A second brain was never really feasible
Organizing notes, mining knowledge to discover insights, and building a second brain - all stuff I've written about before. Past a certain point, however, the very act of building a second brain starts to feel performative, much like the countless tenets of Agile. For about six years now, I've dedicated time to building a second brain, but the second brain remains a work in progress to this day. I would meticulously create atomic notes and link them in a manner that was simultaneously too rudimentary and overwhelming. And try as I might, those linked notes sat there gathering dust; the ideas that were promised never materialised.
At this point, I could do one of two things
- feel disillusioned with the concept and forfeit
- figure out what was wrong with me, since everyone else could get it to work
Turns out, I wasn't alone. Joan Westenberg wrote about deleting her entire second brain in Obsidian - 10,000 notes collected over 7 years. Joan faced the same issues that had plagued me.
For years, I had been building what technologists and lifehackers call a "second brain". The premise: capture everything, forget nothing. [...]
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.
This is true. In the pursuit of a life where nothing is forgotten, the second brain becomes a dumping ground for every. single. idea. I started out with the best of intentions and a plan to organize and prune the notes periodically, but the future-self that was assigned this task never appeared. Over time, the second brain turned into a landfill.
The process of building a "second brain" - and Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) to an extent - emerged out of an obsession with systems theory, the quantified self movement, and Silicon Valley's productivity as life mindset, and was made mainstream by the gaggle of iPadcore productivity bros on YouTube. Tools like Notion, Roam Research, and Obsidian (which I still use, just not as a second brain) gained cult-like followings. Being able to build "a lattice of meaning" was the initial temptation draw for many.
And yet.
As I wrote above, the whole act of building a second brain seemed to become performative. Instead of archiving notes and insights as they occurred, I started archiving for the sake of it. The way I looked at content changed - I would look out for insights to mine, sentences to highlight and record, instead of reading articles and essays for the joy of it. And despite all this, no meaningful fountain of knowledge and ideas sprung forth. And what's worse, a note that is created then gets buried with all the other notes, never to resurface again.
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 architecture began to shape my attention. I started reading to extract. Listening to summarize. Thinking in formats I could file. Every experience became fodder. I stopped wondering and started processing.
Buying into the idea that building a second brain is possible, that you can outsource memory and recall to a piece of software, and never forget anything is a pipe-dream regardless of what the productivity bros would have you believe. As with anything else, Goodhart's law applies here.
Maybe the real trick was never in having infinite, accurate memory. Maybe the real trick was in convincing us that it was possible with the right mix of tools, workflows, and discipline.