I feel really seen by this. For years I’ve tried to be dilligent with PKM and read-it-later tools. There are some workflows that are useful e.g. these quotes are parsed from my highlights of the transcript of the Youtube video in Reader, but overall my journey mirrors the author’s, and the underlying psychology it exposes is uncomfortable to comprehend. I’m not sure I’ll delete it all, but it’s given serious pause for thought.

The irony: this posts plays into the same fallacy the video exposes: will I reflect on it again? Or having done the act of saving, highlighting, documenting, is it condemned to the archives, never to traverse my neurons again?

Quoting Westenberg:

over time, my second brain became a moraleum, 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.

I was digging through my archives, scrolling through old notes, old goals, and old mental frameworks I had once treated like gospel. Systems layered on systems, promises I had made to my future self, as if that self were an operating system waiting for updates.

I could see how each iteration of myself was trying so earnestly to build a road map to something better. But what got me sober, what got me through the first one, two, three hard years, none of it was in those notes. And it hit me. What got me here won’t get me where I need to be next.

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, and 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.

I started reading to extract, listening to summarize, thinking in formats that I could file, and every experience became fodder. I stopped wondering and I started just processing.

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, and a tag is not insight, and an idea not re-enccountered might as well have never been had.

I realized I had created an entirely new problem. Deferral. The more my system grew, the more I deferred the work of thought to some future self who would sort and tag and distill and extract the gold. And that self never arrived.

My reading list had become a totem of imagined wisdom, a shrine to the person I would be if only I read everything on it. But I never did.

This mirrors a deeper psychological error. And I am so guilty of it. The belief that by naming a goal, you are closer to achieving it. That by storing a thought, you have understood it. that by filing a fact you have earned the right to deploy it. And this is productivity as performance. It is a symptom of modern intellectual insecurity. The fear of losing track of forgetting of not being caught up. But caught up to what? The feed, the discourse, the meme cycle. There is no finish line in the pursuit of knowing, only presence.

In knowledge work, we hoard. We treat accumulation as a virtue. But what if deletion is the truer discipline? I don’t think I want a map of everything I’ve ever read. I want a mind free to read what it needs. I want memory that forgets gracefully. I want ideas that resurface, not because I indexed them, but because they mattered.

I don’t want to manage knowledge. I want to live it.