The only family member whose diaries I came across is a grandmother. (After she died they were in my mother’s possession for a bit and I went thru the boxes for pictures to scan and what not.)
Very sparse. Seemed mainly used to note who had visited her after she was widowed. I don’t see them being really useful to any family member who wanted to check on the date of something or some such.
I don’t really know why she thought she needed to log this information.
I don’t keep a diary and really never have, but I used to blog film festival reviews (which somehow got me quoted on a DVD sleeve once, which is kinda hilarious). I tend to write really long FB posts though; when I travel, or when there’s some huge upheaval in the world, I’ll get very verbose. As a failed screenwriter, maybe it’s my way of expressing myself in words as I don’t have any creative opportunites for that any more.
After a serious head injury and associated memory problems, I began keeping notes every day to keep from losing track. This grew over time and I’ve spent the majority of my life with a notebook at hand. As the years passed, it changed gradually from pen & paper notes about work projects to a file on my PC. As it became more introspective and personal I added a password, then an almost insane level of encryption. For the last decade or so it has essentially been a part of my mind - offloaded from my less-trustworthy brain into a more reliable medium.
I use it to review my thoughts, work through upcoming decisions with information that would normally be sporadic/lost, and as a short daily to-do list (I print out these segments). It is a great help on any long or complex project, and has proven to be useful in things like tracking down confusing health problems (I can record mundane things like activities and diet, then find correlations). While I’m not completely dependent, it does make life much easier to navigate.
I allow almost all thoughts and musings to exist in this space. The encryption program recognizes “me” by expecting non-intuitive and non-sequitur responses to certain queries, and will react with hostility if it appears (to it) that a stranger is attempting to access any file previously encrypted by me.
When I travel and wish to take my “memory” with me, I invoke an option that encrypts the original file name into the resulting data, then inserts the results into an image or video file. It can exist as an innocuous file on a laptop, or be uploaded to a sharing site for me to collect and decrypt later.
My entries are much shorter now. I like to reflect on my day and what happened. I try to keep it positive. I usually have a small moment that I want to remember. Walking in the park or maybe hearing birds outside my house. Something worth appreciating in contrast to the frustration of daily life.
I have a daily score that I use to track my moods. It’s helpful to recognize when I need to make changes in my life.
I used to vent frustrations in my journal. I realize now it’s not helpful or healthy to write that stuff. It’s not worth reading and re-experiencing that negativity six months from now.
I encouraged my middle- and high school math students to formulate a question whenever they felt like saying “I don’t get it.” Some (never all!) turned it into a powerful habit.
To institutionalize the advice, I described how software developers use the phrase “ask the rubber ducky” to convey the same idea. I told the apocryphal story of the developer who kept going down the hall to ask the question of a colleague, and repeatedly found that the problem would become clear before the colleague responded. Instead of walking down the hall, they put a little rubber ducky on top of their monitor and posed their question to the ducky with the same result.
My mistake was ordering buckets of cheap little rubber duckies to pass out. They squeaked when you squeezed them.
Interesting that many people expect others to be interested in their posthumous journals. I can’t imagine to be the case for me. Also, the idea that their journals have to be encrypted to protect them from … what? Stealing trade secrets? Finding out the Secret Shame?
I have long been disabused of the notion that I have anything of interest to hide, or pass down. I’m just not that special. I write for myself, and when my self has set sail in my final little boat, I can’t think that my jottings would be of anything more than marginal interest to my relations, most of whom have taken very little interest in me while I’m alive.
How common is this though? My impression was that most people who keep diaries/journals do so for themselves (often their future selves) and don’t expect anyone else ever to see them.
This is what I was wondering and what prompted me to start this thread. And from the answers here, it appears there is no primary answer.
My late mother gave her wartime diaries to the local museum. Some of her postwar ones remain here.
These days, I use ChatGPT for a lot of my journaling, to save energy. I put in a list of facts and observations about my day, week, or whatever and ask it to write a 400-word journal entry for me or the like (it tends to become scattered and unhelpful if I ask it to write longer than that.) The important thing isn’t just energy saved, but also being able to read my own thoughts from another perspective, phrased in words or prose I wouldn’t normally use.