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Hyper-Documenting

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.

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​