creating a digital garden to end my doomscrolling

a digital Garden is a place that makes it possible to make connections between all of the things that you are consuming so you're not just taking notes in a notebook or writing a Blog where things are going to be all chronological you can write about a certain topic and you can connect it to all of the other things that have to do with that topic or have to do with something adjacent to it and you can see the ways that all of your interests are interconnected like you can see it as if you're looking at

the ways that all of the trees are connected below ground hello welcome to Wild [Music] Geese hi hotti Lattis with the swimmer bodies do you guys remember that from Hannah Montana I feel like I saw that once when I was eight and it just stuck in my brain like a little worm in my brain for the rest of my life um welcome back to Wild Geese I want to start this episode by saying thank you so much for listening for subscribing we reached a thousand subscribers on YouTube right now we're at I think something like

1300 subscribers on YouTube I've only put out four videos so that feels like a really big milestone I know for other big creators a thousand subscribers is nothing but I'm a big believer in celebrating everything everything celebrate every single thing I was talking to my roommate Raina about it and she was like congratulations on a thousand subscribers I was like thank you so much and she looked at me and she was like if you really think about it a thousand people have heard you talk like it's really just listening to you speak and they've decided

that they want to hear more and that's a big deal that is a really big deal to me cuz if I think about a thousand people in a room you know like it's really easy to value these things when it's online and you look at a subscriber number and you're like oh a thousand people that's not that much some people have a million subscribers blah blah blah but like a thousand people in a room would be a life-changing amount of people to hear you speak so I don't know thank you there is a difference between

the first season of wild geese and this season of wild geese and that this season there's a lot more solo episodes I really started this show just interviewing people that were interesting to me you know like any that I saw while I was scrolling on Tik Tok who I was like oh I want to deepen that conversation I would reach out to them and have a conversation with them and I had a great time doing that but I think in coming back for the second season I realized that a lot of that was sort of

a crutch and it was sort of a wall that I could stand behind because I didn't trust that I had enough to say on my own you know I've always kind of had this worm in the back of my brain that has told me that I'm not a very interesting person I remember in high school theater we all sat in a circle one day and just went one by one and said what our biggest insecurity was which is an insane thing to do to high schoolers but I remember saying like I just don't think there's

anything really interesting about me so there has been something really deeply healing about the experience of doing this podcast and I just want to say thank you for that and that's like a perfect segue into what we're going to be talking about today because I think what we're going to be talking about today is a very concrete tool that can help you be a more interesting person you might have heard the phrase in order to be interesting you need to be interested instead of putting all of your thoughts and energy into thinking about like how

can I be more of an interesting person I feel like I'm a boring person all of this stuff finding a way to channel your own curiosity and find what you're interested in and really go full force into your interests that's how you're going to be a more interesting person and lately I've been seeing so much content especially on YouTube about consumption about people like taking a month off of social media and then sharing their experience with it people really really interested to see how that's going and I think it's because we've gotten to a point

where we're so fatigued with overc consumption we are all scrolling all day long we are all intaking more information than we ever should be it's like if a pilgrim saw the amount of information that we are intaking on a single day they would just burst they would explode they wouldn't know what to do with it and frankly I think even we don't know what to do with it most of the time and I think the blanket advice of create more than you consume is good advice but it's incomplete compl advice because now we're in such

a routine of consuming so much and consuming in a way that's really really shallow and I think what you first have to do in order to kind of break yourself out of that pattern is to become a better consumer become a more intentional consumer and I think one Avenue into being a better consumer is taking notes stick with me on New Year's I went out to a bar and I was waiting in line for the restroom and this guy comes up and he's waiting in line behind me and he strikes up a conversation he's like

happy New Year blah blah blah we're talking I'm like what are your new resolutions he's like I want to have more fun I'm like more power to you absolutely he's like what about you and I was like I want to be more creative and he was like how are you going to do that and I was like I'm going to take notes and he's like how is that going to make you more creative which is a really fair question to ask so let's talk about it today I want to dig into not just taking notes

but building a digital Garden for yourself a digital Garden is a place that makes it possible to make connections between all of the things that you are consuming so you're not just taking notes in a notebook or writing a Blog where things are going to be all chronological and you can only look at it from like okay I wrote this on this date instead you can write about a certain topic and you can connect it to all of the other things that have to do with that topic or have to do with something adjacent to

