Humanity survived the plague, the Mongols, and the invention of group projects on this remarkably efficient system called forgetting, and then someone invented journaling and convinced us that forgetting was a character flaw.

Apparently the modern brain is no longer permitted to process an unpleasant experience and move on, so every emotion must be documented, every conversation dissected like a frog in a biology lab, and every minor inconvenience preserved in a leather-bound notebook that costs more than the lunch you skipped because you were too busy overthinking.

Welcome to the only hobby in which you pay good money to become your own unpaid interrogator.

The first problem is that journaling makes you remember things you were perfectly happy to forget. You sit down with your favourite pen, write “Today was a good day,” and three sentences later you are investigating why someone replied “okay” instead of “okayyy”, exhuming a conversation from four months ago, and wondering whether your mother was secretly disappointed in you when you were seven.

Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt for looking back just once, and you have decided to do it nightly, with stationery.

Gratitude journaling is worse, because it promises a gentle exercise and delivers a performance review. You write that you are grateful for your friends, your family, and the roof over your head, which is lovely, until your brain demands to know why you felt lonely at lunch, why you resented your family for something they never knew hurt you, and why that humble roof now resembles the ceiling of a dungeon. You cannot even be miserable in peace anymore, because your misery is obliged to acknowledge its privileges, like an aristocrat apologising for his suffering from the balcony of a very nice villa.

Then arrives the self-awareness, that cruel little gift. Before journaling you were simply a person who occasionally made questionable decisions; now you are a person with a documented pattern of emotional avoidance, maladaptive coping, and an anxious attachment style, who writes a five-page retrospective titled My Contribution to the Collapse of Interpersonal Stability and then repeats the exact same collapse next Tuesday.

Oedipus at least had the decency to be surprised by his mistakes, whereas you keep the signed confession in your drawer, right beside your socks.

Samuel Pepys kept a famous diary through the Great Fire of London, and historians treasure it, but it is worth remembering that while an entire city burned, the man buried his Parmesan cheese in the garden and then wrote it down. This is the true legacy of journaling: it ensures that the pettiest detail of your worst day will survive for centuries, long after anyone has forgotten whether the fire was put out.

Of course, the internet has made everything worse. We now have bullet journals, shadow work, morning pages, manifestation journals, habit trackers, dream journals, and enough colour-coded systems to administer a small government, so you require one notebook for your goals, another for your feelings, and a third to record why you abandoned the first two.

The productivity enthusiasts insist that you wake at five, drink water, meditate, exercise, and become your best self before sunrise, while you wake at 10:47 with the emotional stability of a wet tissue, open your journal, and write “I need to be more disciplined,” as though your life was missing another authority figure explaining that you are not doing enough. Excellent diagnosis, Doctor Notebook.

And then there are the people who journal about other people, the forensic investigators of everyday life. They do not simply have a crush; they conduct a longitudinal study of one person’s response times, punctuation changes, story views, and the suspicious disappearance of a heart emoji, until a man who said “good morning” becomes the unwitting subject of a dissertation titled An Exploratory Analysis of Affectional Reciprocity Under Conditions of Ambiguous Digital Communication. Like Cassandra, they predict everything accurately except the part where anyone cares, and by the time they conclude whether he likes them, he has forgotten he sent the message.

Friendships fare no better. Someone cancels plans, and instead of accepting that people have jobs, illnesses, and an occasional need to sit alone in their comfywear, you spend forty minutes writing that everyone secretly hates you, turning your journal into a courtroom where you are the prosecution, the defence, the witness, and the man sentenced to lifelong exile.

Caesar needed a Senate and twenty-three stab wounds to be betrayed by his closest friends, and Napoleon needed the British navy and a rock called Saint Helena to be properly isolated, but you manage both with a ballpoint pen and a cancelled lunch. Nobody has to abandon you anymore, because you can do it yourself, in writing, with excellent grammar.

Then comes the romanticisation of suffering, the belief that pain becomes meaningful if it is written beautifully enough. Heartbreak becomes winter, loneliness becomes an empty train station, and your inability to reply to emails becomes a profound commentary on the human condition. You are not avoiding responsibility; you are “learning to sit with discomfort,” and you are not obsessing over someone who moved on; you are “processing an attachment wound.” Narcissus fell in love with his reflection and wasted away beside a pond, which is essentially a journal with better lighting, and he at least had the dignity to die before posting a carousel about it.

Sometimes, sir, you are simply having a bad week. Not every inconvenience is a lesson from the universe, not every person who leaves is a karmic assignment, and not every recurring problem is your inner child demanding attention. Sisyphus pushed a boulder up a hill for eternity and never once called it a healing journey, yet we insist on extracting meaning from every disappointment, converting every failure into character development and every breakdown into material for our next transformation arc.

God forbid an experience simply happens to us without becoming a TED Talk.

The final and most diabolical trick is that journaling convinces you that writing something down means you have dealt with it, when all you have done is move the problem from your head to a page, where it can be reread in increasingly dramatic handwriting. The person who hurt you has gone to sleep, watched three episodes of a sitcom, and forgotten the entire incident, while you, on page fourteen, maintain a timeline of emotional negligence with the filing diligence of the Stasi. They are at peace. You have archival evidence.

To be fair, journaling can help people understand their emotions, recognise patterns, and organise thoughts that otherwise feel impossible to untangle, and there is genuine value in reflection. But like every tool marketed as a cure for being human, it becomes one more way to punish yourself when approached without kindness or limits. You are allowed to write “Today sucked” and close the notebook, to forget an argument without identifying your attachment style, and to have a feeling without turning it into a research project. And if you write something embarrassing, you may burn the page, delete the document, or never look at it again, and unlike the Library of Alexandria, nobody will mourn it.

Pandora opened a single jar and released every misery into the world, and you open a notebook every night with the same curiosity and the same results. Perhaps the healthiest thing you can do for your mental health is to stop asking yourself why you are like this and let yourself be like this for five peaceful minutes.

Now excuse me. I have to go journal about why I wrote an entire article attacking journaling instead of doing the things I was supposed to do today.