Comment by Dependance

Self soothing behavior. Helps quell the anxiety derived from the dopamine threadmill of modern digital media.

We're all becoming mental hoarders and discussing our piles of though junk in our digital storage units.

There's also an article from this same site about that: https://www.ssp.sh/brain/digital-vs-paper

IMO it's way better to do what you think is good, whether that's Obsidian, notebooks, or something else

I use Obsidian but I don't follow the whole "second brain" thing, I just organize my notes by directories. You can use Obsidian however you want and adapt to the way your actual brain works. The "second brain" thing doesn't work for everyone. Even taking digital notes doesn't work for everyone (for example, it looks like you prefer paper notes).

If you haven't tried Obsidian at all I think you should give it a shot and write notes without following any system in particular. If you've tried it and you still prefer paper notes and the occasional apple note, then perhaps Obsidian isn't necessary for the way you take and organize notes.

Taking the notes (and being able to read them again if I want) is all I need from my "second Brain". This perfectly can be pieces of paper, as long as i can carry them around with me. More realistically some digital notes software fulfills that requirement.

> Could anyone enlighten me as to why to use Obsidian in one's daily life ?

My handwriting has degraded from consistent keyboard use over the last 30 years. Obisidan has replaced my paper notebooks, mostly because of this. However, it is handy to be able to mesh those notes with hyperlinks, LLM output snippets, quotes from other sources, embedded images, etc. Doing all of those other things would be laborious to impossible with paper.

I just use Obsidian as a glorified notebook. I've been using paper notebooks, but I tend to lose them... With Obsidian I just push my files to git and never worry again. Since the files are just markdown, there's no lock-in.

What I also really like about notetaking apps is that I can organize my notes hierarchically, move things around and make cross references.

I still regularly sketch ideas on paper, but once I have something that's worth keeping, I write it down in Obsidian.

I'm also skeptical about this "Second Brain" thing. People make videos on YT about how they have been enlightened by Obsidian and then try to sell you their online course. To me it seems like notetaking for its own sake. You could call it "idea maxxing" :)

I just want something that I can use to record notes, with good backups, and a format that doesn't lock me in. Obsidian offers that. It has a pretty decent mobile app and desktop app, in terms of the actual editing. And if I do want to do something advanced, like automatically generate a daily note for recording what I worked on today, it can do that. You can do all these things with other programs, or even just raw files, but Obsidian adds just enough to make it easy.

Obsidian and apple notes are basically the same thing. Obsidian just has some more features.