My digital garden #1
Project name: My digital garden
Fun name: El cachivache
Time period: now - foreseeable future
This blog! Could be considered a project, in some way. What's up with it? The idea of having a project lands on the idea that I'm making this for a purpose. And, that's obvious, yeah, I do it for the heck of it and for write. Also I want to be ultra famous by some random post that gets into hacker news and then gets a hundred youtube commentators talking about it.
Only joking, of course. It's true though, I have delusions of greatness. Above all, I have enough self-awareness to know that it's is wrong to want that, if anything for a lack of creativity and the derivative nature of my particular choice of delusions.
Being serious. There is a shadow, an animal if you like the animal and the angel metaphor, that will mess up everything good I do, if given the opportunity. There are no pure intentions pure enough to be saved from it.
I made this because I saw federated wikis and Zettelkasten made by other people, and I was just stunned. I found it to be truly breathtaking. The structure, the complexity that arises from simple enough rules, the elegance of it. I found it to be beautiful in it's nature, and I wanted to do one of my own. This is the truth. It was not pure enough to be saved.
While I agree that there are many personal issues at play, perfectionism, social media and the consequences of it, give or take. This is about introducing a limiting factor so I don't go off rails. And after some deliberation, I thought that maybe having a facet of this iteration of a digital garden to be public will help with that. This is not my first attempt at making a digital garden, but this is my first public attempt (and also first attempt at having a digital presence, if only in a corner). I have taken notes from my previous tries.
In the background, there are personal notes. My own mind, naked for only me to see. If there are interesting things there, they are properly arranged and they go here.
I think this helps because having it be public helps with accountability. It also allows this to be of some help to anyone that may find it useful or at least entertaining. More than that, I now have a corner of the internet of my own! That's amazing!
It also helps me this time that I'm limiting this space of the internet. It's not an account on facebook or even medium. It's an blog. A text blog. It has less public and reach. If I mess up and write an embarrassing piece, it will be limited in it's reach and impact by the medium. It wasn't a big deal before, it's even less now - somehow I need to take care of that part of me after all, it's annoying but it's just trying to help.
Not to discredit bearblog though, it is just what I needed, and I'm both very surprised and grateful that this - bearblog, the community, the discovery index - exists in the first place.
Sometime ago I read about the present tense ruining lifes in a blog post on lesswrong. It essentially says that there is a world difference to doing something and wanting to have done something.
Currently, I couldn't say if I want to have and take care of a digital garden, or if I want to have made a digital garden (and for it to stay in that way). It makes no sense put that way. One does not have a physical garden done, one does a garden everyday. And I want to try that too.
I am doing this daily - give or take, and I want to do it until it is clear whether I like having a digital garden, or I liked the idea of having a digital garden. Proof of action. I also want to note and observe any meaningful change or impact this may have. I would also love to meet interesting people, and putting myself out there makes that easier (hi!). I also want to improve my writing. And I also truly like the idea of having a special corner in the internet and to make it pretty.
And most importantly, I truly am amazed of elegant note taking. Not by it's possible side effects and benefits it may have - I'm also looking up to that, but there is just, something. Something about systems, and about good systems, that just amaze me. I love the idea of documenting the mind, and making something beautiful out of it.
It only makes me excited to think about.