Bullet Journaling
is like the Divine Comedy
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“Midway along the journey of our life I woke to find myself in a dark wood, for I had wandered off the straight path,” wrote Dante in the opening lines to Inferno, the first part of the Divine Comedy.
Midway through my own life’s journey, I became a halfhearted bullet journaler. A method that involves writing out tasks and events using an organized system of symbols but has expanded to include extensive tracking of almost any imaginable aspect of life, “bullet journaling” began to take over the student, housewife, and young professional scene around 2014. People everywhere started making “bullet journal spreads” to track their tasks, movies they had watched, events they had attended. The New Yorker even ran a piece entitled “Can Bullet Journaling Save You?”
The article indicated that, probably, it can—simply by confining all your notes, imaginings, schedules, and events between two covers, you can take control of a chaotic, shapeless life. The piece compared the “multiple-notebook person” and the bullet journalist in a narrative akin to a religious testimony: “The multiple-notebook person maintains a wall calendar, a desk calendar, and two calendar apps. She has scribbled a list of movies to watch on a sticky note that she will never find again. She has an app full of cryptic asides (“Rice bowls,” “Bat room”). She has no idea where her bank details are. The multiple-notebook person lives in a kind of organizational purgatory.”
In contrast, the founder of the Bullet Journal Method, Ryder Carroll, has found transformation: “He no longer uses multiple notebooks (and he no longer needs other jobs). ‘It’s helpful to have one source of truth,’ he said. ‘That’s what the Bullet Journal is for me.’”
I probably started bullet journaling around 2015. (As an absent-minded person who in the same time period lost a pair of boots at a conference, I did not log my bank details.) I never kept a bullet journal for long enough for it to become my “one source of truth” or for me to ascend to single-notebookhood, but my romance with bullet journaling continued, a fascination with a certain kind of ethos—an ethos in which life is programmatic, planned, coherent. I wrote out graphs I would never complete for budgets and glasses of water to drink. I started lists for movies to watch or books to read that would peter out after three or four entries.
Despite these often-lackluster results, is no denying the power of sitting down envisioning your life in terms of dopamine-friendly checkboxes and progress bars. It isn’t the outcome that’s important, it’s the ethos. The thrilling sense that you have your life together—even better, that you’re just about to, that just around the corner all of life will become a series of pastel-colored charts and lavender lattes.
The internet has dubbed this aspirational ethos “that girl,” a girl who usually surfaces in morning routine TikToks or carefully-curated YouTube videos—“that girl” is a woman who has her life together, who knows where or what her bat room is, who has escaped organizational purgatory. Pastel colors, tasteful coffee shops with light-colored wood, overnight oats, matcha lattes—these are the accidental qualities of “that girl,” but in essence she is the embodiment of the ordered life that hoi polloi always feel is right around the bend.
Alasdair MacIntyre, moral philosopher, reflected in his masterwork After Virtue: “man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal. . . . I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’”
Bullet journals help answer that question. They track where we have come from and where we are going. A traditional bullet journal is comprised of the “daily log,” “weekly log,” and “monthly log.” On these logs you record your thoughts, tasks, and events of the day. There is even an oxymoronically-named “future log,” for logging the future.
If you know your story through these facts, you know who you are. “That girl” supplements these aids to memory with trackers for things like daily walks and budget tracking. Logging what you have done and what you intend to do helps you build a story for yourself around being a certain kind of person. When you fill in your little tracker for glasses of water you drank that week, you are writing yourself a story in which glasses of water matter, in which you are a person who drinks glasses of water, in which you are part of the cohort of the water-tracking water-drinkers of society. It provides a tiny thread of narrativity in a non-narrative world.
Joan Didion, one of the great essayists of the 20th and 21st centuries, was in many ways not “that girl.” (For one thing, breakfast wasn’t a green juice and hot lemon water, but one “ice-cold Coke.”) In her essay “On Keeping a Notebook” she sounds like she is spinning dangerously close to the mentality of an unsaved “multiple notebook” person:
At no point have I been able to successfully keep a diary; my approach to daily life ranges from the grossly negligent to the merely absent, and on those few occasions when I have tried dutifully to record a day’s events, boredom has so overcome me that the results are mysterious at best. What is this business about “shopping, typing piece, dinner with E, depressed”? Shopping for what? Typing what piece? Who is E? Was this E depressed, or was I depressed? Who cares?
Instead, Didion recorded in her notebooks what, she confides in us, “some would call lies.”
