I Deleted My Second Brain

Saved by MPM and

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Merlin Donald, in his theory of cognitive evolution, argues that human intelligence emerged not from static memory storage but from external symbolic representation : tools like language, gesture, and writing that allowed us to rehearse, share, and restructure thought. Culture became a collective memory system - not to archive knowledge, but to... See more

Joan Westenberg • I Deleted My Second Brain

But over time, my second brain became a mausoleum. A dusty collection of old selves, old interests, old compulsions, piled on top of each other like geological strata. Instead of accelerating my thinking, it began to replace it. Instead of aiding memory, it froze my curiosity into static categories.

Joan Westenberg • I Deleted My Second Brain

In trying to remember everything, I outsourced the act of reflection. I didn’t revisit ideas. I certainly never interrogated them. I filed them away and trusted the structure. But a structure is not thinking. A tag is not an insight. And an idea never re-encountered might as well be forgotten entirely.

Joan Westenberg • I Deleted My Second Brain

PKM systems promise coherence, but they often deliver a kind of abstracted confusion. The more I wrote into my vault, the less I felt. A quote would spark an insight, I’d clip it, tag it, link it - and move on. But the insight was never lived. It was stored. Like food vacuum-sealed and never eaten, while any nutritional value slips away.

Worse, the

Joan Westenberg • I Deleted My Second Brain

Nietzsche burned early drafts. Michelangelo destroyed sketches. Leonardo left thousands of pages unfinished. The act of deletion is not a failure of recordkeeping. It is a reassertion of agency.

In design, we speak of subtraction as refinement. A sculptor chips away everything that is not the figure. A musician cuts a line that clutters the melody.... See more

Joan Westenberg • I Deleted My Second Brain

JJeremy P

aka what we refer to as ‘natural selection’, whereby reality is constantly deleting, revising, evloving, at the foaming edge of becomingness; no Hero’s journey of striving to Be The Best Self, just a love-driven exploration of what can be possible, to know ourself in every way, distilled by the pain and joy of existing; n’er static, (by definition it cannot be);