Again, I am really hyped about taking notes. Again, I spend hours and hours inside Roam Research, jumping from one note to the next, finding some obscure highlight I've taken a while back. Again, I'm rediscovering that this is the magic of Roam, the frictionless way to have a dialogue with past versions of yourself, the frictionless way to talk with yourself from four years ago about something that interested you then and suddenly it interests you again. These interests of mine are like waves, crashing on the shores of the note-taking apps where they leave their mark, and then I discover them again years in the future and am delighted by the discovery.
My note-taking practice can be described as sporadic at best and the fact that I like to try one note-taking app for a while and then switch to another doesn't help. In the past I've been jumping around between Bear, Obsidian, and Roam. Bear feels the most cozy and I like to think of it as the most permanent one, but then I get annoyed by the lack of features and Readwise highlights, so I switch to Obsidian and then I get annoyed by the fact that linking to a block is so weird and switch to Roam, but then I run to the coziness of Bear after a while because Roam feels too much like a “magical junkyard” and that scares me a little.
Well, I've come to appreciate the wildness and rawness of Roam and I embrace it now. I think note-taking shouldn't be too tame, there needs to be some illegibility baked in. If it's too tame, it becomes dead in the Christopher Alexander sense. Perhaps what has driven me toward Roam's embrace is this highlight from "Where Good Ideas Come From":
After all, I don't think I should judge a note-taking app solely by vibes, which are immaculate in Bear. I think I should judge them by the level of excitement I feel when I use them, because making an activity more fun means I'll do more of it. And also, I think I should judge them by the level at which they enable conversation between different versions of myself and this level is unprecedented and still unmatched in Roam. The only thing I dislike in Roam is the search — I think it could be done much better if it were semantic instead of full text. That's one of the main motivations for my crazy idea of building a minimalistic Roam alternative.
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