All the smart people had a particular way that they processed and synthesized information, so I figured I should get one too.

Maybe it started with Sarah Chappell’s series on how she researches. Maybe Tara McMullin had posted something similar about her process. Maybe I vaguely dreamed of having a curated newsletter, wondered how anyone managed to do so, then realized that if I only kept track of what I read, I would also have plenty of links and ideas to share at the end of the week.

I suppose I had the sense that I wasn’t optimizing. That I would be smarter—or seem smarter, or feel smarter, I’m not sure which—if I only had a better system.

I’ve been taking some dives down the digital garden section of the internet again, a section where everyone seems to keep a significant chunk of their brain on GitHub and the rest of it on Obsidian.

I’ve been reading about Personal Knowledge Management, which I am going to go out on a limb here and define in my own words instead of googling it first: It’s about having a system to process and make meaning and connections from the information you encounter every day.

They say that you need to have this kind of practice or system in order to more deeply know things and in order to make unexpected connections. That reading isn’t enough—you won’t retain, you won’t understand deeply.

As someone who is very open to different ways of knowing, I don’t know what I believe. Sometimes you recall things serendipitously. Sometimes you’re nursing your baby and things come together in your mind. Sometimes you can turn an idea over and over in the mind like a stone until a new facet is revealed.

On some level, I know I’m turning to systems like this because my life feels out of control. I want to pleasure-read about taking more efficient notes, to fantasize about a life in which my ideas are neatly organized, in which my systems are faithful and reliable always.

A systems romance, perhaps, featuring an ending where the protagonist finally finds the right systems to instill calmness, knowledge, perhaps even wisdom—and they all live happily ever after.

I can’t help but acknowledge the profound irony of pleasure-reading about note-taking and knowledge management while taking a break from reading a book called Hospicing Modernity, which in many ways illustrates the futility of this very approach, of modernity itself.

One quote in particular:

Wording the world drives the privileging of meaning within modernity/coloniality. We search for the meaning of life. We value things that are meaning-full, we ignore things that we perceive to be meaning-less. This obsession with meaning overrides other sensibilities to the point where we can only register what we consider meaning-full, and we may numb to sense-fullness (in the broadest, most sensorial sense).

(I’ll pause here to note that, of course, I pulled this quote from my “knowledge management system,” such as it is—Kindle synced to Obsidian—and that I originally highlighted this quote while reading on my phone while nursing my son, which is perhaps itself an exact example of privileging meaning while numbing to sense-fullness.)

And then of course, I’ve just finished reading McMindfulness, which tears away the whole idea that mindfulness alone will save us. This idea, essentially that practicing mindfulness and letting go of our thoughts in meditation will save us, is of course, perhaps the twin of the idea that our thoughts and ideas will save us, both of which are ideas that Hospicing Modernity would find dwell within modernity/coloniality.

And yet, the strange seduction of a new system.

Do I allow myself the pleasure of falling for it, yet again?

On one hand, why not a simple, harmless little lie? (The lie: Yes, this system will improve my life, make me smarter, make me complete.)

Or is it not so harmless?

I’ll go out on a limb here: I don’t know the answer.