I Deleted My Second Brain

Joan Westenberg has some pretty strong arguments against the notion of building a “second brain”.

Example: it’s so easy to let the goal be overcome by the tool’s wants:

the architecture began to shape my attention. I started reading to extract. Listening to summarize. Thinking in formats I could file. Every experience became fodder. I stopped wondering and started processing.

You shape your tools, then they shape you:

In trying to remember everything, I outsourced the act of reflection. I didn’t revisit ideas. I didn’t interrogate them. I filed them away and trusted the structure. But a structure is not thinking. A tag is not an insight.

So. Many. Great. Lines.

There’s an illusion of mastery in watching your notes web into constellations. But…They do not guarantee understanding.

The act of deletion is not a failure of recordkeeping. It is a reassertion of agency.

Mic drop:

I don’t build a second brain. I inhabit the first.