There has been a strange internet phenomenon known as the “second brain” making waves through the productivity space for quite a while now. The trend of ditching your first (and only) brain for an app became the new hot thing while I was doing philosophy at uni. It seemed a natural fit for someone like me, who clearly struggled with some PKM issues. What is PKM, you ask? Personal knowledge management (PKM) is nothing more than having your information sources well organized—or at least that’s what the second brainers want you to believe. The PKM subculture experienced a revival when YouTube productivity gurus began claiming that our flawed and frail memory could just be done away with entirely.

There is a valid argument for wanting to digitize knowledge. While in the 1950s a university professor would need a thicc office cabinet filled with a swarm of notes just to get by with citations, nowadays it’s just easier to have everything readily accessible on the cloud: there are huge savings on retrieval time and storage space. I would have no issue if the PKM crowd had only gone that far. But, alas, they were greedy. Why stop there, at physical information, when we can also digitize memory itself?—they said, contemplating all the revolutionary possibilites the technology could bring about. And thus they embraced a hybrid from of transhumanism, according to which they limited the use of the brain to just hosting their personality (for now, at least) and instead offloaded all their knowledge to a PKM app, the omni-app.

Hordes of colorful and beautifully designed apps started roaming around in cyberspace, promising a revolutionary way of dealing with information. Managing book collections, keeping up with the news, organizing grandma’s recipes—everything could be done through the omni-app’s interface. YouTube is full of examples of gurus showing off their complex information systems; you can almost feel the velocity of their enhanced productivity ripping off your skin.

I myself fell for the hype. I was lured by the promise of this new revolutionary technology, and dreamed about having a centralized database that would contain all my philosophical knowledge within it. I could clearly picture it in my cluttered mind: the directory, the back-links, the tags, the citations, the intricate web of interconnected ideas. With my now obsolete memory I could have never visualized all the connections between ideas, some would have surely escaped me. But not anymore. I was determined to consolidate all my course notes and reading summaries into a beautifully formatted second brain. I downloaded Logseq (because open-source) and quickly got to work, thinking about the productivity gainz I’d experience once I had it all set up.

My dream proved to be harder to achieve than I initially thought, though. Since I stubbornly refused to take anything but handwritten notes during class, I had to manually copy my notes to my computer afterwards. I didn’t mind this double workload at first, but I quickly found myself lagging behind on the task at hand. I thought about taking notes on my laptop like most of my 21st-century classmates, but I decided against it every time I observed one of them transcribing every word the professor said verbatim into the word processor. I even had a friend who made summaries that were longer than the texts we were supposed to summarize, but that’s a different story, maybe for a different post.

I also ran into another unexpected issue: I was spending more time customizing my app and its data-structure than actually studying the material I was supposed to memorize. Exam week was getting closer and closer, but I kept telling myself I needed to tweak the presets just right, reconnect the back-links for the fourth time, and slightly reformat the new entries so that I’d end up with the most “efficient” system out there. So I happily spent days feeding the program extra context about the authors I was reading, carefully customizing their files so they looked more complete and lively. Instead of deepening my understanding of Aristotle by looking up secondary literature or just reading his damn books, I spent my study time correcting the indentation and arranging the typography on my notes about him. Studying could wait until I had a killer app, then it would be super easy!

When the academic year finally came to an end, I had both a sleek database containing all my notes, arranged in a beautiful conceptual spiderweb, and the worst grades of my time at uni. I had spent so much time building my second brain that I’d neglected cultivating the first one. That’s when it hit me: why did I do all of this to begin with? As the illusion began to fade, I noticed I had not become more productive or knowledgeable: my mind had gone from being filled with information about my subject matter to constantly thinking about optimizing my damn database. I didn’t free up any mental space; I just substituted one type of information for another, albeit of a much less relevant kind.

This is perhaps one of the most common errors of our time: mistaking the means for the ends. In an age where time, harvested through attention, is the ultimate commodity, every interaction with technology should have a clear purpose. Furthermore, every implementation of technology should have a clear purpose other than itself. A note-taking app is just a tool; it cannot and won’t ever replace the human brain. When the tool for the tool’s sake becomes the end goal, human autonomy is relegated to servitude.

In the end, I derived a good heuristic from this whole mess: if you cannot clearly state the purpose of a given program five seconds after launching it, you should stop using it immediately. When the time for questions comes, I don’t want to resort to my Obsidian, or my Notion, or my org-mode (still based), or my Claude; I want to recall information I’ve previously internalized to the best of my ability and build from there. Plato, as great a writer as he was, famously stated that the written word is detrimental to memory. He argued it ought to be relegated to a lesser, secondary medium of expression. If God (or nature, make your pick) gave me one and only one brain, I’ll try to honor his hidden motives and foster it so that I can develop my potential as a human being. I don’t want second best, thanks, the first one will do just fine.