Missing the Point
Some friends of mine were chatting about politics in the group chat, which piqued my interest, so I started writing some of my thoughts out in the hopes of an interesting discussion. However, as my message grew and grew to account for all caveats and nuances, I realised it would be too long, too self-indulgent, and too unfair to thrust this wall of text upon anyone. So I moved it to my note-taking app, where it slowly morphed into an essay I didn’t intend to share beyond to those who seemed interested. I offered to share the now 4,000-words-long essay with my two friends when I was finished, provided squirrel-brain didn’t take me elsewhere (the default in my case). Well, my brain likes a well-manufactured plot twist, so of course it took me down the route of hyper-focus instead and now the text has evolved (or rather devolved, to be realistic) into a 12,000 word, and growing, thesis on governance.Â
As I had been doing routinely for around a week, I opened up Obsidian (where I write) and noticed to my dismay that something funny had been happening with the sync function. I’m not particularly fond of subscription models, so I had switched to using iCloud to sync files between Obsidian on my phone and tablet lately, but, as anyone who has used this method for Obsidian knows, it’s notoriously unreliable. Something about iCloud and Obsidian just doesn’t agree. All my opened tabs displaying a multiplicity of drafts had closed, which is only mildly bothersome, mostly for the fact that I’m the type of person who leaves work open with the cursor exactly where I left off and some notes to help jog my memory. Faintly irked, I searched for the latest draft and opened it, discovering to my absolute horror that the entire section I’d been working on for most of Friday wasn’t there. Okay, I’ll just check the version history… Oh wait, I don’t have version history any more, ever since I switched to iCloud syncing!
I spent hours looking for a way to recover what I’d lost, to no avail. The previous version of my treatise that contained my precious section of 1,695 words about historical context had vanished. Utterly disheartened, I felt my motivation wane, as though I’d just discovered my very own writing had betrayed me and now something feels off about our relationship. But I sank so much time and effort into it! I can’t just let go over this one technical issue! So I decided I would try to salvage what I could from previous drafts.Â
Armed with staunch determination to brute force my way through the same essay-within-an-essay, I rifled through my numerous drafts and notes in an effort to cobble together whatever I could to recreate my absent magnum opus. Upon opening a file informatively named “Draft 6”, I promptly scrolled to the chapter in question only to discover that, on Friday past, I’d been writing in the wrong file all along. Here facing me was my elusive hypothesis, complete with notes about where I’d left off. Rereading it revealed that not only was it rather mediocre, over-explained, and missing my core point, but it wasn't even half finished.Â
You know, it appears I went through the five stages of grief with this posthumously appreciated composition: denying that it was really gone, anger at having been wronged by technology, bargaining with the system that if it just magically resurrects my fallen text I will stop cursing it, despairing about whether the essay was even worth finishing. Finally, I accepted it was gone, it was all my fault, and I would need to start fresh. And I would love to make a philosophical point from this, waxing lyrical about the nature of humans, complexifying the simple and missing the beautiful simplicity before them. Or about how easy it is to romanticise what we no longer have. But the reality is this: I’m an idiot. A dramatic idiot who somehow never thought to immediately check the earlier drafts I’d made in the first place.