Ask Brett Kavanaugh his opinion :).
Incidentally, we’re doing a big purge of old stuff and I just threw out many years of old Franklin Planner pages. Odds are I will never, ever go back to them unless I decide to run for SCOTUS some day..
I tossed out 20 years of training journals from when I was racing two years ago.
I’d literally drug those notebooks to China and back.
I save my journals - at most two per year - in a box at the top of my closet. When I can’t hold a pencil any longer, I’ll donate them to a university. Students could write masters’ theses on my shopping lists and church committee notes.
I’d keep them. I can’t remember what I had for breakfast yesterday so I love it when my memory is jostled by an old diary entry. I’ve only kept one sporadically over the years, but now I wish I’d written more often to document the highs & lows of my life.
They’re not just a ‘day in the life of...’ they’re a day/week/month/year(s) in YOUR life - so yes, keep them - but digitize them. I.e., scan them in to an Adobe PDF - will keep little space and read anywhere. This way, before you become like Biden, you’ll be able to reminisce, if you so choose.
I’d like to ask my sisters for my dad’s sermon notes - would love to read many years now after he’s gone.
Think of Reagan - all his notes he wrote in his journals. It made fascinating reading to know the man’s thinking at the time.
TOSS THOSE SUCKERS. (Better yet, don’t keep a journal in the first place.)
Yes it is.
How much would you like to pass on to society, your kids or grand kids.
Pretend you are the government and black out what you don’t want to pass on.
She should have never thrown the others away. Worst case she should have secured them in something relatively water/airtight and buried them somewhere.
20, 50, 200, 1000 years later someone would find them and they would provide hours of fascinating insight into someone long gone. To have casually tossed a declining hard storage medium that contained a fairly detailed layout of a portion of an individuals existence in the past was to throw away a small scrap of informational immortality that few create or preserve...
At this point the majority of collected personal and social information is collected and stored digitally. At some point ALL of that will become irretrievable given some catastrophe or just an expansion/evolution of media outside the then current storage and retrieval technology. Anyone here still have the capability to read the information off a 3.5 inch floppy disk? How about a 5 inch? An 8? A cassette tape? 8 Track? Reel to Reel?
Additionally, the people who control the means to read/recover the information and store it will be the people who interpret it for others...
I’d keep them. A grandchild might use them to write a book.
Digitize (scan) and then transcribe (in the case of handwritten notes: type by hand; in the case of already-typewritten notes: use Optical Character Recognition software) all of your journals.
You will now have a Microsoft Word file of your journal.
It is then fun to cross-reference your file with all of your likewise scanned grocery store receipts, movie theatre receipts, photos, etc.
Regards,
Bookmark