Deleting the second brain

A wonderful post by Joan Westenberg who went a deleting spree of all her knowledge base—notes, links, to do lists.

Two nights ago, I deleted everything.

Every note in Obsidian. Every half-baked atomic thought, every Zettelkasten slip, every carefully linked concept map. I deleted every Apple Note I’d synced since 2015. Every quote I’d ever highlighted. Every to-do list from every productivity system I’d ever borrowed, broken, or bastardized. Gone. Erased in seconds.

What followed: Relief.

And a comforting silence where the noise used to be.

For years, I had been building what technologists and lifehackers call a “second brain.” The premise: capture everything, forget nothing. Store your thinking in a networked archive so vast and recursive it can answer questions before you know to ask them. It promises clarity. Control. Mental leverage.

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.

And so…

Well, I killed the whole thing.

This is akin to the forest fires which are valuable for some ecosystems to thrive. They open the forest canopy to sunlight so that sunlight reaches the ground and stimulates new growth. Sometimes, we also need a clean slate to start with new set of ideas.

Another wonderful excerpt from the post.

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. A tag is not an insight. And an idea not re-encountered might as well have never been had.