I Deleted My Second Brain

Summary

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.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.Well, I killed the whole thing.I’ve been sober for six years now; and that kind of milestone does something to your perception of time. It creates a before and an after, and it invites you - gently at first, then insistently - to take stock. A few weeks ago, looking back on my sobriety journey, I was digging through my archives, scrolling through old notes, old goals, old mental frameworks I had once treated like gospel. Systems layered on systems. Promises I had made to my future self, as if that self were an operating system waiting for updates.Reading through these remnants, I felt a tightening in my chest. Not sadness, not nostalgia - a kind of existential lag. I could see how each iteration of my self was trying so earnestly to build a roadmap to something better. But what got me sober, what got me through the first one, two, three hard years - none of it was in those notes. It hit me: what got me here won’t get me where I need to be next.The Promise of Total CaptureThe mo...