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In 1994, French artist Jean-Marc Philippe conceived of a spacetime capsule named KEO. This satellite would launch into space and orbit the Earth while carrying samples of our dirt, air, and water. Philippe also envisioned that it would have billions of personal messages on CD-ROMs, a collection so vast it would be able to represent every stratum of human life. The satellite would travel around the globe for 50 millennia before it would return to the planet’s surface, a ghost from the past reminding Earth’s current inhabitants (whoever they are) of what we felt, what we thought, and who we were.
KEO never actually launched. But if such a project were to be undertaken today, I would propose that every Earthling who owns an iPhone should download the current contents of their Notes app onto thumb drives and put them on the rocket.
Surprisingly, the simplest app on the iPhone is the one that is the most trusted repository of all our hopes and dreams. If you want to know who someone truly is—what they eat, what books they read, what movies they watch, or how furious they get inside their own minds—you should probably check their Notes app.
Simple Is Key
A lot of people would argue that you don't need an app to organize your thoughts, that paper and pen are enough. While I do love my lined Leuchtturm notebooks and my Hobonichi Techo for my daily to-do list, they don’t occupy the same mental space as a mobile app. Also, if you’re going to use an app, you could do a lot better than Notes. From the standpoint of pure utility, Apple Notes is one of the worst note-taking apps. There are so many more robust choices available, like Google Keep, OneNote, and Joplin.
But I would argue here that using a more full-featured option—or worse, adding more features to Notes—would be a detriment. Notes is simple. Notes is serene. When I’m writing in Notes, I’m not tinkering with the best way to clip web content or writing in Markdown or worrying about the level of encryption. When you have to write a note, even the tiniest bit of friction, like trying to decide if you want checkboxes or bullets, can stop you from jotting something down. I recently opened Google Keep; I haven’t used it since 2018. I use the Notes app every day.
Here are a few of the things I keep in Notes. I have the usual suspects, like separate shopping lists for the grocery store, Costco, and Target. I have a list of holiday presents that my kids want and packing lists for them at summer camp.
But my Notes app falls off the cliff pretty quickly. At a recent karaoke night, all my friends pulled out their phones to compare our lists of songs we liked to sing; I screenshot mine to share, only to have someone point out that “Teenage Dirtbag” was on it multiple times. (I was probably drunk.) I have a list of funny things my kids have said (“pee is the rain of my butt”), a description of Young’s double slit experiment, and a note that says, with no explanation, “Things That Are Full of Beans That Shouldn’t Be.” (I guess I was not aware of the meme.)
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In an informal survey of the contents of my coworkers’ Notes apps, I found that multiple people keep drafts of texts or emails to friends or family members. There are lists of forgotten passwords and the requisite travel packing lists. One person says they use Notes to prewrite posts for social media. Others kept lists of mansard roof homes, or a searchable list of friends’ and family’s astrological signs. Multiple people had written their wedding vows in Notes and kept them saved there.
Everyone Take Note
Of course, we plebeians are not the only Notes devotees. Celebrities have been apologizing via heartfelt Notes screenshots for years. TikTok is full of users reminding each other to vent into the Notes app instead of sending an angry text or firing off a spicy social media post. “What’s in your Notes app” is the new “what’s in your bag.” We all have a Notes app. And we all pour the darkest (and brightest!) moments of our souls into it.
When Claire Mazur and Erica Cerulo, the duo behind the popular podcast A Thing or Two, did an episode about the ways they used the Notes app, they were shocked by the intensity of the listeners’ responses. Many who wrote in were eager to share the personal ways that they used Notes, from listing baby names that they loved to keeping a “shame log" as a reminder to treat themselves a little more kindly. “Your notes are not public-facing or performative,” Mazur says in a Zoom interview. “You're being your most authentic self, as opposed to performing what someone wants to see from you.”
Cerulo says that our Notes apps put us directly in touch with our most intimate selves. “'It's like what one of our commenters said, ‘Forget my search history. When I die, my BFF needs to delete my Notes app.’”
Unlike a photo app expressly devoted to digital memories, my Notes have never triggered what is termed “the miscarriage problem”—the internet’s tendency to ping you with painful, unprompted reminders of traumatic events in your life. I am never made sad by what I see when I go through my notes, or when I ask to see someone else’s. Notes are not polished memories, set in stone. They're hasty, messy, and generally unhinged. They can even be lyrical; as my colleague Lauren Goode notes (ha ha), “Who among us has not jotted down a random thought on the go and thought, ‘My God, I am a poet.’” (For the record, I have never thought this.)
Especially if you’re a writer like me, it’s tempting to create and adhere to the story of your life. Here is where you started, here is where you made mistakes, here is where you won, and here is where you made that decision you can never take back. Contrasted with all the oppressive, maybe harmful, apps that you may have on your phone, the Notes app serves as a playful reminder that we’re all just works in progress.
This is how we should want to be remembered 50,000 years hence. Not as the composed and probably artificial facades that we present at work or on our holiday cards, but messy and whole. Here we were, loving preposterous baby names or singing the worst songs out loud in public. Here we tried to remember what mattered to the people we loved, what socks they wanted, and what their favorite pizzeria order is. Life isn't perfect, but it's pretty good, and we’re writing it all down.
