That moment is over now. Such euphoria and now I'm back at the house and it's all but a memory. Already gone in an instant. The only way I can immortalize it is by writing these words. So thus I write in a feeble hope to cheat time.
-- Diary excerpt from October 27, 2025
I asked myself: what is my most valuable possession?
Easy. Probably my MacBook, and then my Balenciaga flip flops, and then my future sexy red Ferrari once I get rich enough to buy it. Oh, I can already see its holy shine and feel the cold metal beneath my hands --
I'm joking. The real thing, weirdly enough, is my diary.
I never would have expected that when I started writing it. When I was a kid, I always thought a diary was the thing the weird kids and also your grandma wrote in. And that you start it with "dear diary", and draw little hearts in it, and write about your crush and yearn over them for endless pages. And while I still write endless pages yearning over my crushes, it's become something much bigger than that.
It's turned into my own little time machine, and given me several benefits I didn't expect.
My journey to insanity
My diary these days is insanely long. It's over 750,000 words (3,000 pages). But believe it or not, there was a time when my diary was 0 words.
I started writing my diary as writing practice. I was writing novels, and wanted to see if I could take "what happened today" and make it fun to read. I wrote these for a week, then forgot them.
Months later, I found them and was shocked by how interesting it was to read back. I had forgotten many of the moments, and the writing transported me back to them.
I had written those entries during an important part of my life -- when I was talking to my first girlfriend, before we dated, including the time I asked her out. This is the actual entry I wrote that day:
A small silence overcomes us, and my heart beats faster in my ears. I steel my mind. "I mean, what we are is kinda ... ambiguous. So I wanna make it official." I turn fully toward her. "[Name], I really like you. You wanna be my girlfriend?"
She hesitates. "No."
I wait for a second, and then my brows knit. "Wait, really?"
"Ok. Yes, I do want to be your girlfriend. But, like, I want a cute ask. This doesn't count."
"Oh, well, I just didn't want to keep procrastinating." My voice comes out as whiny, which I didn't intend.
She has a massive smile on her lips, I do too. "So, I'll be your girlfriend. But you just have to give me a cute ask. You don't have to spend a lot, or anything. You just have to plan this one."
"I did plan this one, though." I laugh.
-- Diary excerpt from November 19, 2023
I thought to myself how, if I hadn't written those entries, I would have forgotten this formative part of my life.
Stephen King talks about how writing is time travel. I discovered that firsthand then. I could read what I had written and be back in that moment.
That inspired me to start writing more regularly. At first, I only wrote when I was in my emo feels. But over time, I started writing in it every day. And now I sit at the insane point of having a full book-series-length of diary entries.
Already gone
"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect."
-- Anais Nin (famous author, and maybe an even bigger diary-er than me)
The main reason I started taking my diary seriously was because a life forgotten scared me.
When I look at my childhood, 99% of the important memories are gone. Even recent memories fade quickly. Whenever I read back a random entry, I'm shocked by how much I forgot.
If I don't write it down, then eventually I'll forget. And if I forget, then 10 years from now, isn't that the same as it not even happening in the first place?
The whole "time" idea is the most emo-ifying thing I can think of. Every moment feels like it's over before it begins. Every moment I ever want to happen, everything I am excited for, hoping for -- I know that when I get it, it will already be over.
I write so that my life does not disappear. To give some semblance of present to my past. To prevent it from dying and fading away into nothing. It is my little taped together cardboard time machine.
I just don't have the words or the time or the energy to describe how amazing this night was. So it'll be up to your fading memory and these insufficient words to make up the lack of detail.
-- Diary excerpt from January 22, 2026
Stupid T-Rex pegs
One thing I didn't expect: my diary significantly improved my writing style. It turns out writing 750,000 words does actually improve your skills.
The biggest change is that my writing became genuinely creative.
I don't filter anything in my diary, and I almost never edit it. If I write something stupid, that's fine, I just keep writing. It's an unfiltered access into my mind in that moment. Flaws and all.
