this one)

(not quite LessWrong quality maybe but I thought it was interesting enough of an experiment to post regardless)

Introduction

I wrote down every single thought I had for 2 days straight. I had no good reason for doing this except seeing what would happen.

The first day was among my most productive in years, I couldn’t wait for tomorrow.

I was never surprised by what popped up (memories, cacophonies of contradictions, rat races) but I was quite surprised how embarrassed I felt sharing it all.

And after a while, after about 5 hours of writing down every single thought I had, I felt viscerally, deeply unhappy in a way I’ve never really felt before.

No thoughts were firing, I had dealt with them all, it was all very quiet. Not in a nice, meditative way. I had looped over all the thoughts but my inline code block was empty. I had done nothing with them.

This is all to say, the second day was really bad.

Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself.

Here’s 5 excellent reasons why I will never do it again:

1. That’s not how thoughts work

You don’t actually think in language. At least I don’t. I think in some fucked up void filled with memories, abstractions, connections and imagery with language as the glue to try to connect it all.

You can’t distill this down into language, it’s way too lossy. But you can try and then be frustrated.

2. Sometimes I think really bad things

Sometimes random slurs appear in my internal monologue. or an automatic thought goes off that makes me want to lick a 50 year old mans bald head.

Sometimes my brain autoplays “of course, that’s because hollywood is ran by the jews“. I don’t believe and have never believed in any form of jewish conspiracy. I think I was simply exposed to it too much during childhood. My brain fires it non-consensually at randomly at times. I can’t help myself, it’s in my training data. Pancakes taste way better when made with frozen butter, Wait!

I randomly think about killing myself. I am not suicidal or anything. It’s also not ideation. It’s just some fucked up leftover from 2019 or something.

There were points where I randomly felt like crying.

I don’t want to give some of these thoughts the spotlight of the page.

Maybe you think you aren’t like that, after all, you’re you. I would say I recommend you to try it out and see for yourself. But I don’t recommend that, I don’t recommend that at all. I just think you would be surprised.

It makes me understand that Kanye song a little more.

I think this is the part where I’m supposed to say somethin’ good to compensate it so it doesn’t come off bad
But sometimes I think really bad things
Really, really, really bad things
And I love myself way more than I love you
See, if I was tryin’ to relate it to more people
I’d probably say I’m struggling with loving myself
Because that seems like a common theme
But that’s not the case here
I love myself way more than I love you
And I think about killing myself
So, best believe, I thought about killing you today
Premeditated murder

Kanye—I Thought About Killing You

3. Incompatible with society

Even if you were fine with sharing everything, if you end up sharing certain thoughts it’s very likely you would alienate those around you quite quickly.

It’s necessary for social cohesion that the stranger you’re talking to doesn’t know that you kind of would like to have sex with them. Or the way you feel about literally everyone around you.

4. You will go insane

I self-censored a lot. I couldn’t help myself. I tried pushing against this impulse to self censor.

Mindfulness? The meditation technique where you let thoughts pass, and you acknowledge that you aren’t your thoughts in an attempt to obtain metacognitive awareness or nirvana or whatever? Well, when you write down every single thought you have you can’t do that. You’re forced to be the antithesis of mindful. Mindless if you will.2

You literally cannot chew your thought, because chewing your thought requires thinking, but you have to write those thoughts down as well! A recursive rabbit hole to hell. You’re like a helpless teacher that didn’t turn off YouTube autoplay, except it’s your thoughts. All you can do is watch.

You didn’t evolve for YouTube or TikTok, but trust me, you really didn’t evolve to post every single thought to the internet.

5. It slows you down

You’re spending a lot of time being unproductive. Most thought down writing falls squarely in to the camp of “my ass itches but I wiped properly?“ and not in the camp of …. I went to go look for a very productive thought that I was glad to have written down and I can’t find any…

Writing thoughts down interrupts your chain of thought, most thoughts are fickle and ephemeral. By adding the cognitive load of writing one down it’s exceedingly likely the “where I was going with this“ will slip through your fingers and fall into the void.

A friend pointed out how this is the antithesis of this advice video by Sakurai. It really is. He talks about inflating balloons of ideas first before you go and share them with others. I think he’s probably on to something. I recommend watching the video. If you have, writing down every single thought you have is like making a hole in the balloon before it even has the chance to inflate.

Concluding

So this is how it ends friends. Open source no more. I lasted 2 whole days, and I am very tired indeed.

I will continue the method of “writing down thoughts not related to the task at hand when I want to be productive”, because I think it’s a technique that continues to help me greatly, but writing down every single thought is simply too much.

I’m still obsessed with documenting myself and will probably continue, in private.

Like smartphone designers in the 2000s trying fucked up designs only to all converge on the same boring rectangular slab, I may just make a dating doc or a website or something…

The truth will set you free. But first it will piss you off. The main lesson I learned is simple: “I should journal more“.3

not really it’s something different basically

Maybe my next calling is meditating for some crazy amount of time

and maybe go back to therapy

Five very good reasons to not write down literally every single thought you have