I realized about the time I bought my first Moleskine that there existed in me a predisposition to fawn, for the lack of a better word, over the stationary and shift my mind towards not the subject matter that I should have been writing about, but the execution of writing in that it has to be this perfect thing rather than a messy exploration of thoughts where things are thrown away constantly and information becomes out of date. That there exists very little reason, if any, to archive any of it once it’s been written. And if it does have to be archived, that it’s done at a much later stage when more of the what-matters has been determined and everything else pared away.

So it struck me as strange that people devised these extravagant note taking systems because I could easily sense the procrastination rearing its ugly head. The actual work behind the notes is always the difficult part. Not the notes themselves. But it’s good people realize this eventually even if it takes them years to come to their senses.

As for the Moleskine, decades later it sits unused. I went back to cheap spiral bound paper and pens, because my mind does not register any of it as some shrine to my thinking, I’m free to actually focus on what I should be writing about. A few color coded pens just for my own sake is all that’s needed.

The financial investment of that one stupidly overpriced and overrated notebook was enough to paralyze me to the point where I never want to use it.