A Place That Doesn't Talk Back

The One Room Where AI Doesn't Belong

I recently opened Day One, the journal app I’ve been using for over 15 years, to be confronted with this.

Except what I actually saw was Donald Sutherland’s character from Invasion of the Bodysnatchers raise his arm, point at me and screech hideously.

Something in me snapped.

What seemed to be the last bastion of probity and decency in the journalling software niche had broken the most sacred of trusts. This was the galvanising moment that shredded my ennui and transformed it into a drive to carve out the space that had been stolen from me.

I want a place for reflection, reverie and review.

I want a sanctum where I can be provoked, amazed, perhaps even ambushed by my past.

I don’t want that place to be summarised or rephrased for me.

I certainly don’t want a digital counsellor in that sanctum pretending to know me, when I don’t even know myself.

I don’t want my journal to talk back to me. I want it to remind me of the dead ends, the breakthroughs, the summits, the nadirs of that person who recorded everything for me to evaluate from the perspective of a higher camp on Mount Metacognition.

Now much is made of metacognition, and I’ve spent a good part of the last two years looking at how my mind works, its traps, its biases, its algorithms — my journal is after all a window into the mind of the man who had less perspective than the man I am now.

My journal serves to remind me that the journey through whatever hell I went through made me stronger, better and more appreciative of the joys that followed. And my God! How many joyful moments my life has been filled with, which would all have been erased by just a single memory of a temporary hell had I not journaled them!

I love technology, and it’s why I’ve used Day One for 15 years. It had earned my trust, but this clumsy excursion into AI, well, I object to it being invited into the one room, my sanctum, that it has no business being in.

Much of the discussion around AI and social media is polarising and therefore, unhelpful. It’s here, it’s part of the fabric of life and likely will be for generations to come.

Look, I know there’s a party going on downstairs. I know it’s going to be loud. I know they’ll be playing music that pounds through our floorboard at 1am, perhaps even 2am. I’ll wear my earplugs. I’ll somehow survive the next day. It’s not good, but I can handle it. What I can’t handle is when the neighbours decide to break down my door and bring the party into my flat. That’s a literal threshold that nobody gets to cross, except that more and more people think this is normal.

City parties are the price of city life, but we’re being led to believe it’s normal to have our personal, private space become a free-for-all to every Tom, Dick or Harry and I say to hell with that.

I don’t think my journal should be your journal.

I don’t even particularly want my journals read by anyone.

Not everything written is meant to be published. I already have a sporadic public life for that purpose.

I know that I don’t have to walk alone, I’m a lifelong Liverpool fan after all, but I do need a place where I can sometimes sit alone.

A sanctum for reverie, for reflection, for review.

So I built that sanctum.

Would you like to see it?