it and you can see the ways that all of your interests are interconnected like you can see it as if you're looking at the ways that all of the trees are connected below ground you can actually see the way that your thought processes your interests your takeaways are starting to all be interwoven now the person that got me into this idea of taking notes as a way to dig in deeper to your creativity and become a better consumer so that you can become a better Creator is Odyssey on YouTube I'll tag him and I'll link

the videos that I'm talking about in this episode but he has a video called mindful consumption that was really sort of the entry point into this understanding of taking and how it can ultimately deepen your creative practice but even more exciting he has a couple of really indepth videos about the notetaking process itself and the platform that we're doing it on called obsidian I'm not going to be doing a full Deep dive on the platform of obsidian and the whole process of taking these notes but basically he's making a point that we're really in a

days when we're consuming online there's so much access to so many resources that can be great they're more accessible than ever they can literally change your life but when you're consuming them and not really giving your mind any space or time or intentionality to process what you're consuming then most of it goes in one ear and out the other something I have observed in myself I think as sort of a byproduct of this situation is that I can't remember names and it's not just people's names it's also like names of TV shows and movies and

just like any names ever don't stick in my brain I'm not a person who can like pull up quotes in my mind and like quote a movie I'm a very big picture person in my thinking and what that can mean is that I'm missing a lot of smaller points and what it could also mean when you're just scrolling mindlessly is that you might see a video that you agree with but you never fully take the time to think to yourself why do I agree with this or you might see an article that you disagree with

and something about it rubs up against your understanding of something else and you never really take the time to tease those things apart and figure out what you think about that thing so that's how you're getting stuck in this consumption Loop and never really creating anything it's because you're not inviting your own thought processes into the conversation and most of the time inviting your own thought processes into the conversation is how art is made Ian arton has a substack article titled in defense of retention she makes some really incredible points about the rise of anti-intellectualism

the falling literacy rates and just all of the things that are implicated when we devalue art and reading in our society how that really opens the door to a level of callousness and inhumanity that we should not get comfortable with and so like I said before the phrase create more than you consume has its place and validity but there's also something to be said for I'm not going to speak more than I listen any art that has ever been made has been influenced by all of the art that that artist consumed before they made that

piece of art so here's a little excerpt from the article in defense of pretention she says I am a bundle of all the work I have ever come into contact with I think I can trace parts of my personality to the Anthony bouraine documentaries My grandmother used to watch my sense of humor is a mix of my mother's dryness and the work of Rick Riordan if we all see the same five Clips on Tik Tok the same three films how will we ever be individual part of my love for the Arts comes naturally from my

profession as a writer the irony here is that I do not have the words to adequately formulate just what this craft has given me if I was forced to I'd sum it up as power these words I write are little pieces of me it's why I'll never buy into the separate the art from the artist nonsense this work did not birth itself it could not birth itself it needed my pen to make it be first there were only ideas but in my hands stories and arguments and Analysis live so if we know this if we

know that as artists not consuming other art is not an option then let's stop putting so much energy into shaming ourselves for consumption and still say okay if I am going to consume this material let's make sure that I am there as I am consuming it and I am active as I am consuming it it's the difference between passively watching a TV show and scrolling on your phone as you're doing it and watching the TV show and taking notes as you're doing it and pausing when you have an interesting thought pausing when you think oh

that reminded me of this oh that reminded me of this oh I didn't like that part why didn't I like that part what would I have done differently it's leaning in I remember in college I had a professor who was a very old woman and she was very iconic everybody just like woried the ground that she walked on because she knew something that we didn't and we knew that as soon as we walked in the room and I remember the first day of class walking in and she didn't even say anything she was just sitting

there and then with her body she started showing us how leaned in we should be How Deeply we should be listening anytime that we weren't up working on something with her she was very adamant that we were sitting up straight and leaned in fully listening the whole time that's the difference between mindless consumption that eats away at your brain and you feel like [ __ ] afterwards and you feel like you didn't actually retain a single ounce of the information that you just scrolled past and consumption that actually makes creation inevitable now there's a book

