We don’t write things down to remember them. We write them down to forget.

That's the true value of notebooks, notes apps, bookmarking tools, and everything else built to help us remember. They’re insurance for ideas. They let us forget.

Most of our thought and the random things we discover aren’t actually valuable. We’ll write them down then never give them a second thought. You could get the same value by writing them down, then setting fire to the paper and scattering the ashes to the wind.

The problem is we ascribe value to our thoughts and findings. They took time to think up and find; they’ve got to be worth something. We’re scared to lose them.

Daniel Kahneman explains the concept of “Loss aversion” in Thinking, Fast and Slow, “The response to losses is stronger than the response to gains.”

It’s biological, naturally selected into our DNA: “Organisms that treat threats as more urgent than opportunities have a better chance to survive and reproduce.”

Try to remember it all with misplaced loss aversion, only to strain under the weight of a million open mental tabs and erode our ability to remember the important things.

We need to forget, but we first must feel safe forgetting.

We need to feel safe that our memories were not in vain, that they’ll be there if we want them again. Only then can we let go.

Flipping through your old notes suddenly “feels like sifting through stale garbage,” as Dan Shipper found, disillusioned after building a galaxy of notes in Roam Research. It turns out most of our ideas and discoveries aren’t actually worth that much, not on their own anyhow.

Evernote to OneNote, Moleskins to Field Notes, Roam to Obsidian. We blame the tools, the techniques. Surely they’re to blame. A new app will be better.

Then we dump our newest thoughts into it, try the latest features to organize notes, until we’re back to safely forgetting things. Then the illusion gets shattered again, and we’re on to the next new thing.

You’ll come across those best ideas again and again; your notes end up merely being a record of when you first encountered the idea.

But hey, storage is cheap. Might as well keep the illusion of value going, as long as it gives you the mental safety to forget.