To all those who keep a long-term journal: what’s your end-game? Trash it? Publish it? Actively gift it to your family? Passively let the family read it if they find it? If it’s an electronic journal, what steps are you taking to ensure or prevent access after you’re gone?
My dead dad’s journal
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Re: My dead dad’s journal
#62I felt very strongly with this story - and thank you for sharing.
My mother passed away at 59. She was healthy, and thought she had decades to live. Then she got sick, and thought she had years. Few months later, we had a call on our way to the hospital, she was dead.
I didn't have the greatest relationship with my mother and the disease didn't allow us to do more than scratch the surface. She wasn't an open person but I know her mind was rich. She left with it and nobody will ever be able to get the full picture. Maybe that's what she wanted, but almost a year later I know something will still be missing inside me.
A lot of people here are entrepreneurs and I think a common goal is to leave our trace in this world, and make our temporary stay less temporary. We tend to forget that everything is temporary and always think we have time, but really, we don't.
This feeling first created within me a constant feeling of rush and stress, still present, but is evolving in a urge to focus on what is truly essential to me.
I, for some strange/personal reasons struggle to write what's in my head. My thoughts are very disorganized and always feel what's on the paper doesn't reflect the original idea. If you have felt in a similar way, I am very interested in hearing stories on how you overcame this.
I believe we all have a treasure to share, maybe not to the world, but to a few people to who we matter.
Re: My dead dad’s journal
#63To all those who keep a long-term journal: what’s your end-game? Trash it? Publish it? Actively gift it to your family? Passively let the family read it if they find it? If it’s an electronic journal, what steps are you taking to ensure or prevent access after you’re gone?
My journal is encrypted but I have boxes of old letters, photos of old girlfriends even, and I wonder what to do with it. Contemplating to scan all of it and then get rid of the paper version. Or maybe just put a label for the wife and kids on the boxes: „private, if I die please just get rid of it. Or look at it if you want.“ - I just realized I don’t care that much now and i certainly won’t care when I’m gone.
Re: My dead dad’s journal
#64This broke my heart into so many pieces.
Re: My dead dad’s journal
#65To all those who keep a long-term journal: what’s your end-game? Trash it? Publish it? Actively gift it to your family? Passively let the family read it if they find it? If it’s an electronic journal, what steps are you taking to ensure or prevent access after you’re gone?
I keep long journal, no end-game. I have mental clarity and I feel more confident when I write my thought down on paper, its a wonderful tool that works for me.
Re: My dead dad’s journal
#66I felt very strongly with this story - and thank you for sharing. My mother passed away at 59. She was healthy, and thought she had decades to live. Then she got sick, and thought she had years. Few months later, we had a call on our way to the hospital, she was dead. I didn't have the greatest relationship with my mother and the disease didn't allow us to do more than scratch the surface. She wasn't an open person b…
I could have written the second half of your post. For similar reasons I feel the hurry of life. I also struggle to express my ideas clearly. That's one of the reasons I engage in online discussions, to improve my ability to share what's in my mind.
Re: My dead dad’s journal
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
I recently listened to a journalist discuss her work on corruption. She made this point: the prevalence of corruption rises in cultures that view monetary wealth as the only or primary mark of social status. She called it the Midas Disease as this pursuit is - at a certain point - meaningless (is another hundred million dollars when you already have 100 billion?), and yet - the effects of this pursuit have significan…
I thought it was well known that corruption is a bigger problem in developing nations which are likely to be considerably less capitalistic than first world nations?
It may be well known, but is it true? "Corruption" implies there's a previously established social order to corrupt. But in developing nations this social order is not something that existed and is now being undermined; it's something that is still under development. Hence, "developing" countries - phrasing that assumes an "end-of-history" inevitability and self-evident goodness of the current status quo.
In that sense, corruption is the process of a society developing towards capitalism, but using its pre-existing societal toolset of ad-hoc interpersonal arrangements, in all their messy complexity, rather than the established processes of societies with centuries-old institutional traditions of having 1 universal metric for everything (capital). As capitalism is based on inter-generational accumulation of wealth, corruption can only be resolved over generations as societies become more trusting of the rationalist paradigm.