The cracked crab that I recall having for lunch the day my father came home from Detroit in 1945 must certainly be embroidery, worked into the day’s pattern to lend verisimilitude; I was ten years old and would not now remember the cracked crab. The day’s events did not turn on cracked crab. And yet it is precisely that fictitious crab that makes me see the afternoon all over again, a home movie run all too often, the father bearing gifts, the child weeping, an exercise in family love and guilt.
And yet, despite her professed total disinterest in keeping a notebook “to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking” (which could be a mission statement for the bullet journal), Didion’s approach gets at the inner complexity of the Bullet Journal phenomenon.
Memory and identity, as it turns out, are fickle things. Galen Strawson, perhaps the foremost philosopher skeptical of the “narrative selfhood” theory MacIntyre seems to espouse, insists that “Every conscious recall brings an alteration, and the implication is plain: the more you recall, retell, narrate yourself, the further you risk moving away from accurate self-understanding, from the truth of your being.” There is some truth to this: memories are indeed revised in the process of being consolidated. Like Didion, many people remember cracked crab when there was no cracked crab to begin with. Many people reinvent themselves without realizing that they are no longer the same person they were before. Strawson believes narrative selfhood is impossible, because one’s memories and the empirical facts will never totally cohere.
Medieval people saw memory as its own art: the ars memoria. They used memory palaces, a method inherited from Cicero’s De Oratore and other classical sources, to organize and recall huge amounts of information. At a time when printed text was scarce and probably no one was keeping personal notebooks, the art of memory was a necessity. Keeping track of fixed texts, like the Psalms, was essential.
But remembering what had happened to you was not like remembering the text of the Psalms. For the medieval mind, the “factual quality” of personal memories did not matter in the same way that they do today. Dante’s Commedia, a sequence of fictional events in which he travels hell, purgatory, and heaven, is presented as a series of memories, but none of them are, strictly speaking, “true.”
Though the poem is clearly presented as a work of fiction, the Commedia is also not “lies.” Making himself the protagonist embedded Dante into the narrative. Identity for Dante is a series of relationships: with “real” people he put in his poem (some of whom he didn’t hesitate to place in hell), with his idealized Beatrice, with his (imaginary friend and) mentor Virgil. What happens to him is both an interior journey and an exterior journey, both true and fictional. Whether the stories Dante is telling about himself are empirically accurate is not a medieval question. Dante, too, would have remembered the cracked crab.
In our very different age, truth is understood to be empirical. If you keep a bullet journal, reviewing your “logs” daily and weekly and monthly, you can become the ideal empirical man: remembering everything exactly as it happened.
Socrates, coming from a time when writing, not Instagram, was the technological innovation, expressed skepticism about how writing things down might affect our ability to remember. Contrasted with the new type of physical, empirical writing was his ideal type of interior writing: “a discourse that is written down, with knowledge, in the soul of the listener; it can defend itself, and it knows for whom it should speak and for whom it should remain silent.”
Perhaps our time fears that if you forget what happened to you, what you bought, where you went, you will lose who you are, because who you are depends on your self-conception, demands the objective justification of external reality. Truth needs facts. Truth, and identity, do not reside in you, but externally, subject to experiment and verification.
Bullet journals attempt to cover over this lack of resilient internal identity, to defend oneself with an abundance of facts: I had a matcha latte on Tuesday, cried on Friday, went to a yoga class on Sunday. It’s no surprise that bullet journaling became a viral trend on Instagram, the flagship platform for of self-narrativization through selective memory and external affirmation (sure, I’d be happy to write the App Store description).
In a less identity-insecure time, perhaps, we would have provided this narrativization for ourselves through a community in which we know and are known, by human others to whom we can appeal for a collective memory of our shared past. We could debate the facts of what happened and eventually settle on a communal account that is perhaps even truer than what “really happened.” But when our story is not a shared one, we must write it down, set it in stone—lest we lose ourselves.
Didion’s refusal even to engage with the factual representation of everyday activities was, perhaps, a rebellion against that fear—an insistence, like Puddleglum, that fiction could be not only better but perhaps even truer than truth, on a world in which “the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones.” Didion, like Dante, was unafraid to let memory begin to fictionalize, because she did not rely on empirical facts for her identity. The truth, Didion’s notebooks and Dante’s poetry insist, can defend itself.
Come back next Friday: to find out why femininity is like the Federal Reserve.
In honor of: the launch of Amazon’s Lord of the Rings series, here’s a podcast episode on the mystery of one California license plate that shows up in many movies and television shows. (You never know.)
Fair warning: Dubious Analogies now has a Twitter account, where the analogies will be even more dubious.
Very special thanks to: my grandma, who sent me an egg cooker after reading my essay on single-use objects.
