Notion. Obsidian. Roam. Logseq. I've tried them all seriously.
Same ending every time — stuff goes in, never comes back when I need it.
I think the problem isn't the tool. It's that all of them treat retrieval as a search problem. But I don't remember what I know by searching. I remember it because I'm in the middle of something and context triggers it.
A system that requires you to already know what you're looking for isn't a second brain. It's a filing cabinet.
The other thing: notes capture what you've read. They don't capture how you think. If someone had full access to my Obsidian vault they still couldn't think like me — because my reasoning patterns aren't in there, just the outputs of them.
Has anyone gotten past this? Or is this just the unavoidable ceiling of the whole category?
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