The Meaning of Keeping a Journal
At the end of the month, while reviewing my diary to gather material for the monthly post, I stumbled across my entries from February 28th of 2017, 2018, and 2019 on DayOne, and from 2020, 2021, and 2022 on Daylio.
It was only then I realized — this habit of journaling has been quietly going on for six years. Reading back through those six years felt genuinely strange and moving. So this post is about journals: what they’re actually for.
For me, keeping a journal does three things:
- It’s a tool for self-awareness
- It reflects the meaning back out of daily life
- It records the beautiful things nearby
1. A tool for self-awareness
Self-awareness means noticing your real feelings and emotions, and understanding what you actually need and want, so you can find purpose and meaning in your life.
One of the great things about journaling is that it helps you understand your own thinking through the accumulation of small daily reflections — like a mindfulness aid that reveals who you are by helping you observe your own emotional states.
A few years ago in college, I even built an app called “Twin Diary” — its core matching and psychological reporting features were both designed around exactly this idea of self-awareness.
2. Reflecting the meaning back out of daily life
This is fundamentally the same idea as self-awareness, since self-awareness is itself one of the main paths toward finding meaning. But I wanted to pull it out separately and explore it a bit more.
In an earlier post — Thoughts on the Value and Experience of Life — I wrote that “life is a string of fleeting moments, and what matters most is the here and now,” and that “the meaning of life is not granted by so-called ‘milestones’ but by the ordinary, unpredictable texture of daily living.”
The sense of meaning we seek but can’t quite grasp begins, first and foremost, with genuinely throwing yourself into life. Only when you are “truly present” do you build a deep, honest connection with life — and life finds its own way to give back to you.
In the Japanese tea ceremony tradition, there is the concept of “ichigo ichie” — the idea that this meeting can never happen again, that it is a once-in-a-lifetime encounter, and so both host and guest must give it everything they have. It comes from the Buddhist concept of impermanence: cherish each passing moment, and pour your whole heart into what may be the only time this ever happens.
The delicious meal in front of you, the fish jumping in the river, the petals falling by the roadside — every moment, every thing can bring a genuine inner joy, a welling-up of happiness. Even fear or anger belongs to the present. All we ever have is our current experience. To be aware of the emotions of the moment, to experience them, to welcome them — that is what it means to be alive.
And journaling captures each of these “present moments” — these awarenesses and feelings. The notes may never be useful later. But simply writing them down is itself a reflection of life’s meaning, and it produces a kind of quiet fullness: at least this feeling was real, at least this moment wasn’t wasted.
3. Recording the beautiful things nearby
This one took me four years of journaling to discover: if you’re going to record anything at all, why not record only the good things?
In last year’s year-end review, I wrote: “When I look back on the day before sleep, I deliberately choose to record only the beautiful things that happened — partly hoping for good dreams, and partly hoping tomorrow might be even better.” And when you look back years later, what you’ll find is a collection of beautiful things. Isn’t that something wonderful in itself?
May we not spend our whole lives rushing and drifting, but instead bring joy and enthusiasm to the living of a beautiful life.
I’ll close with a passage from my WWDC 19 travel diary from 2019:
This Month’s Log
At the start of the month I went on my first-ever work trip, to Beijing for GMTC. The Beijing edition of this conference has been repeatedly postponed since 2020 due to the pandemic, so it was quite the journey just to make it happen.
In Beijing I got to see an old friend I hadn’t seen in five years. We’d been closest friends once, and I’d assumed we might simply grow apart for good. But when we met again, neither of us could even remember why we’d lost touch. He was exactly the same.
A few moments from February:
P1: 🍶 An evening in a quiet, cool Beiluogu Lane. Not run-down — just cool and still, a few scattered lights illuminating the deep hutong. I loved the “bookshop that doesn’t sell books” and a chocolate-focused spot called “Cacao Ballet.”
P2: 🍻 Someone jumped in, a small bar deep in the hutong. That night we walked through endless dark alleys for over an hour before finding this place to duck in out of the cold. A few days after returning from Beijing, I saw a blogger I follow had also visited the same bar (I borrowed the photo below from his newsletter). There was a strange sense of time folding over itself. Side note: Beijing shops close incredibly early — almost nowhere to go after 8 or 9pm, and past 10pm you can barely find a ride home QAQ.
P3: 🌺 The plumeria tree downstairs bloomed. Spring is here. I really love the street below my building — it runs alongside a small river, quiet and lovely.
P4: 🍩 Sunset over the sea, with a plane crossing overhead.
P5: 🚗 A rare trip to Guangzhou, but it took nearly eight hours round trip — a day of relentless traffic jams. I seem to attract accidents wherever I go.
P6: 🍾 Friday night, I had friends over to snack, vent, and watch movies.
P7: 🎮 Found an incredibly beautiful scene while doing a Genshin Impact quest.
P8: 📮 Since I encouraged letter-writing in last month’s post, more friends have started writing. Last month: 20 letters exchanged. Letter correspondence really does feel calmer and more substantial. Readers are welcome to write to me too — airing@ursb.me — about anything at all~
P9: 📝 On the work front: gave a department presentation, wrote a technical article, took on a sponsored post on Zhihu, studied Android JNI programming, and integrated a debugger into the project’s V8 engine.
P10: 🎬 This month’s books, films, and shows (apparently my most active month yet):
- Finished: Novel | Letter from an Unknown Woman | ★★★★★
- Finished: Novel | The Thirteen Steps | ★★★☆☆
- Reading: Novel | Demian | ★★★★★
- Watched: Film | Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania | ★★★☆☆
- Watched: Film | The Platform | ★★★☆☆
- Finished: J-Drama | Nagi’s Long Vacation | ★★★★★
- Watching: US Drama | The Last of Us | ★★★★★
- Watching: Drama | Three-Body | ★★★★★
- Watching: Anime | Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood | ★★★★★
- Playing: Switch | Persona 5 Royal | ★★★★★
- Playing: Steam | Red Dead Redemption 2 | ★★★★★
