20 Years of Journaling as a Dataset: Recurring Patterns, Fading Affect Bias, and the Limits of Self-Observation Without External Analysis Author: Дністер Published: 2026-09-23T03:01:42.000Z Language: en URL: https://neurodrift.org/en/blog/ya-vedu-shchodennyk-20-rokiv-povtoryuvavsya/ Original (Ukrainian): https://neurodrift.org/blog/ya-vedu-shchodennyk-20-rokiv-povtoryuvavsya/ Tags: journaling, self-deception, memory, habit, stoicism Original source: https://neurodrift.org/blog/ya-vedu-shchodennyk-20-rokiv-povtoryuvavsya/ A personal reflection on 20 years of journaling and meta-pattern recognition: why an archive built against forgetting becomes a repeat machine. Kahneman, the "end of history illusion," the fading affect bias, Marcus Aurelius, and Robert Shields, who wrote 37.5 million words about his own life — and never lived it. A scalpel without anesthesia, with verified sources. ----- The Earth's axis seems immovable. The North Star hangs over the North Pole with such confidence, as if it had been nailed there. But it isn't nailed. The axis slowly traces a cone — like a spinning top slowing before it falls, only in ultra-slow motion. In roughly twelve thousand years Vega will become the pole star. And then the circle will close, and in 25,772 years Polaris will return to exactly the same point in the sky from which the first astronomers once began to look. The planet was never moving forward. The whole time it was drawing a circle — and passing it off as motion. I know about this circle not from an astronomy textbook. I know about it because I've kept a diary for twenty years. And last week I did what a diarist must never do: I opened the volumes in sequence. Not one. All of them. And I saw my own precession. The One Who This Year Finally Changed I have an antagonist. He lives on the first page of every new volume, and he's easy to recognize by his handwriting — he writes a little straighter than usual, because he's full of resolve. I call him The One Who This Year Finally Changed. He shows up in January (sometimes in September, sometimes just on a birthday), sits down at the desk and swears the old cycle is over. That now everything is different. That he's understood. He writes it with such sincerity that it's impossible not to believe him. The trouble is, I have twenty of his oaths. And they're all dated. And they're all — word for word — about the same thing. This is the cheapest way I know to catch yourself lying: you just have to live long enough to have an archive. Because one year's lie sounds like an epiphany. A lie repeated twenty times with the same pathos sounds like a diagnosis. My inner One Who Finally Changed is no optimist. He's a repeat offender with a flawless attendance record: twenty years running he comes to repent and twenty years running he walks back out to commit the same job. I just spent all that time never confronting him with himself. Or more precisely — he's a head accountant who files the same annual report twenty years running. The letterhead changes, the date is fresh, the handwriting resolute. And down at the bottom, where the balance is, it's the same number, year after year, to the cent. Accounting, after all, is the place where self-deception is first asked for its papers. For twenty years I accepted those reports without looking, because who reconciles a balance that's guaranteed not to add up. And when I finally did add it up — laid the volumes side by side and read them straight through — it turned out the psychologists had named this back in 2013, and one study was enough to strip me bare. This psychology has always existed. But in 2025–2026 it got a new operating system. Day One AI, Notion AI, voice journals with transcription, LLM summaries of "your year in five sentences" — all of it makes the loop faster and more invisible. Before, the archive was retouched by slow memory, over years, like an old accountant smoothing the numbers by hand. Now you have an outside firm that does it in a second without your involvement: the algorithm automatically curates your "highlights," throws out the boring Tuesdays, keeps the peaks — and files an already-groomed annual report. Before, you had to wait years for memory to do its cosmetics. Now you just press "Create Summary" — and the balance is reconciled by default, in your favor, with the quiet obligingness of an auditor signing off on whatever he's paid for. The illusion you repeat every decade Quoidbach, Gilbert and Wilson surveyed over 19,000 people aged 18 to 68 across six studies. The question was insultingly simple: how much have you changed over the past ten years — and how much will you change over the next? Almost everyone admitted the same thing: oh, over the past decade I became a completely different person. And almost everyone predicted: but now I'm fully formed, from here