is a senior reporter focusing on wearables, health tech, and more with 13 years of experience. Before coming to The Verge, she worked for Gizmodo and PC Magazine.
In July 2023, I deleted the Day One journaling app from my phone and laptop. It was perhaps the best thing I’ve done as a lifelong diarist.
The decision was prompted by Apple announcing its Journal app at WWDC that year. In that keynote, Apple said it would use “on-device machine learning” to provide prompts based on the content in your iPhone — things like contacts, photos, music, workouts, podcasts, and location data. The idea gave me the ick. Mainly because the app was described as a riff on the Memories feature in the Photos app, which at the time had “intelligently” resurfaced a photo of my mother’s open casket.
This is kind of dystopian. Image: Google
I had flashbacks to that moment last week when I saw a demo of Google’s take on its new Journal app. Except Google’s Journal app leans harder into AI than Apple’s version ever has. In addition to AI-powered journaling prompts, the on-device AI will also provide summaries of your entries. There’s also a little calendar view that assigns a little emoji signifying your mood based on whatever you journaled that day.
At my demo, Google told me the idea was to make journaling easier — much in the way that Gemini simplifies other writing tasks, like emails and document summaries. Sometimes, I was told, it can be hard to know what you should journal about. Looking back can also be difficult. The point of Gemini in this instance was to make life a little more convenient and helpful.
That’s nice, except journaling isn’t supposed to be easy or convenient.
Ask any writer: a blank page is meant to be wrestled with. And in journaling, the only prompt you ever need is “What happened today and how do I feel about that?”
It’s a deceptively simple question. Some days, it’s abundantly obvious what you should write about. A great tragedy, a joyous occasion, an event you’ve been looking forward to — anything that sparks a strong emotion is an obvious prompt. But most days pass without much happening at all, forcing you to sift through mundane minutiae to find anything worth recording. That’s the point. Honing your discernment, exercising your brain, wracking your vocabulary to find the right phrase to express your inner world. These are not things that are supposed to be easy.
There’s one quote in the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals that sums it up for me. “It isn’t really the thought that counts, but the effort — which is to say, the inconvenience. When you render the process more convenient, you drain it of its meaning.”
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