that I have not read called how to take smart notes by zanka aens and in that book he outlines something called a second brain and so no I have not read the book but Odyssey the YouTuber that I mentioned before laid out the pros of having a note-taking process like this the first one is it forces you to slow down I think obviously everybody's all about do it faster do it faster do it faster all the time but when it comes to learning and curiosity and creativity you've got to go slow to go fast I

think that when I go too fast that's again why I don't know the names to anything I'm just like eating up so much content and it goes in one year and out the other I can't tell you how many books that I have read and I can't tell you what the book is about after I read it I can be like yeah that was an amazing book and you're like what's the plot and I'm like I have no idea so that's number one number two is that it is instant feedback when you're taking notes and

you realize that you can't actually put this thing into your own words like you hear a concept and you think oh I get that concept but then you challenge yourself to take a note and put that thing that you just read or heard or watched into your own own words if you cannot put that into your own words or you have a really hard time putting that into your own words that's a pretty clear signal that you actually don't have a good grasp on that concept yet and you should actually probably return to that and

go deeper with that concept and then the final big Pro to note taking like this is that you can see your ideas in a different way than just being presented chronologically so say that you're taking notes just in a notebook really you can only look at that notebook like from front to back you might have a table of content that might point you towards a certain page but thinking about a digital Garden or a second brain compared to taking notes in a physical notebook or like writing a Blog which is very chronological this way of

note-taking is like creating a network or a web that interlinks your ideas together and then suddenly you can have a note from four months ago that connects to a note that you took today and if you connected the two of them suddenly you have an essay suddenly you have a speech suddenly you have the idea for your first pilot show but without a way of connecting those two ideas you might have completely lost that first note to the timeline of your life so now that I've laid out why you should create a digital Garden let's

talk about what a digital Garden actually is and again I'm not going to get into the nitty-gritty of the program that I use because Odyssey has a YouTube video that lays it out so easily and I am not a software girl so go watch odyssey's video and he will will tell you how to create this program all for yourself and you also don't have to use obsidian there's a ton of other tools some people use notion some people with digital gardening create their own website like completely but I like to kind of equate this to

your own personal Wikipedia so you know when you're looking at a Wikipedia page how all of the different concepts that it might be introducing to you are linked so if you see a word that you don't recognize you can click on that word and it'll open up a new Wikipedia page that's also how your notes can look so you can be taking a note and it can have a certain theme or something in it and you can click that link and it can take you to all of the other thoughts that you've had about that

certain theme so to put it as simply as possible what you're going to do is while you are consuming something you don't have to do this for everything that you consume you can keep some things purely entertainment based that's totally fine if you want to just check out sometimes do it don't shame yourself whatever but if you're looking to be a little bit more active in the book that you're reading or the the show that you're watching and you want to glean something from it and actually have takeaways that you will remember months from now

pull out your laptop pull out your phone whatever you have your note taking system on and take some notes as you are watching that thing so for example I recently rewatched flea bag great show to rewatch by the way you think I should become a Catholic no don't do that I like that you believe in a meaningless existence and you're good for me you make me question my faith and I've never felt closer to God [ __ ] you and I took notes with every single episode and by taking notes I mean like I would

pull quotes from things I would make note of things that I found to be really funny I would make note of things that I found to be really sad I would write down things that I didn't notice the first time that I watched it I'm looking at one of my notes now and it looks like I kind of broke it down based on a couple of different like subheaders for this note I have observations comedy character choices damn that's deep impeccable writing and editing choices because as an editor the editing was really interesting to watch

the way that you take notes is completely up to you you're not being graded on this by a professor these notes are for you what do you want to write about you write about that thing what do you want to remember from the episode what are some themes that you want to dive into okay so while you are actually consuming the thing you can take those notes some other people like to fully consume the thing and then come back for a second round of consumption where they take notes the second time but they don't take

notes the first time it's totally up to you how you want to do this but after you take those notes from the source material what you're then going to do is take notes that are decontextualized from whatever you just consumed so these are your thoughts that's why it's decontextualized so in the source material notes you're really taking notes on the actual material itself you might be bringing in your own voice to the conversation here and there in the source material but that's not fully what it's for the source material notes are really for your own

