For as long as I can remember, I have always written something down. My thoughts, feelings and impressions are scattered over dozens of notebooks and yearbooks, computer files and notes in my smartphone.
I wrote these notes because at certain moments in my life I felt the need to express, to manifest all that was happening to me and in me. Things that I could not show to anyone. There was always my "I" inside me, hidden from everyone, which demanded attention and self-expression.
Would these records be of interest to anyone but me? Hardly. But as someone rightly said – «The important thing is not that no one would see it, the important thing is that it had to be written». The important thing is that I was honest with myself at the time.
Besides writing itself, I have always been attracted to such a genre of literature as autobiographical writings - memoirs, diaries, letters. As an opportunity to look at the world through the eyes of other people, to live a part of their life together with them..
I have always liked to observe the rehearsals of various human destinies, a person's attitude to themselves, to their life, society, time, and to the changes that take place.
So why do people keep a diary?
There may be different reasons, but the main thing is that a diary is, first of all, a work on oneself, it is a practice of self-knowledge and self-therapy, with the help of which a person consciously or arbitrarily solves his certain problems.
A diary for yourself
More often than not, a diary is the result of inner reflection, a form of inner life. Diary entries bring repressed emotions to the surface and give clarity to thoughts. In it you can spell out your states and perceptions, and thus perceive the situation more objectively. And this, in turn, gives us the opportunity to look at ourselves from the outside. That is why diaries have an excellent therapeutic effect.
Why else do people start keeping a diary? It probably comes from a deep loneliness. People don't get enough attention and human involvement. That's why diaries can often be written in the form of unsent letters. Or an imaginary dialogue with someone.
More often than not, people keep diaries in moments of difficult trials or difficult circumstances in life - as one way of working through stress, which allows them to calm down, make sense of the situation and find the right solution to an important issue or problem.
If you keep a personal diary for a long time you can observe this or that tendency in your own development, realize the secret reasons of your decisions and actions. And then the diary can become a long-awaited answer and the key to positive changes in your life.
As a rule, a personal diary is written only for oneself and is not intended for others to read. Most people do not want it to ever get into anyone's hands and have someone find out about their hidden, secret part of life.
So sometimes people can't be completely frank about their diary, they're afraid that someone might read it, even people close to them. But some people count on it.
A diary for oneself and for others
As Veniamin Kaverin wrote in the preface to the diary of the writer Korney Chukovsky: «A diary for oneself is, after all, a diary for others.»
There are people who consciously or subconsciously hope that someday someone will read their diary and find out what they had to see and experience and how they coped with it.
In such cases, the diary can be a message to all of humanity, such as Anne Frank's diary. Or diaries that are predestined for publication, such as F.M. Dostoevsky's «Diary of a Writer», or Salvador Dali's diary, which were clearly intended for print, and the diary form was only used.
One may recall the story of singer Courtney Love publishing the diaries of her husband, Kurt Cobain. The first words that are written at the beginning of the book in Cobain's sloppy handwriting are, «Don't read my diaries when I'm gone". Below that, on the same page, he writes, with all his usual inconsistency, «All right, time to go to work... please read my diary. Look through my things and unravel me.» Clearly, Kurt hoped in his heart that this would be published, but carefully and delicately, lovingly, so that respect for him would be preserved.
Recently I found an interesting project on the net, which, in fact, prompted me to think about diaries.
Project «Prozhito»
The electronic service of personal diaries «Prozhito» (by Eng. Lived, https://prozhito.org/) - it's a whole library of mostly Russian-language diary entries, with a detailed search function for various complex queries.
When the project was created, it was planned to be just a collection of all already published diaries, but then the creators moved on to the publication of previously unpublished manuscripts. Sources of material for the publication are various archives, personal collections in libraries, Memorial and Kunstkamera organizations.
The bibliography of what is published on the «Prozhito» website includes more than 750 personal diaries, 260 thousand daily entries written from 1821 to 2014.
«Prozhito» not only allows you to read specific personal diaries and memories uploaded to the system, but also allows you to work with the entire array of entries, obtaining selections by complex queries: authors, time, place, language of recording, as well as by persons and keywords mentioned in diaries. You pick a date, and you see a whole compilation of observations, aspirations, anxieties that people shared with these very days. So these are texts that say much more about the past than history textbooks and dry monographs.
The texts on Prozhito.org are written by different people, famous and unknown, rich and poor, of different levels of education and literacy, in different forms and styles, but united in one thing: they are not made up, they are real and sincere.
When these people wrote about themselves, did they think that anyone, tens or hundreds of years later, would read it? Perhaps someone simply needed to vent their feelings and thoughts, to confide in someone, at least on paper, and someone wrote with the hope that their thoughts would be published after all. And they will be interesting to someone, will bring new knowledge and will help change someone's life for the better.
A diary for others
In fact, we have all kept our own public diaries for a long time, in one form or another - Facebook and Twitter posts, pictures on Instagram, or articles on Hive and Proof of Brain.
Through them, in a way, we broadcast our own lives to the world. We do it in different ways, though.
There are diaries that are rather self-centered, in which the author tells and shows everything that happens to him or her on a daily basis. There are diaries - reflections, in which we write about our experiences, share our feelings and impressions with each other. There are diaries of sociable and progressive people, in which there are always many guests, actively discussing some ideas and expressing their opinions. There are diaries in the form of someone's regular financial reports about their achievements, the amounts of tokens received, and goals for the future.
And it's great and good that everyone is free to make their own choices, and can be whatever they choose to be.
But we know that any information is first and foremost a means. A means of gaining new knowledge that gives new opportunities to achieve goals. And the more information leads to a goal, the more useful it is, the more valuable it is.
So we remember that, for all our personal involvement, a diary on Hive is first and foremost a blog for others. And every time, before we publish our content, we ask ourselves: "Who else but me will be interested in this? What new and useful things will readers learn from my story about myself? ".
And social networking on blockchain is designed so that when you try to create and transfer what value to others - that expressed value comes back to you not only with gratitude, but also with financial reward. Perhaps not always in the way we imagine we want it to be. But by trying to share the best you can with others - you are sure to be rewarded.
Our life is a diary, kept constantly. We can keep it for ourselves, for our loved ones, or for all of humanity.
And if we want to make our society better, if we want to make our own life better, we must try to find and show the best that we can.
And then our days will be worthy of the best diaries)