on I'll barely change. The twenty-year-olds thought so. And the forty-year-olds. And the sixty-year-olds. In fairness: the illusion weakens with age — in the young it's thickest, and over the years the margin of error narrows (the researchers logged a decline, b ≈ −0.13). But it narrows, it doesn't vanish: even the oldest participants still underestimated how much life would yet rewrite them. Everyone stood on their own step and sincerely believed it was the last step — the sixty-year-old just erred a little more modestly than the twenty-year-old. The researchers called this the end of history illusion — the stable conviction that right now you've reached the final version of yourself, after which the history of your personality essentially ends. Do you see what this means for a diarist? That the phrase "now I finally understand who I am" isn't a conclusion. It's a symptom. And I recorded that symptom twenty years running, each time mistaking it for recovery. My diary isn't a chronicle of maturing. It's the same illusion photographed twenty times from different angles, every frame signed by the hand of a man convinced that this one, surely, is the final shot — and so on through twenty "final" shots in a row. "Now I finally understand who I am" isn't a conclusion. It's a symptom. And I recorded it for twenty years, each time mistaking it for recovery. I could console myself that at least relative to other people I'm moving somewhere. Personality psychology takes even that comfort away. Roberts and DelVecchio pulled together 152 longitudinal studies — 3,217 correlations — and measured how stable your position is relative to others across a lifetime. The picture: in childhood the test-retest correlation is .31, in college years .54, at thirty .64, and between fifty and seventy it plateaus around .74 and freezes there. That is, the older you get, the less you move relative to others. Translated into accounting: your "self among people" isn't working capital that turns over daily, it's a fixed asset that's long since been on the books and after fifty is barely revalued. For twenty years I recorded depreciation in my diary — while keeping the books on an object that never moved. The diary, it turns out, doesn't record evolution. It records an orbit. I thought I was writing a story of ascent. I was writing a radius — and for twenty years I confused the length of the record with the distance traveled. Diary fixes the rail and calls it a life It gets worse, because now it's no longer about self-assessment but about the very material of the records. Wendy Wood and colleagues studied habits for thirty years — and here's the delicate irony: the number about to crush me they obtained with a diary. In a 2002 study people recorded their own behavior every hour, and it turned out about 43% of daily actions are performed automatically — in the same context, while thinking about something else entirely (a later 2006 review raised the estimate to 45%). That is, nearly half of what you "lived" today, you didn't choose. It was a rail — and even the diarist who measured it sat down the next evening to write about it as if it were a decision. And now the trick. When you sit down to write in the evening, you don't record the rail as a rail. You record it as an event. "Today I again chose to take that route, because I needed time to think" — that sounds like the decision of a free person. In reality your legs carried you down that route because they carry you down it every day, and your brain wrote the motivation afterward, like credits to a film long since shot without it. The diary takes the rail, slaps the label "choice" on it — and the repeat is guaranteed in advance, because you didn't even notice you were repeating yourself. Diary fixes the rail and calls it a life. I catch myself at this in the most banal things. For twenty years I've written variations on one sentence about how "this time I'll organize my workday differently." For twenty years my workday begins with the same action at the same hour. The rail hasn't changed once. Only the adjectives I described it with have changed. That's the sum of my free will over two decades — a list of synonyms for the word "again." "Today I again chose this route" — sounds like the decision of a free person. But your legs carry you down it every day, and the trail of doubles behind you confirms it. The turtle with a scarred shell crawls the same groove it has already worn twenty times. The sum of my free will over twenty years fit into a list of synonyms for the word "again." The Remembering-Self's organ Here it's worth stopping and asking: why didn't I see this earlier? I was rereading, after all. Kahneman gave the answer, and it's merciless. Kahneman split the human into two. There's the Experiencing Self — the one who lives second by second, the