Diary goes to sleep

I have been thinking about the function of the diary on this site, and I have decided that it has drifted, month by month, until it no longer serves anything like its original purpose. 

When I began it I intended it as an act of discipline. I intended it as a way of making me see. Once every day I would notice something and photograph it.

When I began the diary contained a daily photograph with a contextual caption. Sometimes this explained where I was, or why I was there. Sometimes it offered a reason why I photographed this subject rather than some other.

Over the six years I have been doing this the captions have grown into descriptions of my day, to the point where they describe the day’s weather; what I had for breakfast; what I did when I got to work; and so on. This has become time-consuming and pointless. People have begun pointing out that some entries are factually incorrect when I am not sure why I am even bothering to write them in the first place.

If I want to know how often it rained this year, or what time I got to work, or what I had for lunch, there are far better ways of tracking this than writing an online diary. I have an app on my iPad called Habits, which I downloaded when it was free for a short time. It would enable me to create endless amounts of lists tracking just these things if I could be bothered, which I can’t. It would enable me to make graphs and add things up and so on.

If I cared about how many days it has rained in 2015, which I almost certainly don’t.

Six years ago I posted notes about interesting things I had found, invented or seen, and I posted a daily photograph. That sounds like a much better arrangement, and one that I will revert to.

At the end of 2015, then, the diary goes to sleep. Hopefully one result of this will be that other things wake up.