I briefly considered keeping a journal in the late 80’s. Downloaded a simple daily journal shareware program and installed. I may have entered a few entries. Never did follow through.
I regret it now. So many events in my early career. The excitement of house hunting. Buying a house. Remodels. The birth of my kids. Watching them grow up. All the milestones of their childhood.
I have my memories. But it would be very satisfying to read my thoughts at that moment. I’m sure it would spark old and long dormant memories.
I do have a record of major life happenings–my internet postings. Specifically my Straightdope posts. When I’m bored, I’ll look back old posts and suddenly remember what I was going through when I wrote them. Sometimes I’ll read something I wrote 15 years ago and think, “Did I really write that?!”
I have considered it but I just don’t have the discipline to do it. I have such a bad memory for dates that I often wish I had a way to reference back. Yeah, I can track some of that down if I really need to, but my late FIL had his journals and could look up anything from a major event to a doctors visit back to like 1938. I sometimes wish I had that capability.
I greatly regret not keeping a medical diary. Everyone should have one from birth. a hard copy journal of every medical treatment, diagnosis, vaccination, and medicine taken.
a regular journal would be an interesting thing to do and would be fun to read what you wrote as a young child. A scrapbook would be a nice addition to it.
I’ve had a LiveJournal since 2003, so no regrets since then. I wish that before that I’d kept the hundreds of emails I sent to internet-friends. They’d be as good a diary as anything.
I’ve never considered keeping a journal of regular events, and am not sorry I didn’t. On the other hand, when I purchased some bare land back in '92 for the purpose of constructing a home, I decided to document the process. So I have a detailed development and construction journal of my place that is still ongoing.
I may not remember when my niece was born but if anyone asks me how many times in the last 24 years I’ve replaced my ozone water treatment lamp I can look it up.
I’m up to volume 8. Think I might be a bit OCD about this? I do.
No. I have never seen the appeal of keeping a journal and have much better ways to spend my time. Those things could be used against you in court, ya know.
This is probably why I never saw the appeal of Twitter either.
I kept journals in middle school and high school, and looking through them is really fucking depressing. I seem to only want to journal when something is bothering me. So I don’t really want another compendium of my hardest moments, TBH.
If you’re thinking of it more in terms of life highlights, though, go for it. Journaling, especially with a focus on gratitude, has been found to have positive effects for mental health. A significant portion of people who consider themselves happy are journalers.
One thing I am delighted to have, which is a similar concept, is every e-mail my husband and I sent one another in college, from our initial ‘acquaintance’ e-mails to close friendship to falling in love and beyond. And it was a LOT of e-mails, because for the first three months of our relationship, he was in Spain. All of the emotional intimacy developed through those e-mails. So on our three year anniversary, when he proposed to me, he presented me with two 3’’ binders full of these emails. And we still have them today, 11 years later. Definitely worth having.
I’ve kept a daily journal since the day I turned eight. Every night I have a cup of tea, listen to the news and write down what I did that day, and review yesterday’s and add to it if need be,
I kept a journal starting in grade school and continued until college, when my someone swiped it from my dorm room and showed parts of it to my circle of friends and acquaintances.
Aside from this website I don’t put much in writing anymore.
I started one when I was about eight, fascinated with a pioneer diary that I’d read. It didn’t last more than about a week or so. So I decided I’d start again the next year on new years, when I was 9 (so in the fourth grade). I kept that one every day through to the middle of the summer.
So that Christmas I bought another little diary, one of those five year ones, and started that one on 1 January 1976. To date I have made 14,863 consecutive entries – albeit not in that one little book!
I’ve kept a journal off and on (more off than on) since I was about 12.
I made daily entries for several years, then, from a more mature perspective, read over my earlier stuff, realized how embarrassed I’d be if someone else read it and destroyed every last bit of my journal.
Since then, I’ve made sporadic attempts at keeping a diary, but really can’t muster enough self-discipline to stick with it consistently. So I do still have one, but it has huge gaps in it.
And I do regret not making regular entries, even though it could be a bit of a problem if the wrong people got ahold of it!
Nope. Anything resembling a journal in my years gone by have been in the form of letters to others. Don’t care enough to keep on for myself and consider it a waste of time.
Seriously, even if I had journals I don’t think I’d read them. I seem to be aimed toward the future, not the past. (Drives my mom mad as she tries to get me interested in family genealogy: “HOW can you not remember your greatgreatgreatgreat granduncle Fridolin? He was the one who used to hike from Glarus to New Glarus delivering cuckoo clock catalogs!”)
And you can bet that if I left a stack of journals (or a website full of journaling) to my wife or kids, they’d just roll their eyes…
