18 JANUARY 2025
In 1986, I kept a very basic and dull diary, but since 1990, I’ve maintained a consistent record of my life. Having such a complete record isn’t always a good thing as old journals can stir up memories of stress or unhappiness, but I’m still glad to have them. They may not interest anyone but me, but they’re a way to record things that might otherwise be forgotten or misremembered.
I switched from writing to typing my journals in late 2000. In the past, I experimented with dictating them to speech recognition software, but the results were slow and disappointing. Many years ago I did type up some of the smaller shorter journals but it was even more tedious. Until recently, I never thought I’d have the patience to convert all my handwritten journals to digital text. Thanks to ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini transcribing hundreds of photos of the pages over the last week, I now have a pretty accurate digital version of everything I wrote. I’ve even printed and bound copies in a legible, consistent format.
The journals don’t really serve any practical purpose beyond satisfying the occasional curiosity about what I was doing “x” number of years ago. I sometimes wonder if the person tasked with clearing out my house after I’m gone will even glance at them, or if they’ll all end up in a skip. Honestly, that’s probably for the best.