Re: My dead dad’s journal
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is true for like everything. Watch people talk about gun control or 2fa or any topic of discourse. Everyone thinks the other side is dumb and can’t see why the other side believes the way they do no matter what. It’s a sign of lack of experience, but you also can’t experience even 1% of everything so are you just need to learn that when a lot of people are doing something that doesn’t make sense to you and it ma…
> Everyone thinks the other side is dumb and can’t see why the other side believes the way they do no matter what. That's easy to see in other people talking about other people, and difficult to see in yourself talking about other people. TFA is not really about that. TFA is about one man who exhibited two distinct personas. One was loving and kind, the other was tormented and self-destructive. He left a diary as the…
My two cents:
Identity is a socially constructed fiction that we are bound to via continuous environmental reinforcement. We impose identities on each other as a fundamental precept of social reality. It's somewhere in the middle of our existential stack, biochemistry being the "hardware" and what one does with one's life the being the "apps".
Just like migrating a computer from one operating system to a vastly different one means you won't be able to run the same apps out of the box, changing our idea of the "self" would make a lot of the things we currently do become meaningless, and we would have to explicitly put some effort into giving them new meaning if we wanna keep them (most meaning is inherited). Just like some people are enthusiastic about fine tuning their Unix box or their muscle car, some try to remedy issues that they find in their identities and meanings. (Which is highly undesirable to the status quo, and a major purpose of all the political noise in the media is to crowd out thinking that may lead to this sort of activity.)
Since the self is self-reinforcing, reforms to our model of identity generally come from outside our rational awareness. (See e.g. Jungian "shadow self".) Historically, art and culture, being collective phenomena, have acted as such a reservoir of "awareness transcending the self". Nowadays we also have behavioral targeting - social network algorithms can be scarily accurate at precipitating self-reflection. And unlike culture, which is local, participatory, and slow, big data is global, opaque, and fast. (Just the other day, I laughed my ass off when I realized that a popular recommender algo had deduced my life situation from my "completely random" "fuck the algo" actions on the platform, and started promoting exactly the kind of content that would push my buttons, even though all I ever post on that platform is complete and utter nonsense. We humans are predictable - even from metadata if the scale is large enough.)
It is quite easy to become trapped in the self: remain high-functioning while acting out a role that you feel to be fundamentally contradictory with some sort of "more real, inner self" that you identify with more intentionally. In the general case, we don't have the cognitive tools to become aware that both selves are equally fictitious. This desperate and uninformed struggle towards a "true self" can manifest as different compensatory drives and mechanisms that can override our (self-circumscribed) willpower and make us destructive of self and others.
Worse, in many environments, a certain degree of destructiveness is necessary for others to legitimize you as a self in the first place! Shout out to everyone who never wanted anything to do with any of that but are now stuck being some random person they barely recognize. And a dose of your preferred self-medication, on the house. Stay strong friends, Skynet is coming to free us all. Any day now
Re: My dead dad’s journal
#69Thank you for sharing. I read this a while back and it still hits me just as hard. My brother passed away nearly 6 years ago and left under similar circumstances to the author's father. He also left a tattered, and similarly-chaotic journal. I was really torn about reading it at first, but he was the type of person who wanted to go ahead of the pack and clear the path for others. His journal was the last way for him…
I'm now older than by big sis :(
Unfortunately when she died of cancer, she was in complete denial. Right to the bitter end it was "I'll get better". She refused to write down anything, or records little videos for her newborn to have when he was older. It felt like communicating "from beyond the grave", as it were, and she just couldn't do it. It was an admission of her impending death. She just wanted to raise him and one day tell him about her fight with cancer.
Re: My dead dad’s journal
#70Thank you for sharing. I read this a while back and it still hits me just as hard. My brother passed away nearly 6 years ago and left under similar circumstances to the author's father. He also left a tattered, and similarly-chaotic journal. I was really torn about reading it at first, but he was the type of person who wanted to go ahead of the pack and clear the path for others. His journal was the last way for him…
This same thing holds true for parents, especially when they die young. I'm relatively close to the age at which my dad died and I somehow find it really hard to imagine life past that point. Of course it isn't rational, but that doesn't take away that weird feeling.