A few months ago, during an October weekend when I was feeling particularly burnt out and overwhelmed, I forced myself to think about why I was feeling this way and what I could do about it. I discovered the root cause of this overwhelm was being too on and consuming more information than I knew what to do with. Part of this was work related but a lot of it was related to my media consumption habits. My screen time was way too high with most of that time being spent on TikTok where you can get hit with videos about niche mustards, the atrocities of our political landscape, and cute animals at the farm all in the span of a minute. Don’t get me wrong, I like consuming media on TikTok (pre-Oracle takeover anyway). It’s taught me about slow fashion and cultivating my personal style, given me great book recommendations, and helped me experience new cultures.
But the never-ending content stream is too much. Our brains benefit from being at rest and having time to process all the stuff we’re taking in. I wasn’t being kind to my brain and giving it that time.
I came across the term “digital garden” as somewhat of a trend on Substack and got curious enough about it that I started looking for more information. This rabbit hole led me to a YouTube video of an episode of Anna Howard’s Wild Geese podcast creating a digital garden to end my doomscrolling, which really spoke to the feeling I was sitting with.
“We have gotten to a point where we’re so fatigued with overconsumption; we are all scrolling all day long, we are all intaking more information than we ever should be. If a pilgrim saw the amount of information we’re taking in on a single day, they would just burst.”
- Anna Howard, Wild Geese
The podcast then pointed me to Maggie Appleton’s A Brief History and Ethos of the Digital Garden. After learning more about the concept, I was actually surprised I hadn’t run into it sooner. They became A Thing™️ in 2015 and gained popularity from 2018-2020, particularly in the web development community, a community I was participating in at that time as a software engineer. It took a digital garden renaissance in the literary circles of Substack and TikTok for me to find the idea.
A few facets of the concept that really attracted me to it:
- intentionally cultivate your interests and curiosity
- synthesize what you’re learning and consuming so it takes root
- slowly develop an idea over time
- let ideas be in conversation with each other to develop richer layers
Borrowing the garden metaphor, if a patch of land sits there receiving constant water from a stream, it oversaturates and rots. Our brains also rot if they receive the stream all day, every day. Even if it’s all good, interesting, high quality stuff in the stream. I really like the garden terminology because it implies an introduction of action and responsibility instead of only consumption. It emphasizes slow growth over time instead of an accelerating fast pace at all costs.
And so I started a digital garden of my own. I’ve been tending to it for a couple months now locally on my machine using Obsidian. It’s been immensely helpful in building a muscle around taking notes as I consume media and writing down ideas I want to explore further. Inserting intentional friction into the process of consuming so I have to be active in it. The books I’m reading and movies I’m watching are in deep conversation with each other because I’m retaining more. Giving myself this outlet, I’ve found I have more thoughts and ideas than I was even aware of.
I think I’ve always carried this limiting belief that good ideas come first and only then are they worth writing down. But through this intentional practice of writing down whatever thoughts I have, even mundane ones, I’ve found that offloading them onto the page makes space for new ones to build. The ideas don’t come before the writing. The writing is what brings them.
Now I’m at the next step, which is making a public version of my digital garden. I believe gardens, digital or not, should be community assets. I also like the idea of resisting the tendency toward perfectionism and polish before making it public. It’s okay to release seedling ideas into the world, letting them mingle with others is how they grow.