In an off-the-cuff survey of the contents of my coworkers’ Notes apps, I discovered that a number of individuals hold drafts of texts or emails to associates or relations. There are lists of forgotten passwords and the requisite journey packing lists. One individual says they use Notes to prewrite posts for social media. Others saved lists of mansard roof houses, or a searchable record of associates’ and household’s astrological indicators. Multiple individuals had written their marriage ceremony vows in Notes and saved them saved there.

Everyone Take Note

Of course, we plebeians aren’t the one Notes devotees. Celebrities have been apologizing through heartfelt Notes screenshots for years. TikTok is stuffed with customers reminding one another to vent into the Notes app as a substitute of sending an indignant textual content or firing off a spicy social media publish. “What’s in your Notes app” is the new “what’s in your bag.” We all have a Notes app. And all of us pour the darkest (and brightest!) moments of our souls into it.

When Claire Mazur and Erica Cerulo, the duo behind the favored podcast A Thing or Two, did an episode in regards to the methods they used the Notes app, they had been shocked by the depth of the listeners’ responses. Many who wrote in had been wanting to share the non-public ways in which they used Notes, from itemizing child names that they cherished to retaining a “disgrace log” as a reminder to treat themselves a little more kindly. “Your notes are not public-facing or performative,” Mazur says in a Zoom interview. “You’re being your most authentic self, as opposed to performing what someone wants to see from you.”

Cerulo says that our Notes apps put us directly in touch with our most intimate selves. “’It’s like what one of our commenters said, ‘Forget my search history. When I die, my BFF needs to delete my Notes app.’”

Unlike a photograph app expressly dedicated to digital reminiscences, my Notes have by no means triggered what’s termed “the miscarriage problem”—the web’s tendency to ping you with painful, unprompted reminders of traumatic occasions in your life. I’m by no means made unhappy by what I see after I undergo my notes, or after I ask to see another person’s. Notes aren’t polished reminiscences, set in stone. They’re hasty, messy, and generally unhinged. They may even be lyrical; as my colleague Lauren Goode notes (ha ha), “Who among us has not jotted down a random thought on the go and thought, ‘My God, I am a poet.’” (For the document, I’ve by no means thought this.)

Especially if you’re a writer like me, it’s tempting to create and adhere to the story of your life. Here is where you started, here is where you made mistakes, here is where you won, and here is where you made that decision you can never take back. Contrasted with all the oppressive, maybe harmful, apps that you may have on your phone, the Notes app serves as a playful reminder that we’re all just works in progress.

This is how we must always need to be remembered 50,000 years therefore. Not because the composed and doubtless synthetic facades that we current at work or on our vacation playing cards, however messy and entire. Here we had been, loving preposterous child names or singing the worst songs out loud in public. Here we tried to recollect what mattered to the individuals we cherished, what socks they wished, and what their favourite pizzeria order is. Life is not good, nevertheless it’s fairly good, and we’re writing all of it down.