This piece is a thought experiment-style simulated interview. The respondents are composed of cognitive science, archival studies, and product design perspectives and do not represent any actual expert’s original words.
In May 2026, I stopped using flomo.
That month had no daily reminders, no faint sense of debt from “today’s notes still pending,” and no rapid conversion of thoughts into cards. Surprisingly, life didn’t thin out. Instead, Laotian cities, caves, injuries, strangers, and bars coalesced in late May into a more complete self-reading than fragmented pieces.
I had originally thought note-taking tools were mirrors: what happens, they preserve.
Only after stopping did I see they were more like scissors. They determine where a record begins and ends, what deserves naming, and which experiences get left out because they don’t fit neatly.
Tools Record Life, and Train Attention
Me: Can a note-taking tool really change personality?
Cognitive Scientist: Don’t overcomplicate “personality.” Part of personality is simply what you repeatedly focus on, how you interpret it, and what you find easier to focus on next.
Recording creates selection pressure. Every time you prepare to write a moment, you ask: Is it new enough? Insightful enough? Useful enough for future recall? Over time, the brain starts seeking “recordable life” before the tool even opens. Attention has already been shaped by the tool’s structure.
Product Designer: Every product has an invisible reward function.
Streak counters reward consistency, likes reward shareability, bidirectional links reward association, and AI summaries reward compression. None is neutral. Live inside a reward function long enough and you naturally begin producing the material it rewards.
The most dangerous moment comes when you start mistaking what the tool prefers for what you truly care about. This is harder to detect than external manipulation.
When Recording Comes Before Experience
In April’s notes, I wrote: “Posting on social media might complete an experience loop.” After an event happens, if it’s not spoken, shared, or seen by others, your mind feels like it’s left with an uncompleted task.
This mechanism isn’t all bad. Expression helps experiences gain structure, and witnessing allows feelings to land socially.
But when “how should I record this” appears before “what I’m experiencing,” the experience gains an audience.
Me: Does having an audience consciousness damage authenticity?
Cognitive Scientist: Not necessarily. Humans are social creatures—we often organize experiences by imagining potential listeners. The problem lies in whether the observation layer continuously dominates the perception layer.
If you keep generating titles, compositions, and conclusions while watching a sunset, your body receives less light, wind, and time. The memory that remains might be vivid but will be “how I described that sunset,” not the sunset itself.
Product Designer: Recording systems most often mistake capture rate for value. They make users afraid of missing things, so they lower recording barriers, add reminders, and automatically gather everything. The result? More complete data, but greater distance between people and their experiences.
Not missing things doesn’t mean truly owning them.
Why Stopping Recording Made Me See Myself Better
The May without daily fragments forced me to rebuild using residual physical sensations, photos, conversations, and memory. It inevitably missed things and rewrote history.
But forgetting is not pure loss. It lets similar details sink and leaves behind what repeatedly returns: why I came alive in Vang Vieng, why I felt emptied out in Vientiane, and whether I truly fear repetition—or the loss of control.
Cognitive Scientist: Human memory isn’t video. Every recall is a reconstruction. Recording preserves details from the moment but might also fix an early interpretation.
If you write “I don’t like this place” three minutes after an event, later rereading that sentence will embed it within the memory itself. The tool preserves an interpretation made at one particular moment, not the unprocessed past.
A moderate delay has a benefit: different moments can correct each other. The intense feelings of a day no longer automatically gain final authority.
Me: Should I record less, or not at all?
Cognitive Scientist: This turns the question into a quantity debate. The key is distinguishing the purpose of recording.
Some recordings aim for fidelity—like time, location, exact words, and decision rationale. Others serve thinking and require rewriting. Some are for commemoration, where value lies in the moment’s subjectivity. Others aim to reduce working memory. Mixing all four types into one information stream causes contamination.
Recording Also Corrects the Stories I Like
By the time I wrote this, the article would easily become a critique of tools alone. But an old note gave me a counterexample.
After returning to Shenzhen in June, I once explained my low mood as “a sudden drop from high-energy Laotian life back to city life.” This story had vivid imagery and followed my emotional flow. But when I flipped to December 2025, I had already written: “Exploration no longer provides sufficient traction.” At that time, I hadn’t returned to Shenzhen yet—city freshness was already fading.
This note contradicts my current preferred cause-and-effect. It pushes the problem’s origin back six months and forces me to admit: returning to Shenzhen may have amplified my low mood, but it didn’t create it alone.
Cognitive Scientist: This is the other side of external recording. Your current state rewrites the past, making history seem to lead directly to today. Timestamped older materials can resist this hindsight bias, especially when they preserve evidence conflicting with your current narrative.
Product Designer: Therefore, a tool that only returns notes “most like you” loses value. A good review function should occasionally bring back outdated phrases to remind you of different conclusions you reached in another environment.
Recording both freezes and dismantles interpretations. The difference depends on whether you’re looking for proof or conflict when you revisit.
Designing Two Processes for Experience
This piece doesn’t discuss how agents maintain identity or how memory decays—those are other engineering problems. Here, we only care about the distance between recording and the present experience.
I want to leave two processes.
The first is called on-site recording. It preserves materials that cannot be reconstructed later: a direct quote, timestamp, location, a photo, or the body’s immediate reaction. It can be very short, or even absent. When watching a sunset, there’s no obligation to create a note.
The second is called delayed interpretation. After one day, a week, or a month, answer “what does this mean for me.” Interpretation must remain separate from the original material and preserve the version from that moment. Future changes should not overwrite old text.
The space between these two processes matters. It allows experiences to not surrender meaning at the moment of occurrence and prevents the emotions of the moment from claiming permanent conclusions.
Why May Needed No flomo
I won’t frame a month of stopping as a universal method. Some people need immediate recording during chaos; others lose details quickly without writing. May served me more specifically: it temporarily canceled the default assumption that “every thought should be captured.” Caves, injuries, bars, and long afternoons first occurred as life, then coalesced in late May. The cost was detail loss, but the gain was patterns only becoming visible at month’s end.
I’ll still record. But when my hand is ready to grab my phone, I’ll ask myself: Does this moment truly need to be preserved, or have I already grown accustomed to letting an experience go without output?
Some nights, I might still write. There should be some sunsets that end with nothing but darkness.
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