boredom, the fatigue, the dragging Tuesdays. And there's the Remembering Self — the one who afterward assembles a story out of it. And the Remembering Self judges not by the sum of what was lived but by two points: the peak and the end. The rest is erased. In a 1993 experiment people were asked to hold a hand in ice water. One version — 60 seconds of pain at 14°C. The other — the same 60 seconds, then another 30 seconds while the water was warmed ever so slightly to 15°C, so the end was a touch less unbearable. Objectively the second version is more suffering: the same 60 seconds plus another half-minute of cold. And yet, when people were asked which experience they'd agree to repeat, most chose the longer one. Because the end was better. Memory rewrote more pain into a less painful memory — only because the last note sounded softer. Now look at what a diary is. A diary is not the Experiencing Self. The Experiencing Self doesn't write; it has no time, it's living. The one who always writes is the Remembering Self — in the evening, after the fact, from the summit of the day. The diary is literally the Remembering Self's organ, externalized onto paper. And therefore it's structurally incapable of recording duration, boredom and repetition. It records only peaks and endings. For twenty years I haven't kept a chronicle. I've kept a montage — and, like every editor, the footage I hold longest in my hands is exactly the footage I later throw out: the takes where nothing happens, that is, most of my life, that is, the rail, that is, the only evidence of the repeat. The archive that lies in your favor And even this isn't the bottom. Because what's left after the montage is also faked — and faked systematically, in one direction. It's called the fading affect bias. The emotional charge of negative memories fades faster than that of positive ones. Part of the negative starts fading within the first twelve hours after the event — and stays muted for months. Joy stays on the books at full value; pain depreciates overnight. This means that when, five years later, I reread an entry about a hard day, in my head it's already been revalued in softer tones than it really was — the wound on paper is drawn cheaper than it felt to the hand that wrote it. Now combine this with the repeat. I make a mistake. I record it hot, with all the pain — the full sum of the loss, as is. Time passes, the pain fades by the law of fading affect bias, the brain quietly transfers this loss to the "experience" column, and when I reread it the consequence looks tolerable. "Well, I got burned, but I survived." And the next time, standing before the same mistake, I don't have enough fear in the archive to stop. The risk reserve has been written off. And I repeat the mistake — not despite the diary but thanks to it. Memory softens burns automatically, in your favor, so you won't fear the kitchen; the diary is the same obliging accountant that year after year understates the price of your old burns, so you keep reaching for the same stove. Interestingly, in people with depressive symptoms this effect weakens or inverts — for them the past doesn't brighten, it darkens. Here's the hook that runs cold: healthy thinking isn't accurate accounting, it's accounting that systematically lies to you in the plus. Depression, in essence, is honest bookkeeping that records every loss at full value and won't let you forget a single one. Normal is when the numbers are touched up just enough to get you out of bed in the morning. My diary is an accomplice in this forgery, only a qualified one: it doesn't just lie, it keeps double-entry books and certifies every line with a date. The most dangerous bookkeeping isn't the kind where they steal. It's the kind where the balance is reconciled so beautifully that the owner stops checking the tills. I repeat the mistake not despite the diary but thanks to it: it understates the price of old burns — and I reach for the same stove again. The man who recorded everything and lived nothing And now — the man who took all this to its logical conclusion, and from whom I still go cold. Reverend Robert Shields, an English teacher from the town of Dayton, Washington, recorded his life every five minutes from 1972 to 1997. Not every day — every five minutes. He sat in a tiny office with several IBM typewriters at the ready and described everything: what he ate and how much he paid, the air temperature, how many people came to his sermon, every urination. He slept in fragments, no more than four hours at a stretch, to keep up with recording his dreams. He even left samples of nostril hair on the pages — "for future science." The total: 37.5 million words, four hours of writing a day, twenty-five years (1972–1997), and an archive now held at Washington State University — by older descriptions in 91 