There's no expectation for it to be good, and somehow that usually makes it pretty good. Sometimes, I'll read back and find myself impressed at the casually poetic or deep or funny things that I wrote.
At some point, I got into the habit of accepting and nurturing every stupid thought that I had. The crazy ones. The weird Tyrannosaurus-rex-shaped pegs trying to fit into square holes. After a while of this, my mind just felt more creative.
I even started doing stand-up comedy and writing a comedy book. In fact, the internal voice of the comedy book is extremely similar to the prose voice I write with in my diary (except somehow even lower IQ).
It's only about time until AI's intelligence catches up to Albert Einstein. And then a few years after that it will catch up to me.
-- Diary excerpt from July 24, 2026
Know thyself
Sometimes, I look at myself, at my hands, at my face, and I feel confusion and ask, "Who am I?"
It's weird. I've lived my entire life in my body. Yet, there are moments when I feel like I don't know myself.
Who am I?
There's a saying of how you have three faces: one you show the world, one you show your close ones, and one you show only yourself.
I would take it even a layer deeper.
There's also a face you don't even show yourself. All the stuff you never stop long enough to think about. We spend most of our lives on autopilot, hooked up to dopamine-dispensing machines. It's hard to self-examine. But writing a diary has given me better clarity on all this.
The face I show the world talks out loud. It's mature, reasonably smart, and occasionally impressive.
The face I show myself is the voice in my head, talking constantly and making dumb, immature jokes about farting at the most inconvenient times. Writing is the best way I can access this exact internal voice in my head. As a result, my diary is filled with an unholy amount of fart jokes.
This is the moment I wanted, right?! ... The moment I'm free. But ... It just feels semi-normal. It's like this sense is building very subtly in me. Like the early hints of a fart deep in your stomach. You can feel it but you don't know how big the explosion is going to be.
-- Diary excerpt from September 26, 2026
Sometimes, I will glimpse the hidden face. I will write about things that I've been avoiding, or that I never took the time to write about before. And I look this hidden face in the eyes -- the part of me that has failed more than I would like to admit, is more self-absorbed than I consciously think -- and accept it.
Every time I look at that hidden face and accept it, it shrinks. Maybe one day I will understand and accept all those hidden parts of myself. Maybe one day, I can say with confidence that I know myself.
More than wanting a girlfriend, I want someone to want me to be their boyfriend.
It's never about them, it's always about me. This is what I'm finding out the more I live.
-- Diary excerpt from January 8, 2026
How to train your dragon write your diary
The generic-but-valid advice first:
Write a diary entry every day, even if it's only one sentence.
Write everything stupid that comes to your mind. Don't filter.
Store it somewhere, probably on your computer. Though if you're a paper-head, then do as you wish.
And now, some not-as-generic advice:
Transport me, baby
Certain entries seem to transport me into that memory more vividly than others. Usually, it's the ones that are actually trying to. The ones that describe with visuals or other senses. Even just one line of vivid description can help. They make your time machine better.
I even had a brief stint where I started writing my diary in third person. For some reason, my third person writing is more vivid like a novel, whereas first person is funnier and often deeper. Both have their merits.
Take this for example:
He heard the patter of rain outside. And when he looked out, there were puddles rippling with rain. Welp, I'll go get some groceries then. He got his raincoat on, grabbed a bag, and headed out.
It was dark, and cars were splattered with rain. As he walked down the street, his heart was filled with genuine glee. So beautiful and alien and strange, but so joyful. He started running.
-- Diary excerpt from September 30, 2025
It's no Hemingway, but it paints a picture in my mind. When I write in first person, I probably would have just done "it rained today". Boringggg.
Cringe-maximizer
I subconsciously avoid writing about certain things. Embarrassing things. But, honestly, those are the best to write about. They are where you can come to know yourself. Whenever you sense yourself avoiding something, lean into it.
The sheer amount of embarrassing and cringe things I've done in my life is, well, a lot. Whenever you write about it, you cut away at its hold on you.
