Around every first Saturday of the month, the following happens between me and my computer—some step repeat on other days, too, but rarely all:
- encrypting local files
- syncing encrypted local files with a remote cloud
- copying notebooks from my notetaking programme into an archival section, named like this: year, month, and notebook name, like so: the notebook called “Projects” has its content moved to “2024-09-projects”, before the next step
- exporting notebooks from my notetaking programme into various formats, then using an archiving programme to make an archival copy of these files
- a certain analysis takes place, knowing I have my projects and ideas in one place: when I get around to them, I will do them
- these exports and archives get synced from one local drive to another local drive, which itself is the decrypted representation of the encrypted local files I keep in sync with the remote cloud
While this is not exactly a pleasurable process, it does provide a certain comfort: all is not lost. And while physical archives are rarely easy to access or a joy to use (my SO might have the one exception I am aware of: a suspension filing system by Leitz, which I find really neat absolutely glorious), this is one of the systems whose only tedium comes from the redundancy in exporting.
As I work my way down my list of notebooks concerning topics like my projects and ideas, personal diary entries, changes to my workshop and its tools, social content, I take notice of why I do this process. Of course, there is that thing about being German and loving archives, sure, check that stereotype, sure, yes, sure.
But why I do this is at all, is this: my existence is meaningful to me. What I do is meaningful to me. My observations and experiments have value to me. Maybe there is a little bit of becoming older playing into this, but I have always found computers to be a delight for one simple reason: I can search all of my files. And with interesting new tools like AI, I can even analyze my own files in meaningful ways, looking for patterns, and most often: for tone.
If I would allow all of this to disappear into the obscurity of whatever social media does to a few people’s capacity to become involved in their own perception and processes, then all I would have done, is to allow my own words, my own life, to disappear.
I rather uphold structure. I rather write about what I have done.
Maybe you are into that sort of thing. Maybe you have read some of this, wondering about me and what I do. Maybe this is all very obvious and clear to you. All the same, I believe that knowing what we do, what we write, is of value to us.
And most of what I am currently doing, is writing. I haven’t done that for years, and I am still struggling to get away from any kind of promotional tone: not because I was ever any good at that, hell no, but because the idea of having to market what I do and why I do it, has basically poisoned joy.
Imagine doing work like this, and then having to satisfy some imaginary person you have in your head, because someone said something somewhere to get under your skin.
For most of us, creative or not, that is a sad truth of existence: that only with time we can find joy in what we do, rather than looking for joy given to us by satisfying what others demand of us.
And like I have said up there, doing this archival work is not exactly on a par with eating vanilla ice cream—but it satisfies something, which does not even need a fancy name. Maybe being your own person is about that: to neither be able to be understood by others easily, nor putting any effort into neither being understood nor being misunderstood.
In a way, I am alone with my thoughts, in the company of a few hundred people. Imagine. I actually can’t. I just do these things, and write about them. Some of it in private, some of it like this, in the privacy of a few hundred mutuals, friends, and family.
I think I will finish up reading Maeda’s Creative Code now.
Maybe I will switch on some sort of archiving for my Threads account, too.
I think I want to blog like this. I think I just did.
Source: My after‑hours blog on Tumblr Code & Canvas