understanding of the source material then once you have an understanding of the Source material then you go to the main notes which are decontextualized from those Source material notes so for example I'm going to read a little bit of one of my notes on an episode from fle bag if you've never seen fle bag before maybe don't listen to this part it's definitely a spoiler but like you should watch fleb at this point it's been out for years it's an incredible show there's kind of no excuse at this point but here's a little excerpt from

my source material notes so this is just as I'm watching the show I'm pausing the show I'm taking these notes I'm continuing show I might rewatch The Show and take some more notes but this is about the show that I'm taking notes on this is not amazing writing this is just notes that I'm like very quickly writing as I'm watching the show so like don't judge my writing that's not what this is about okay I just want to show you how the source material notes are really about what you are consuming and then the main

notes that are decontextualized from the source material are about your thoughts on what you are consuming so this note is happening right after her sister Claire got that horrible French haircut and has a breakdown but then kind of starts to have a breakthrough where she's finally being honest with fleabag about the fact that she's a bit jealous of fle bag I didn't want my husband's baby isn't that awful I haven't even asked you how you are how are you what's going on with you um um I met someone what really yeah oh my God that's

amazing what does he do he's a priest oh my God yeah you are joking [Music] no I'm sorry I know it's just I'm sure it's very complicated but very painful you're a genius you're my [ __ ] hero I wrote We realize flea bag pursues her desires but Claire doesn't that's why she's so bitter and this scene perfectly conveys this but she's honest for the first time when she says you're a genius you're my [ __ ] hero we then immediately again the pacing of every realization and visual display of what we just realized is

incredible see this play out in real time when her Crush runs into her at the park and she refuses to say yes to him asking her on a essentially a date she's using her family her shitty husband and his weird son from another marriage that she hates as an excuse to say no she's actively in real time saying no because her Allegiance Falls to not letting down the people who are making her feel trapped her Allegiance does not belong to herself okay so that's just one little part of the notes that I took on the

source material from this episode of flea bag then though if I go to the contextualized notes that I have I then have my thoughts and it's my thoughts on the greater world around me not necessarily like you can reference the source material in the main notes but like this is really meant to be about you and your thoughts about the world and what you just consumed so this note says when we deny ourselves of everything we want that is what creates great discomfort and steals our peace we often blame things like love for our discontent

ENT but that's not the source the source is looking our desires in the eyes and saying I can't when we know it's the only thing in the world that we want and we cling and grasp at things like haircuts because they feel like control they're not illusions of control are constantly pulling us under and away from the actual desire we're too afraid to run towards sometimes an unfailing Devotion to family can translate to an absolutely abysmal relationship to self and the family relations suffer disproportionately every time we try to prioritize [ __ ] we don't

care about we think we're being Martyrs we're not we're being selfish every time we choose the thing we truly at our core do not want because the more severed we are from ourselves the more Havoc we wreak on those we love we hate the people that dare to follow their desires they become the scapegoat to our misery they're irresponsible they're Reckless they're attention seeking that or they're free and that really pisses off the people in a cage okay very dramatic but that's my thoughts it is about what I just watched in flea bag but also

like that's what I'm thinking about the world so suddenly you've invited yourself into the conversation instead of passively watching the show maybe having these thoughts about it but never like fully putting them down to be a concrete thing of like yes I had that thought and I can come back to it now and remember it so now you have the decontextualized notes and what you can do is you can create tags for these notes so tags are like themes basically you want them to be pretty General but like specific enough and you're going to use

those tags as the link between other notes so the tags I have here are desire savior complex suppression romantic love and then what's really cool about this note- taking system is that as you take more of these notes you're going to start to see your patterns in what you are interested in come forward because you're going to have more and more notes on certain tags and you're going to think oh I didn't even really realize that that's like where my brain goes a lot of the time that's interesting maybe I should dig into that more

because the thing is that episode of flea bag everybody that watches that episode is going to cling on to different parts of that episode and be interested in going deeper with different parts of that episode than I'm going to be interested in me personally right now I've been super interested in concepts of like women rage and women's desire and suppression and martyrdom and it's clear in that note but it will also become clear in the amount of notes that build up over time in that tag and in platforms like obsidian it visualizes this experience in