boxes, by the updated 2024 catalog already in 96. And a ban on reading any of it while he and his wife are alive. The world's most detailed ledger of a single life — with an entry for every urination and a zero line on whether the life was worth living that way. Stop for a second on this arithmetic. Four hours a day, for a quarter of a century, a man spent describing a life he wasn't living during those very four hours. He didn't watch the sunset — he logged that he was watching the sunset. He feared losing any moment so frantically that he traded the moment itself for its description. The machine against forgetting devoured the present it was meant to preserve. He built the world's most detailed monument to a human life — and the monument came out empty, because the sitter, while he posed, never noticed that he himself was already no longer inside. The worst part isn't that Shields is a deranged exception. The worst part is that he's not an exception but a limit. He is me, extended to my logical endpoint. Every diarist stands somewhere on this line between "don't write at all" and "write instead of living." And the needle only crawls one way. The antagonist of the diary isn't the lazy man who doesn't keep one. The antagonist is the fanatic, into whose record everything fit except life itself. I keep Shields before me like the skull on a Stoic's desk. Not as a curiosity. As a warning of who you become if you confuse recording life with living it for long enough. The great circle and the small difference And yet I didn't burn my twenty volumes. Because there's a second half to the story, and it redeems — just enough to keep me from peace. But here there's a strong counterargument, and it deserves to be stated honestly. James Pennebaker, a psychologist at the University of Texas, ran dozens of studies and found: expressive writing — when a person records hard experiences for 15–20 minutes a day — lowers cortisol levels, improves immune markers and eases anxiety symptoms. This data is real and replicated. A diary can be a therapeutic tool. To complain about it is unfair. But here's what this truth doesn't explain: Pennebaker studied therapeutic writing — a short, focused discharge of emotion about a specific event, most often 15–20 minutes four days running. Not an archive of self-description, not an annual oath to finally change. The difference is fundamental: therapeutic writing discharges the emotion and closes the gestalt — record the loss, write it off, close the period. The narrative diary — the "who am I and where am I going" diary — does the opposite: it doesn't close the account, it keeps it open for years, continuously accruing interest on the story about yourself, which has to be serviced and which eventually starts running you. The first lowers cortisol. The second feeds the loop. And the millions of people who open Day One or Notion every evening are mostly keeping the second — while thinking they're keeping the first. They buy therapy, they get a subscription to a debt pit. Marcus Aurelius ruled an empire for twenty years and all those years wrote "To Himself" — a text never meant for other eyes. Open it. It's not an ascending line of wisdom. It's the repetition of a few of the same thoughts, again and again: remember that you're mortal; don't waste the morning on grievances; do your work and don't expect gratitude. The most influential man of his world reminded himself each night of the same thing as the night before. His diary too was a circle, not an arrow. But — and here's where the blade is — for him the repeat wasn't degeneration. It was a practice. A rehearsal. He repeated deliberately, because he knew: what you don't repeat consciously repeats you unconsciously. This isn't a chronicle kept in order to have one — it's accounting reconciled in order not to forget. Anaïs Nin, whose handwritten diary grew to roughly 150 volumes (about 15,000 typed pages, and in the handwritten original at the university, some 35,000), called it "a second life," a way of living more intensely. And precisely because she kept it so densely, the same script surfaced in it too — but she at least looked at it with open eyes, instead of filing it away without looking. Here's the only difference that exists at all. Not between the one who repeats and the one who doesn't — only the dead don't repeat. The difference between discipline and a loop is only whether you repeat what you CHOSE — or whether the unchosen repeats you. Marcus Aurelius chose his maxims and returned to them like a fast. For twenty years I returned to my rails, having chosen none, and called it an autobiography. The Earth's axis traces a cone and returns to the same point in the sky in 25,772 years. Open an old volume next to a fresh one — and you'll see your precession: a circle, not an arrow. The ancient