It's made me more comfortable with all that. Less embarrassed by anything. Just writing something down helps you accept it. Realize that, well, you're a human. And while we strive to be more than that, every cell in our bodies came from some monkey-minded fool caveman obsessed with hitting rocks against things.
There is a popular idea that AI could take over the world by being a "paperclip maximizer" -- turning the universe into paperclips. That is me. Except instead of paperclips, I maximize the amount of cringe I feel when I reread my diary.
My most brain-dead Hinge swipe so far:
A girl in front of the Eiffel Tower.
My response?
"wowwww konnichiwa"
Genius.
-- Diary excerpt from September 5, 2026
Goodbye, sweet time
I am writing this sentence on October 7, 2026, 10:50 AM. Now it is done, and that moment is gone. You are reading this sentence. Now you are done, and that moment is over. You will never get it back.
We are a point in time, and we move only forward. We are infinitely thin, a point, we only experience one moment at a time.
Maybe one day, we will be more than this. But until then, I have this dumb, beautiful, unhinged, poetic, feeble, powerful diary. It doesn't let me cheat time. The moments are gone forever.
You can now run your own sideload - a chatbot based on personal information - and it will be close to uploading. Just put the whole dairy into LLM and ask it to roleplay you in some situation.
I've never thought of that. Very interesting idea!
I do something kinda similar. I give an LLM the summarized diary as context (I have an LLM recursively summarize the diary into days, months, and years and save that text). I find this acts as a better form of something like ChatGPT's memory feature. And it can be very valuable for when I need help making some life decisions and such.
I asked myself: what is my most valuable possession?
Easy. Probably my MacBook, and then my Balenciaga flip flops, and then my future sexy red Ferrari once I get rich enough to buy it. Oh, I can already see its holy shine and feel the cold metal beneath my hands --
I'm joking. The real thing, weirdly enough, is my diary.
I never would have expected that when I started writing it. When I was a kid, I always thought a diary was the thing the weird kids and also your grandma wrote in. And that you start it with "dear diary", and draw little hearts in it, and write about your crush and yearn over them for endless pages. And while I still write endless pages yearning over my crushes, it's become something much bigger than that.
It's turned into my own little time machine, and given me several benefits I didn't expect.
My journey to insanity
My diary these days is insanely long. It's over 750,000 words (3,000 pages). But believe it or not, there was a time when my diary was 0 words.
I started writing my diary as writing practice. I was writing novels, and wanted to see if I could take "what happened today" and make it fun to read. I wrote these for a week, then forgot them.
Months later, I found them and was shocked by how interesting it was to read back. I had forgotten many of the moments, and the writing transported me back to them.
I had written those entries during an important part of my life -- when I was talking to my first girlfriend, before we dated, including the time I asked her out. This is the actual entry I wrote that day:
I thought to myself how, if I hadn't written those entries, I would have forgotten this formative part of my life.
Stephen King talks about how writing is time travel. I discovered that firsthand then. I could read what I had written and be back in that moment.
That inspired me to start writing more regularly. At first, I only wrote when I was in my emo feels. But over time, I started writing in it every day. And now I sit at the insane point of having a full book-series-length of diary entries.
Already gone
The main reason I started taking my diary seriously was because a life forgotten scared me.
When I look at my childhood, 99% of the important memories are gone. Even recent memories fade quickly. Whenever I read back a random entry, I'm shocked by how much I forgot.
If I don't write it down, then eventually I'll forget. And if I forget, then 10 years from now, isn't that the same as it not even happening in the first place?
The whole "time" idea is the most emo-ifying thing I can think of. Every moment feels like it's over before it begins. Every moment I ever want to happen, everything I am excited for, hoping for -- I know that when I get it, it will already be over.
I write so that my life does not disappear. To give some semblance of present to my past. To prevent it from dying and fading away into nothing. It is my little taped together cardboard time machine.
Stupid T-Rex pegs
One thing I didn't expect: my diary significantly improved my writing style. It turns out writing 750,000 words does actually improve your skills.
