I analysed 20 years of my chats

Summary

In 2014, Tim Urban of WaitButWhy published Your Life in Weeks - a grid where each square is one week of one's life, and most of the grid is already filled. The image bothered me for years. I started tracking things partly because of it - I wanted the grid to mean something, not just count down. But the biometric data is an odd representation of how fulfilling my life has been. The grid suggests it's the events that matter - jobs, trips, schools, marriages - and those are easy to mark. But they hardly tell how I felt during those weeks, or what I was like to the people around me. That was what I wanted to measure. So I tried journaling. Paper first, then text files, then daily notes in Obsidian. The journal captured what I thought was important on the day I wrote it. It missed the conversations I forgot to jot down or the slow-moving patterns I couldn't see at the time. My notes and their connections growing over the years. Tired of being bad at maintaining relationships1. Not bad per se - I just procrastinate a lot. Once I learnt to shoot and stalk deer because I wanted to cook a steak - and cooking is way easier than human interactions. and wanting the data to compensate, I set off on a quest to build a personal CRM of sorts, built from the record rather than from memory - thanks to the trail left by my prolific time-wasting on the Internet for the past few decades. My digital history ¶ My online presence breaks into roughly three eras: ICQ, IRC, DC++ in 2000s: midnight channels for script kiddies and banter - all gone, and probably for the best. The ten-year-old I was in those chats doesn't need a structured archive. VK2. A now-obscure social network, popular in the post-Soviet space in the noughties. I haven't been to Russia for a decade or so, but the archives going back to 2008 are still there. Gotta love totalitarian states, eh?, Twitter, Facebook in 2010s: school, university, early career - evenly spread. Instagram and Telegram in 2010s-2020s: surprisingly, e...