I didn’t plan out this post, so don’t expect it to flow very well. This post is about my journey with Obsidian and its subreddit, and how it made me realise what I wanted out of life. That clarity lead me to jump to a new text editor, Helix, which encouraged me to learn the command line and Python. My fascination for technology (and hence interest in trying new software) started with me hosting a Minecraft server to play with the only friend that kept in contact with me after I moved from the UK to a third-world country. (That friend now only texts every 6 months or so.)
I was meant to publish my first post on the 31st of August, though when I put cursor to text editor my mind suddenly went blank. I had a lot to say, though I guess I also didn’t. I’m in that part of personal life where I’ve started to realise that things aren’t going to happen ‘later’, and that if I want my life to go a certain way, I have to work for it. This also means an initial phase of running from productivity app to productivity app. I don’t think I got that deep, after reading a few posts by people who went through similar.
It started and ended with Obsidian. I live in a third-world country with unreliable internet. It’s great 40% of the time, slow another 40% and just not there 20%. My father turning it off at random times to ‘get us off the screens’ doesn’t help much either (yes, I’m in my teens). Anyways, apps like Evernote, Todoist and Notion felt wonderful only about 40% of the time, which was enough to persuade me to look for something offline.
The top few results for “offline note-taking app free reddit” all pointed to Obsidian, so I navigated to the website and hit download.
Obsidian is, I think, the only candidate for an offline, cross-platform note-taking app? I guess you have Joplin and Logseq, and if you’re including Apple-exclusives, Bear and iA Writer?
I think I stayed with it for about 2 years. I really enjoyed tweaking CSS snippets and browsing and messing with the hundreds of themes and plugins available. It felt like an entire new operating system, honestly. My first year with it was mostly just putting together cool-looking dashboards and templates I’d never use. I felt productive, even though I was achieving next to nothing. I joined r/ObsidianMD about 5 months in, and was exposed to a few groups of people:
Group 3 remained in the shadows until … they didn’t? I’ve looked through my old paper journals (most stuff was in my older Obsidian vault, which I deleted a few months ago) and couldn’t find an obvious transition from novelty to pragmatism. The best I can describe it is: (1) Do something (2) Figure out it doesn’t work (3) Try something else
Trial and error, essentially. I think I also began to understand what I wanted out of a note-taking app. Up until I moved, and sometimes still now, I’ve been told that I’m “intelligent” and “gifted”. This stated nothing more than the fact that I performed slightly better than my peers academically, and in primary school that meant very little. I didn’t have an identity outside of “the smart kid”, so I clung onto that like an infant to its mother. When my parents moved us out of the UK and into a third-world country, that image remained, suprisingly. I had dropped out of school for a year and a half, most of which was a meaningless blur of tears and yelling. Turns out that putting a 12-year old in a country whose language she doesn’t speak nor understand, whose traditional cuisine causes her to vomit and lose nutrients to the point of unconsciousness, whilst having her friends taken away from her isn’t a very happy situation to be in.
My siblings didn’t seem to have as much a hard time. My sister managed to make a few friends and gets along with my cousins and extended family well. Same goes for my younger brother. He had similar issues to me but then was dropped out of traditional schooling completely. He was also 6 years old. My eldest brother lives in his fantasy wonderland, only temporarily glimpsing at the real world when you yell his name. No change there. He still does pretty well academically, though. Yes, I’m missing a lot of details. I’ll probably elaborate on them more in a separate post. Their stories are more interesting than that.
The false image of an intelligent kid only lived on due to the gap in education quality between the two countries. Stuff I had learnt and got the hang of in year 4 was stuff they would have to pull out a calculator for. A chance to honestly reclaim the lost identity was something I couldn’t pass up on. So, I tried, and tried, and tried again. That eventually lead me to understand that maybe the flashiest tool isn’t the best one for the job.
I jumped between a few text editors, slowly decreasing in features. Obsidian, Minimal, Ghostwriter, VSCodium, Lite-XL, Helix. Huh, the one I like most is actually one similar to Vim. Funny.
Windows user, in case that wasn’t obvious. There wasn’t anything wrong with Obsidian, it can be as basic or as complex as you want it to be. I guess I found it distracting? I also wanted to edit text files outside of my vault, and not just Markdown. I found that regular text editors did all that I needed, so Obsidian became redundant. I still use Helix for most things, but for longform writing I’m more comfortable with Left. It’s on itch.
I became really obsessed with the terminal for a short time. Seemed crazy to me that software could be fast and snappy without needing the latest hardware. A bit more exploration and I think, “Huh, what if I made stuff like this, too?”. I didn’t have the time to seriously begin until half a year more, since my (i)GCSEs were underway. I had a few (vague) goals: 1. Become intelligent through more reading and maintaining a Zettelkasten 2. Learn to code 3. Stop procrastinating
With that new beginning came a ton more mistakes. I read through Atomic Habits, began 5 habits because I thought I could, and miserably failed. I then thought that my method of adopting those 5 habits was wrong, I just needed a more obvious cue, more calendar events –
EEEGH!!! 🚨
Tired of the repeated failures, I decided that I wasn’t better than the next person and decided to take up one habit at a time. First up was a minimal implementation of David Allen’s renowned Getting Things Done, described in Leo Babauta’s Zen to Done. Collecting things in my head was something I was already good at, and I had a habit of sitting down at my desk during the evening to journal, so that went pretty smoothly. Habit no.2 is learning Python. I’m going through CS50P and am just finished with the first lecture. Making it a habit was also pretty easy, since I enjoy watching videos and solving problems. I haven’t yet decided on what to do after I get through the full course, but it probably won’t be as easy.
And now we’re at the present day! I still have lots more I want to talk about. Next post will probably be about my relationship with my parents, the next about my siblings.