For months I have been collecting articles and figuratively setting them aside in my computer, intending to read them later. At one point there were over thirty links waiting for me to read their articles while, instead, I worked on other things. And worse than the procrastination, while I was saving them I even wondered if I would ever develop the motivation to go back through them all and take the notes I intended to make from them. Obviously discipline is an issue for me, and I know it.

Yet, a breakthrough came a week or so ago when I found an article (yet another) describing a way to leverage the computer to automate the note taking process. It wasn’t without a lot of work because I basically had to learn the entire Shortcut app on the Mac to teach myself everything there is to know about its capabilities, but all that work (days of it) paid off, and I learned how to easily write literary notes from a framework that is time-stamped and even contains a PDF of the entire article. The automation is fabulous.

But, then I had a ton of new notes to read and digest… First-world problems, man.

Anyway, the process of sifting through websites to find interesting reading and then converting the content into something useful was rewarding. I learned a lot from it — most importantly that I have been terrible at taking notes (meaning that my casual daily reading has mostly been a waste of time).

But more than anything, it is clear that I have a lot of thinking to do, aside from all the time I have already spent on these articles. After beginning its compilation, it is now apparent that this Zettelkasten will allow me to optimize what I’m cogitating upon by leveraging other people’s thoughts and their customization to my own themes. And whether or not it is the Zettelkasten itself or the discipline required to fill it, the practice of putting all these notes together has been a great way to make myself focus simply by thinking about a subject enough to truly identify what made the article interesting to me in the first place. Win win win, right?

That process is why I started writing this long-winded entry. I realized recently that I stand around reading this shit a lot, and yet I never truly get bored of it. Today I realized that’s because I enjoy the learning process, which isn’t much of a revelation. But, methodically piecing together my personal view of the world is quite a task, and starting the documentation process has shown me how little I have ever known. Humility is good. It also shows me how similar we all are in that each of us could potentially endure the same process and discover the same themes, ideas, and creativity possibly billions of times simultaneously. In the past I might have laughed at that kind of isolated yet similar conclusion upon some tiny concept that somoene else might take for granted, but now the discovery process is to me the very universe now that I realize my little slice of logic exists the same as any other could — like a single dimension inside an infinite conscious.

Does that sound crazy to you? Well, I wouldn’t blame you for wondering what is the point of sifting through math proofs, philosophical arguments, or other writings for hours or even weeks just to make a few connections for myself to realize that 1 + 1 actually does equal 2. But, that misses the point. It isn’t really the obvious conclusions that make it worth the discipline of focused thinking and notating. The obscure random tangents are the true gold — I mean who the fuck cares if 1 + 1 = 2 if what we consider mathematical truth doesn’t actually exist? And what is truth, anyway? That sort of thing.