The Problem with My Journal

A few yesterdays ago, I started to keep a journal. I have done that many times before. The difference is this attempt, which appears likely to continue, relies on a computer program. Called Day One, it is recommended in all the reviews. I cannot complain about it, with its prompts at specified intervals to me to jot down — or, rather, to type on the facsimile of a keyboard displayed by a tiny screen — what is on my mind.

Yet I am skeptical about my own enthusiasm. I do not wish to become a life logger. That practice, much maligned, involves wearing devices to document every moment: who did I meet and what was my mood before and after the encounter? It is related to the quantified self movement, which encourages analysis of those details, from the food that is ingested to everything that is egested and the hiccups and belches in between. The idea is to capture it all. Fitness trackers are the lite version. I admire Gordon Bell, the patient zero of lifelogging. You have to respect somebody willing to dedicate themselves to a project with such extremism. I just don’t want to be him. Most of us do not have the discipline.

I confess that I am a half-hearted member of the cult of self-improvement. I am glad I took up running, but I try not to be obsessive about uploading every stroll on social media. The meme has become passe, “if it’s not on Strava, then it didn’t happen,” referring to the leading platform for sharing the statistics about exercise. I once told a colleague that I attended the opera, which I do not like all that much, in order to be a cultured person. My motivation is not quite as instrumental as that, though the determination to better myself is genuine.

The reason I wonder about all the fuss is not the risk of narcissism or obsessive-compulsive planning disorder. It is the confusion of the photograph with the experience. The point of running, or attending the opera, is to be there. We already are too attached to our gadgets, and my wife implores me to “be here now,” as they used to suggest when society believed in consciousness raising. My journal habit promotes the opposite of that mantra of mindfulness. My life has been reduced to my “feed.”

People who know me do not mistake me for a spiritual individual. Even I, as committed as I am to scientific method, doubt that the digital can substitute for the physical. It can be a representation, even a convincing simulation, like a “smell” generated by a neurological disorder. It is nonetheless a dystopia, where we cannot distinguish between the illusion and the real. The risk is we will not care. We will be satisfied to sit in Plato’s Cave, watching the flickering shadows on the wall for the duration.

The transaction costs of keeping a digital journal are quite low, perhaps too much so. It intrinsically favors numbers (GPS coordinates for my location) over words (a paragraph about what the vista evoked). There are apps that automatically add entries. I installed one that downloads the weather each morning. Beyond that, there is a vast network of virtual self-reference that you can plug into. Other options take posts on Facebook, for example, and replicate them inside Day One. (It works in the other direction of course: you can export your scribblings for your “friends” to read.)

But the endless recording produces nothing more than a recording. Even if it is a perfect reproduction, it lacks any reflection. It is all outer life, not inner life. The journals of Pepys or Emerson or memoirs such as Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek are compelling to us, because they show us what is beneath the surface. As a law professor, I see analogies. The student who takes class notes, earnestly and furiously, typing up every remark is the student who is likely to lack comprehension. She is training herself to be a stenographer. Anyone who has read transcripts, who also was present for the trial, is aware of how limited they are, with literal accuracy that distorts events. The 1992 courtroom comedy movie My Cousin Vinny demonstrates this omission of nuance with an apparent confession that resulted from the failure to hear the nuance of “?”

The omnipresence of my smartphone, and the addictive allure of filling in every blank time slot on the calendar page, causes me, and countless others, to compromise our integrity. That is what it is, when we give up our privacy. We turn ourselves over to the cloud. It is as if we are volunteering for surveillance. We yearn to belong to a community. We do so by offering snapshots of our meals to people who are strangers but for acceptance of an invitation to “connect.” Diaries are not secret anymore. They are our advertisements for our fifteen minutes of fame. There should be no shame in the solitude of our thoughts. We can keep to ourselves.

My data is as useful to others as it is to me. (The Day One folks make ample assurances in this regard.) I exchange my information for convenience: I will tell you what detergent I prefer, if you ship it just on time; from the brand of soap and a smattering of seemingly random data points, you infer my political affiliation. Corporations can buy the bits, aggregated and anonymized as well as with all the “cookies” that identify me, and, by piecing it together into a caricature of my persona as a consumer, in turn try to sell me what they have figured out I want, before I am aware of my desire. That was the dream of the late Steve Jobs. His genius was to make such prescience seem other than sinister. I am not sure I myself can benefit especially from the accounting of the mechanics of my life, unless I expend altogether too much time reviewing it. I am reminded of a joke by deadpan comedian Steven Wright, who said he had an actual map of the United States, full-size, scale 1:1. He doesn’t unfold it very often.

Perhaps I should buy pen and paper. I am told handwriting is making a comeback.

This essay originally appeared at HuffPo.