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Hyper-Documenting

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My mind does not keep pictures of my life, so I keep a record of it instead. That is why I have no fear about how my brain is built.

Panel one: a young East Asian man with short straight black hair in a tan jacket takes a photo with his phone of friends laughing around a dinner table. Panel two: the same man walks down a sunny sidewalk speaking into his phone held near his mouth, with soft sound waves drawn coming from the phone. Panel three: the same man sits at a desk looking at a laptop screen that shows a simple calendar and a warm photo from that day, smiling as he remembers. No thought bubbles, no picture frames, no floating symbols, no readable text on any screen.

I record everything​

I am a hyper-documenter. I love taking photos, taking videos, taking notes, and recording conversations. When something matters, I capture it.

For someone whose mind does not replay the past, this is how I live. My memory of my own life is thin, and I have made peace with that because the record is not thin at all. The people, the places, the words, the moments: they are written down, photographed, and saved.

Why I am not afraid​

People sometimes hear that I cannot relive my memories and assume it must feel like loss. It does not, because I am not relying on my brain to hold everything.

The goal is simple. I want my AI to have access to my full life history, so I can ask something like "What was I doing on this date?" and get a real answer. My mind is free to do what it does well: feel, connect ideas, and move forward. The record holds the rest.

That is what I mean by not being afraid of my cognitive infrastructure. My brain is one part of the system, and the record is another.

How it grew​

I kept journals before, on and off. Around 2019, with Notion, I started documenting my life much more deliberately, mostly by hand.

About a year and a half ago it became detailed, and the reason is voice. Typing everything was work. Speaking is not. Now I talk, and my words are transcribed. I record calls, and they become text I can search. The friction that used to make documentation a chore is almost gone.

Humble about my memory​

Everyone forgets. Mine is just more obvious, so I never had the option of pretending otherwise, and I have come to see that as a gift.

The people who struggle with these new tools are often the ones with pride about their memory. "I'll remember" is the sentence that loses the detail, the follow-up, and the promise. I know I will not remember, so it goes in the record the moment it happens, and the calendar holds what I said I would do. I would rather be held accountable by a good system than trust a memory I already know is thin.

That is the whole design principle, and it works for anyone: assume you will forget, and build around it. My mind keeps what it is good at, which is caring, imagining and deciding. The record keeps the rest. More on that idea in Designing for Human Frailty.

The best time ever to have aphantasia​

We literally live in the best time ever for people with aphantasia.

  • You can speak words, and images appear. AI image tools give a mind without pictures a way to see what it feels. (More in What It Is Like.)
  • You can speak words, and the words are remembered. Voice transcription turns a thought into a note before it disappears.
  • You can record a conversation, and never lose what someone you love said to you.
  • You can ask your own history questions, and get answers back.

A generation ago, a person like me would have had to fight their own memory. Now I just speak, and the record builds itself.

If you have aphantasia, start here​

You do not need a perfect system. Start with one habit:

  • Take the photo. Details you will not remember are exactly the ones worth keeping.
  • Talk into your phone when a thought arrives, before it is gone.
  • Record the conversations that matter, with permission.
  • Keep it all somewhere you can search later.

Further Reading​