Comment by inetknght
5 months ago
> I think obsessively examining ones own comment history would verge on excessive
If you write a journal, do you not sometimes review the things you've written?
This is no different.
If you read the whole journal every day before writing a new entry, then perhaps it is a but excessive. But a review once or twice a year is not a bad thing.
I very much take your point, and literally the paragraph before I said "... I tend to seek a middle way". So if you think reviewing once or twice a year is right for you, then go for it.
But to answer your specific question: I do keep journals and I almost never review them. I have a box with 20+ years of handwritten journals in it. Once every couple of years I'll even open the box and flip through a few pages of a few of the books and read a couple of pages. But that is generally all I do and I have no desire to do any more than that.
I also have maybe 100 journal entries in Google Docs and to the best of my recollection I have never read a single one of them after they were written.
Lately I've been using LLMs as a kind of active journal, where I engage in a dialogue as a means to externalizing my thoughts and refining ideas through critical feedback. I have never gone back and re-read any of those conversations.
I'm not making a value claim here, just answering you honestly. It isn't that I think one should or shouldn't review their journals, it is that it doesn't give me pleasure to do so and I find no personal value in it.