turtle, its shell cracked like a diary cover, has come back to rest exactly where it set out. Only the dead don't repeat. The question isn't "circle or not" — the question is who drew it: you or inertia. What the diary can't do: a register of the past versus a budget of the future Here an honest skeptic should interrupt me. Fine, suppose the narrative diary is a loop. But where's the evidence it can change anything at all? Maybe I've spent twenty years demanding of a tool something it was never designed for — and blaming the hammer that drives screws badly? And this honest question kills my last comfort more precisely than everything before it. Because when you go looking for longitudinal evidence that the "who am I" diary changes behavior, you don't find it. Pennebaker measured cortisol and immune markers — the body, not the trajectory of a life. And where psychologists have actually learned to shift behavior, the format turned out to be the direct opposite of the confessional volume. Peter Gollwitzer showed across dozens of studies: what works are implementation intentions — the dry conditional construction "if situation X, then action Y." Not "I want to move more," but "if it's Tuesday, 7:30, then sneakers and out the door." This raises the odds of real change several-fold. Gabriele Oettingen added the second half: her WOOP method (Wish–Outcome–Obstacle–Plan) works precisely because it forces you first to imagine the obstacle, not just the dreamed-of result. Mere pleasant fantasizing about a changed version of yourself — the main genre of my diary — doesn't correlate with achievement; in part of the data it correlates with it negatively. Dream that you'll change, and the brain has already handed you an advance of satisfaction against work not yet done. Let's translate into accounting, because here the difference is naked. The narrative diary is a register of the past: you record what already happened, in tones that flatter you. The implementation intention is a budget of the future: not "what I was," but "how much and on what I'll spend tomorrow, and where exactly I'm likely to be robbed." The first looks back and writes memoirs. The second looks forward and sets limits. For twenty years I confused these two documents — kept a plump, lovely memoir and wondered why it didn't run the till. The memoir isn't supposed to. You don't reconcile a balance with a memoir; you admire a memoir in retirement. The narrative diary is a register of the past in flattering tones. Change comes from a budget of the future: not "what I was," but "where exactly I'll be robbed tomorrow." The tool: four questions to your own archive If you keep a diary too — or mean to — here's the frame I now apply to entries. It doesn't cure the precession; an orbit can't be cured. It only strips you of the right to pass it off as a straight flight. Question to the entryIf yes — it's a loop (unchosen)If yes — it's a practice (chosen) Who's writing? The Experiencing Self or the Remembering Self?I write the plot after the fact with pathos, peak + end, boredom thrown outI record the boring dragging day too, no montage, including the rail Has this happened before? Have I met this sentence in earlier volumes?"This year, finally" — and so twenty times runningI consciously return to the same maxim, because I chose it as a support Rail or choice? Did I choose this today — or was the motivation written onto an automatism?I do the action daily at the same hour, and in the entry — "decided"The action really differs from yesterday's; a concrete fork is visible How much pain was erased? Is the wound on paper = the wound in the hand that wrote?I reread and think "it was fine, really" — fading affect did its cosmeticsI keep the hot entry alongside as a price tag for repeating the mistake The rule is simple: before believing an entry, ask which of the two of you wrote it and how many frames were cut. And once a year do the thing a diarist instinctively flees — read the volumes in sequence, not selectively. Selective reading shows the peaks. Continuous reading shows the orbit. That's exactly why we read selectively: not out of laziness, but because continuous reading is the one mirror that refuses to flatter us. And here it's worth naming those for whom this silence is profitable — because in every loop someone charges admission. Moleskine sells you an empty notebook for twenty euros. Day One sells a subscription to a cloud where your oaths will lie. Notion sells space for the next notebook, when this one fails. "Atomic Habits" and its fifty clones sell instructions on how to keep a notebook better. None of them earns money from you reconciling the balance and closing the firm. They all earn from opening a new period. Every time The One Who This Year Finally Changed sits down at a clean first page, revenue lands somewhere in