a really cool way where it shows you the web of your interests and how they all connect and then it's totally up to you what you want to do with those interests how you want to dive in deeper with them maybe you want to start a substack and you want to start writing about it maybe you want to start a podcast and you want to start talking about it maybe you want to take the things that you're so interested in in your notes and you want to write a film about it maybe you want to

create a song I don't know what it is I don't know what kind of artist you are but I think the point is we never like sit down to create something with a full understanding of what it is that we want to create at the start we have to go through the long laborious sometimes boring sometimes embarrassing process of creating it and of finding our own interest and Curiosities and question questions along the way and this notetaking process can be your friend in that and I don't know like with flea bag I Remember Loving fle

bag the first time I watched it I was obsessed but how much of it did I retain how much of it did I fully digest the first time around I don't know I mean when I sat down to watch it again there was so much that I had forgotten and that's natural and that's fine but I am happy now that I have so much material from the notes that I have taken that now I can look back on whenever I want to that's like super exciting to me so anyway if you're interested in doing this

for yourself definitely go check out odyssey's video on it again it will be linked in the description and I just want to leave you with a couple of the key factors that make up a digital Garden if you're ready to become a little digital Gardener with me this essay is called a brief history and Ethos of the digital garden and there are a couple of key factors that make up the digital Garden number one topography over timelines Gardens are organized around contextual relationships and associ links the concepts and themes within each note determine how it's

connected to others this runs counter to the time based structure of traditional blogs posts presented in Reverse chronological order based on publication date so again it's less like a blog or a journal where it's chronological and it's more like making a Wikipedia page that's all for you the second factor that makes up a digital Garden is continuous growth so Gardens are never finished they're constantly growing evolving and changing just like a real soil carrot and cabbage Garden this isn't how we usually think about writing on the web over the last decade we've moved away from

casual live journal entries and formalized our writing into articles and essays these are carefully crafted edited revised and published with a Tim stamp when it's done it's done there is no final version on a garden what's cool about this though is that if you do want to write an article or an essay this makes it so that you've got a foundation of writing to start from from all of your past consumption that's really exciting number three imperfection and learning in public gardens are imperfect by Design they don't hide their rough edges or claim to be

a permanent source of Truth number four they're playful personal and experimental Gardens are non-homogeneous by Nature you can plant the same seeds as your neighbor but you'll always end up with a different arrangement of plants I really like this because if we think again back to the quote that I read earlier from the essay in defense of pretention she made a point to be like hey if we're all seeing the same Tik toks and watching the same films how are we ever going to be individual and that's a really good point to make it's why

you have to introduce your own interpretation of things into the conversation and your own interpretation your own curiosity is naturally going to start leading you away from what everybody else is consuming and towards something that's more true to you and number five intercropping and content diversity Gardens are not just a collection of interl words while linear writing is an incredible medium that has served us well well for a little over 5,000 years it is daed to pretend working in a single medium is a sufficient way to explore complex ideas it is also absurd to ignore

the fact we're living in an audio visual Cornucopia that the web makes possible podcasts videos diagrams illustrations interactive web animations academic papers tweets rough sketches and and code Snippets should all live and grow in the garden we're not just talking about taking notes on books or movies I've taken notes on YouTube videos that I've watched I've taken notes on Tik toks that I've watched like some Tik toks are 10 minutes long now okay so if you feel like it actually really has enough information there for you to want to tease apart and like put yourself

into the conversation of you take notes on that okay and then the last thing is independent ownership gardening is about claiming a small patch of the web for yourself one you fully own and control so as you're taking these notes keep that in mind this is for you this is not to post some of this stuff can become an idea that's fully fleshed out in a way that you want to post to the web but so much of it is just for you and that's okay it's for your own learning for your own understanding for

your own tracking of your interests um I know that sometimes when I'm like writing in my journal or something it's easy to kind of have like an audience in your head watching you create these things and sometimes you can like write with this reader in mind that sometimes it is just more useful to write without that reader in your mind as if nobody is ever going to read this stuff except for you which that's another thing you should go back and read your own notes remind yourself of what you were thinking like reading back that

note just now that's the first time that I've read that note since I wrote it and I'm like whoa I had that thought post that thought girl um okay yeah that's all I have for you today um go take notes if you want to if you feel like it it genuinely is so fun and I'll see you in two weeks