Obsidian is starting to stress me out
I was initially drawn to Obsidian because it used simple, locally-stored, plain text files and facilitated linking notes together. That’s all I wanted. It was a refreshing take on notes in a space with beautiful, but bloated, tools like Notion and Craft.
Then I found myself falling down the rabbit hole.
I created “optimized” custom setups with workspace layouts and tons of plugins. I dutifully experimented with various themes.
I way overused the daily notes feature.
I tended my “knowledge garden” obsessively, thinking I was working.
It all became too much and I mostly abandoned it last December.
But I find value in some kind of notes app (I’ve tried about a thousand of them). So I circled back to some old favorites like Apple Notes and Bear.
...and ended up back at Obsidian. The gravitational pull from several years of notes in the archive is strong.
But it’s a mixed bag. It’s still too complicated, and getting more-so all the time (Bases, I’m looking at you).
Yes, I can turn off even core plugins, stick with the default theme, and tweak the UI to be fairly clean.
But I’m learning that sometimes intentionally creating constraints is helpful for me, and all the flexibility of Obsidian—while a major plus for some—is creating friction and distraction.
Or maybe the constraint should be to stick with Obsidian. To make it work in all its imperfect glory.
To realize the answer is not out there, but within.