Thinking

At the start of this year, I decided to take up the “No Buy Year Challenge” that got popular on YouTube around New Years. More specifically I went for the “Low Buy” variant. If you’re not familiar, the challenge is to go a whole year without buying anything, outside of a few predetermined exceptions like food and toiletries. I found out about the idea from this video by Grace Nevitt, but there are a ton of other videos out there.

In this case the main message - “nothing changes if nothing changes” - a call to actively engage in your own life - is something I needed to hear. It is an excellent shorthand phrase for a theme I’ve seen before but often forget. “People have to save themselves. One person saving another is impossible.” -Meme Oshino, Bakemonogatari While the “nothing changes” version of the message is excellent branding and shorthand for the concept, It undersells the problem.

Lately my YouTube feed has been flooded with Tiago Forte and his book, Building a Second Brain, which I might get soon but I haven’t read yet.* I’ve been interested in the idea of creating a knowledge base for a long time but I never found quite what I was looking for in terms of software. I really wanted a non-hierarchical system like MediaWiki, but with a more easily maintainable storage mechanism than a relational database.