Niche Internet

If I am trying to be everything, will I end up being nothing? There’s a tension I incessantly carry: the pull between curiosity and mastery. I want to write beautifully till I run my own magazine. I want to draw till my pieces are installed in galleries. I want to understand the intricacies of chemical engineering till I become distinguishable in the industry. I don’t want to just dabble in these disciplines. No, I want to know them in depth, in profundity.

But what happens if I keep stretching myself across too many directions? Will I dilute my potential? Is there a point where breadth undermines depth?

Mastery is not claiming expertise, but in staying committed. In showing up again and again to each craft, even if progress feels slow with each, even if I am unsure where it will all lead. (I wasn't sure how to end this, but I had a thought: I wonder if, perhaps, instead of mastering each thing in isolation - engineering, writing, drawing - I can weave a larger net, one that forms nuance and connections among all of which, till it becomes something uniquely my own? Could that be its own kind of mastery? Well, only time will tell.)

For years, I had been building what technologists and lifehackers call a “second brain.” The premise: capture everything, forget nothing. Store your thinking in a networked archive so vast and recursive it can answer questions before you know to ask them. It promises clarity. Control. Mental leverage. But over time, my second brain became a mausoleum. A dusty collection of old selves, old interests, old compulsions, piled on top of each other like geological strata. Instead of accelerating my thinking, it began to replace it. Instead of aiding memory, it froze my curiosity into static categories.

The modern PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) movement traces its roots through para-academic obsessions with systems theory, Luhmann’s Zettelkasten, and the Silicon Valley mythology of productivity as life. Roam Research turned bidirectional links into a cult. Obsidian let the cult go off-grid. The lore deepened. You weren’t taking notes. You were building a lattice of meaning. A library Borges might envy.

n “The Library of Babel,” he imagines an infinite library containing every possible book. Among its volumes are both perfect truth and perfect gibberish. The inhabitants of the library, cursed to wander it forever, descend into despair, madness, and nihilism. The map swallows the territory.

The more I wrote into my vault, the less I felt. A quote would spark an insight, I’d clip it, tag it, link it - and move on. But the insight was never lived. It was stored. Like food vacuum-sealed and never eaten, while any nutritional value slips away.

Worse, the architecture began to shape my attention. I started reading to extract. Listening to summarize. Thinking in formats I could file. Every experience became fodder.

Human memory is not an archive. It is associative, embodied, contextual, emotional. We do not think in folders.

Merlin Donald, in his theory of cognitive evolution, argues that human intelligence emerged not from static memory storage but from external symbolic representation: tools like language, gesture, and writing that allowed us to rehearse, share, and restructure thought. Culture became a collective memory system - not to archive knowledge, but to keep it alive, replayed, and reworked. In trying to remember everything, I outsourced the act of reflection. I didn’t revisit ideas. I didn’t interrogate them. I filed them away and trusted the structure.