23May15 | What I’m working on & why I became interested in time travel

I'm working on a time machine, going to release it later this year.

I strongly believe the most powerful meaning we can get out of life is a theme.

A theme that holds everything together, a story we can tell, progress & memories we can recall.

These are the type of things that are going to be here when we’re old.

These are the type of things that are going to be here when we’re gone.

Think about it: the most permanent thing we have today is the internet. An infrastructure that 25 years ago nobody knew nothing about, now holds all of our identities, collective knowledge & external brains. And it's only getting stronger; with new versions, intelligent capabilities, decentralization and cloud distribution. When I first got enrolled in a formal computer science degree, I didn't quite see all of this. Not because I was just getting started, but because 9 years ago we really didn't have what we have today; I've eventually come to learn that even if 9 years ago I was mastering some niche/toolset/tech stack, it's probably totally out of date now. So it wouldn't really make a difference as to when did I start. Which makes me feel super lucky to engage at right about these times; times that I imagine will forever be of great significance.

I'm working on a tool you can use to hop at any day in your life and instantly remember how you were doing, who you were with, your physical & mental state, your biggest focus, your soundtrack, and how you spent your time.

If you think about it, the "journal" premise is just about the same. A journal or a diary is trying to help you have control over your days and be more mindful when it comes to the lingering, the changes, & the progress. A journal is essentially trying to associate every new stimulus with a result, like one big monitor where you are performing an infinite amount of experiments, trials & errors, while learning about life, people and yourself in the process.

Journaling is one activity that pays most dividends over time, it helps your understand yourself and it helps you grow everyday. Now that's good & all, but what's not good, and what really stops me every time I'm trying to maintain a journal is: Friction. Maintaining a journal is a high-friction habit. Meaning in order to be effective, it needs to be a part of your day everyday, and you have to dedicate the headspace and manually do the writing, whether digital or analog. And even for digital journals, the maximum streak I could ever maintain was about 3 months, after which I get caught in life, and never continue.

I believe time is the most important concept among all concepts.

And reality is I find the most meaning in connecting events & progress embedded in the tinniest stretches of time. And I also discovered that I might be into that because of the way I bounced back from the toughest times of my life, & looking back on how we long changed.

In my experience, time also proves to do good when I give it the opportunity.

The time I spend to go through my older journals can easily be some of the best moments of my life. Instantly you travel in time and see your older self talking to you now, literally like a handshake through time & space. You see yourself dreaming, talking to people, going places & envisioning where you'd want to be and what you're trying to achieve. When you do it from a place you dreamt about visiting, the handshake feels like a dream, because we tend to forget. We forget about what we dreamt of, and we forget our thoughts & aspirations. Our biological brains can't simply keep a log of every thought or dream you have every day. But an external one can, if you can fight friction and be dedicated enough to write everyday. BUT, this wasn't me. I didn't journal everyday.

So, given that we don't like friction but we also need to remember our days, I was thinking about the ways we normally default to when we try to remember a specific day. That's a good exercise, give yourself a minute to think, what do you normally do to remember a given day? Maybe check your photos app? a quick search with the day/month in iOS/Google photos gives you a view with the photos you took that day, what else? You open your instagram story archive maybe? Your WhatsApp chats? Is there any other prominent way to remember a day?

In my efforts to answer this question, I spent lots of time trying to make tech work for me.

The end goal: To be able to remember what & how I was doing, thinking and performing on any specific day.

I tried to use apps & methods that can help me manually log several aspects of my life and through which I can search and hop back at any point in time.

I don't want to go through all the experiments I did through the past few years, but, put together, I found out there were several levels to self-tracking:

There’s a rumor Apple is releasing an aggregator app for the next iOS that gathers data from Apple Health, calendar events & phone calls → into an automated journal.

In light of this, we’re on the verge of witnessing a new approach to journaling, mainly because:

Which leads to us becoming better humans, better athletes, better caretakers, better lovers, better professionals, and better friends.