The biggest change is that my writing became genuinely creative.
I don't filter anything in my diary, and I almost never edit it. If I write something stupid, that's fine, I just keep writing. It's an unfiltered access into my mind in that moment. Flaws and all.
There's no expectation for it to be good, and somehow that usually makes it pretty good. Sometimes, I'll read back and find myself impressed at the casually poetic or deep or funny things that I wrote.
At some point, I got into the habit of accepting and nurturing every stupid thought that I had. The crazy ones. The weird Tyrannosaurus-rex-shaped pegs trying to fit into square holes. After a while of this, my mind just felt more creative.
I even started doing stand-up comedy and writing a comedy book. In fact, the internal voice of the comedy book is extremely similar to the prose voice I write with in my diary (except somehow even lower IQ).
Know thyself
Sometimes, I look at myself, at my hands, at my face, and I feel confusion and ask, "Who am I?"
It's weird. I've lived my entire life in my body. Yet, there are moments when I feel like I don't know myself.
Who am I?
There's a saying of how you have three faces: one you show the world, one you show your close ones, and one you show only yourself.
I would take it even a layer deeper.
There's also a face you don't even show yourself. All the stuff you never stop long enough to think about. We spend most of our lives on autopilot, hooked up to dopamine-dispensing machines. It's hard to self-examine. But writing a diary has given me better clarity on all this.
The face I show the world talks out loud. It's mature, reasonably smart, and occasionally impressive.
The face I show myself is the voice in my head, talking constantly and making dumb, immature jokes about farting at the most inconvenient times. Writing is the best way I can access this exact internal voice in my head. As a result, my diary is filled with an unholy amount of fart jokes.
Sometimes, I will glimpse the hidden face. I will write about things that I've been avoiding, or that I never took the time to write about before. And I look this hidden face in the eyes -- the part of me that has failed more than I would like to admit, is more self-absorbed than I consciously think -- and accept it.
Every time I look at that hidden face and accept it, it shrinks. Maybe one day I will understand and accept all those hidden parts of myself. Maybe one day, I can say with confidence that I know myself.
How to
train your dragonwrite your diaryThe generic-but-valid advice first:
And now, some not-as-generic advice:
Transport me, baby
Certain entries seem to transport me into that memory more vividly than others. Usually, it's the ones that are actually trying to. The ones that describe with visuals or other senses. Even just one line of vivid description can help. They make your time machine better.
I even had a brief stint where I started writing my diary in third person. For some reason, my third person writing is more vivid like a novel, whereas first person is funnier and often deeper. Both have their merits.
Take this for example:
It's no Hemingway, but it paints a picture in my mind. When I write in first person, I probably would have just done "it rained today". Boringggg.
Cringe-maximizer
I subconsciously avoid writing about certain things. Embarrassing things. But, honestly, those are the best to write about. They are where you can come to know yourself. Whenever you sense yourself avoiding something, lean into it.
The sheer amount of embarrassing and cringe things I've done in my life is, well, a lot. Whenever you write about it, you cut away at its hold on you.
It's made me more comfortable with all that. Less embarrassed by anything. Just writing something down helps you accept it. Realize that, well, you're a human. And while we strive to be more than that, every cell in our bodies came from some monkey-minded fool caveman obsessed with hitting rocks against things.
There is a popular idea that AI could take over the world by being a "paperclip maximizer" -- turning the universe into paperclips. That is me. Except instead of paperclips, I maximize the amount of cringe I feel when I reread my diary.
Goodbye, sweet time
I am writing this sentence on October 7, 2026, 10:50 AM. Now it is done, and that moment is gone. You are reading this sentence. Now you are done, and that moment is over. You will never get it back.
We are a point in time, and we move only forward. We are infinitely thin, a point, we only experience one moment at a time.
Maybe one day, we will be more than this. But until then, I have this dumb, beautiful, unhinged, poetic, feeble, powerful diary. It doesn't let me cheat time. The moments are gone forever.
But it's the closest thing I've found.