The digital garden cannot capture a shadow of you, and neither does it counts as getting things out of your system (what cannot be captured)
I constantly feel like I'm going insane of the constant stream of... things in my head. They are not good or bad, just like, things in there. Ideally I wish I could really just lie down and sleep the whole day without stress. I can't. There is always something in my head. A restless bug that makes me turn around in the bed and steals my sleep. Why do I have to think and have ideas?
For me the act of creation is a way to free myself of that. Once it exists. Once is out, I can finally lie down and sleep. For a while. Solving problems means creating new problems and then the torment starts all over again.
I'm tormented because I noted something in my digital garden system. It seems like I'm taking the meaning of building a "second brain" too literally. A mirror or shadow of my own brain and all it holds. Why make any of this? A digital garden, a productivity system, a zettelkasten, any of those things that promise to give structure to the world inside.
I was misaligned. Deep down, without realizing, I wished to capture something inside that cannot be captured. What if you could really really know someone through their digital garden? What if I could capture my own humanity and life inside?
I read Funes the memorious. Funes el memorioso, en general, lean Borges. And I resonated with the suffering of Funes. He doesn't forget anything, and has a crystal clear memory of every moment and every sound and image. He closed himself in a dark room and made his objective to try and catalog every memory he had. Funes had no space for creativity, because there was no collapse or space for creative interpretation - a cloud is a cloud, nothing alike any other thing.
These abstractions of the mind are the basis for creativity I think.
My point is, I cannot stay put in a room while documenting everything. I have to get out and do things. This creation of things means that things will get lost and things will be messy. And I must be fine with that. I found great usage of my zettel for getting new ideas so far, but I cannot say that I did many things with them. Not yet.
But it did SOMETHING. I created this system originally to "upgrade" my previous system, which was to write anything anywhere and throw that note away. It helped me so much because that liberated me from the thought, but then it would be lost and I would become distressed that the thought cannot be remembered now. So I started this digital garden with zettel-like system, to put these things in a place. And it WORKS at that.
But even though the thing is in a note, I'm still stressed. It doesn't exists yet. No amount of productive procrastination will help at that.
The thing is identifying the itch. Just saying "write a book" is not good enough. You must be specific on the WHY. Why does this bothers so much. For instance, this blog post! I started writing it because I needed to write something to keep the blog alive, sure (who cares anyway), but also to finally put in text what has been bothering me in a place where I think it could maybe be useful to anyone, at least for me. In that case, the "task" of "write a blog post about xyz" => "explore and write about why it still bothers you so much even after getting it on text and out of your system". It starts with the why, not with the finished product.
And, to answer that last todo. It didn't get out of my system. If it's not something existing in the world as it should exist then it's still inside of me. Stealing my sleep.
btw I didn't update my digital garden in a while. It's bigger now, but I forgot about updating it to the internet. One day for sure!