someone else's neighborhood. Self-improvement is an audit firm you hire to check your books, which instead sells you another volume and quietly agrees with your inner head accountant never to show the owner the consolidated balance. Leonard naked before the mirror In the finale of "Memento," Leonard Shelby stands naked before a mirror, covered in fact-tattoos, because without short-term memory the world disappears for him every twelve minutes. He holds captioned Polaroids instead of memories. And he says: "I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world's still there… We all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are. I'm no different." The diary is Leonard's tattoos. An external memory you trust more than yourself. Except Leonard, it turns out, quietly edits his own prompts — leaves himself exactly the facts he can live on, and crosses out the ones that would force him to stop. This isn't a failure of memory. It's bookkeeping that keeps the books toward a foregone conclusion: hold the course. I do the same, every entry, twenty years — I tally the day so that tomorrow I'll have the nerve to wake up. The mirror doesn't lie about Polaris shifting. It lies more subtly and more profitably: it gives the feeling of progress while you trace a circle, and charges a modest monthly fee for the illusion. I won't stop keeping a diary. That would be the last — most coquettish — oath of The One Who This Year Finally Changed: solemnly to renounce the habit, only to return to it with relief by tomorrow. I'll simply no longer confuse the radius with the path, or the register of the past with the budget of tomorrow. For the first time in twenty years I reconciled the balance straight through across all periods and signed under the loss I'd been touching up. I began the twenty-first volume with a single line, no pathos and no resolute handwriting: this year, most likely, nothing will change — and that's exactly why it matters what to revolve around. Because the most frightening thing isn't that Polaris shifts. The most frightening thing is that it returns. And you keep standing on the same pole, swearing you're looking forward. Sources: Quoidbach, Gilbert & Wilson, "The End of History Illusion," Science (2013), 339:96–98; six studies, N>19,000, ages 18–68; the illusion weakens with age (b ≈ −0.13) but is present even in the oldest — science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1229294 Roberts & DelVecchio, "The Rank-Order Consistency of Personality Traits," Psychological Bulletin (2000); 152 studies, 3,217 correlations; .31 → .54 → .64 → plateau .74 (50–70) — pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10668348 Wood, Quinn & Kashy, "Habits in Everyday Life," J. Personality & Social Psychology (2002) — diary study, ≈43% automatic behavior in the same context — pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12500811; a later review, Neal, Wood & Quinn (2006), gives ≈45% — journals.sagepub.com (Habits — A Repeat Performance) Fading affect bias: onset ~12 h and retention up to 3 months — Gibbons, Lee & Walker, Applied Cognitive Psychology (2011) — onlinelibrary.wiley.com (acp.1738); theoretical review + inversion under depression — Walker & Skowronski (2009) — niu.edu/jskowronski (PDF) Kahneman, Fredrickson, Schreiber & Redelmeier, "When More Pain Is Preferred to Less" (1993); peak–end rule, experiment 60 s (14°C) vs 60+30 s (to 15°C) — en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak–endrule Pennebaker, J.W., "Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions" (1990); expressive writing → cortisol, immunity — pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov (Pennebaker & Beall, 1986 meta) Marcus Aurelius, "Meditations" / "To Himself"; repetition of maxims as practice — cambridge.org (Cambridge Companion to Marcus Aurelius) Robert Shields, diarist (1918–2007); 37.5 million words, every 5 min, 1972–1997; 91 boxes by older descriptions, 96 in the updated 2024 WSU catalog — en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RobertShields(diarist); news.wsu.edu (2024, cataloging the world's longest diary) The Diary of Anaïs Nin; ≈150 manuscript volumes, ≈15,000 typed pages (handwritten original at UCLA — ≈35,000 pages), "a second life" — oac.cdlib.org (UCLA finding aid); en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheDiaryofAnaïsNin Gollwitzer, P.M., implementation intentions ("if X, then Y") — meta-analysis Gollwitzer & Sheeran (2006), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology; Oettingen, G., WOOP method / mental contrasting — woopmylife.org/science Axial precession, full cycle 25,772 years, Polaris → Vega (~14,500 CE) → return — en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axialprecession "Memento" (Nolan, 2000), Leonard's closing monologue — imdb.com/title/tt0209144/quotes