Notes

The Notebook as Life Interface | Jeremy Bassetti

The Genius Loci Newsletter for December 2025

Jeremy BassettiJeremy Bassetti

Despite the smartphone acting as interfaces for much of our external lives, we seldom acknowledge that we’re missing an interface for our inner lives. We use interfaces to communicate with others, but seldom do we use them to communicate with ourselves. Even the idea of communicating with oneself carries negative connotations. Despite nearly all of us sustaining an inner monologue at all times, the idea persists that only lunatics talk to themselves. To “get in touch with oneself” seems woo-woo or suggests a deficiency: you need to get in touch with yourself because you’re out of touch. Keeping a notebook or journaling is often characterized as childish, immature, romantic, or (for a man) effeminate.² 

...note-taking software puts guardrails around your interactions with it. It forces you to interact with it in a certain way. It constrains you to text-based input and reminds you when your writing isn’t grammatical. The physical notebook doesn’t remind you if the word you invented isn’t in a dictionary. It doesn’t alert you if your passionate burst is fragmentary. It doesn’t prevent you from drawing, sketching, gluing, pasting, or blotting. It doesn’t conceal your penmanship, your shaky sentences reminding you that you were on a plane or bus, or your quick hand a reminder of your anger. It is a direct interface with oneself, as unmediated as you can get.³

The notebook as interface works well because it is not meant for anyone else. It prefigures an intellectual solitude that results in intellectual authenticity and honesty. It allows us to confront our own thoughts, unadulterated, anywhere.

A thought-provoking essay on the virtues of analog note-taking from my brilliant friend Jeremy Bassetti. I've read a lot of comments online lately about digital note-taking not really lighting up all of the parts of our heart-body-mind-soul that hand-taking notes does, and while I completely agree I've internalized some of this as whining because as a person who has stayed analog and resisted apps, software, and tools, at times feeling excluded from popular movements or "the bandwagon," my reaction to this newfound epiphany of tech bros has has been 😑.

I loved this essay though because Jeremy is not a tech bro. This is not a half-baked declaration from some tech-addled-just-ten-minutes ago renunciate who is suddenly a life coach. It's a comprehensive, vulnerable look at how digital note-taking maneuvers us out of developing the truest connection we can have with our own minds.

Finally, I never thought about how note-taking or journaling might be perceived as effeminate. I thought that all of the world's greatest thinkers, men and women, took notes. If anything, men's notes have gotten more exposure and led to more opportunities like book deals. (Did you know John Steinbeck straight up stole material from Sanora Babb's notes to write Grapes of Wrath? I'll use any opportunity to share this information.) While being a woman is no walk in the park, being a man sounds downright miserable and stupid.

Your Land, My Land - Offrange

Much of the United States’ winter produce is grown in one economically depressed desert county in California with a century-long agricultural history, where a multi-billion dollar lithium mining industry looms on the horizon. Will Imperial Valley agriculture survive?

AmbrookCarina Imbornone

In the Imperial Valley’s century-long history of American expansionism, ecological disaster, and resource prospecting, transformation is certain, especially the kind of change that threatens to overwrite local ways of life. The century-long history of commercial farming in the Imperial Valley feels susceptible to being superseded by a new mineral future.

What I know is that the Imperial Valley, of all isolated American counties, contains an extreme capacity for American desire to extract from the land. This manifestive agita pools like water runoff in the ancient Colorado Desert. In this singular 4,500-square mile area, gold has been dug up; geothermal and solar energy have been developed at scale; the food you eat, and, quite possibly, the car you drive, will be indebted to this dirt.

I was so moved by this essay by Carina Imbornone that I wrote her a note of thanks and, much to my delight, we connected on some shared interests within the food industrial complex. What I appreciated about this piece was the evocative place writing on the Imperial Valley as a site of intersectionality, not just of industries, but of people, technology, and the competition between "real and unreal."

Part of the story centers on Trevor Tragg, a generational farmer committed to keeping things going. The cocktail of Trevor's emotions – his resentment for a state making it increasingly hard to stay in business, requisite feelings of isolation from being young and peerless in industry groups and meetings, coupled with a dharmic level of devotion to his family and their trade – brought tears to my eyes. This bitter elixir, the fuel of rage, love, and a spiritual dose of loyalty was what kept me going in my family's food manufacturing business until we finally sold in 2018.

Had I found the company of people like Trevor Tragg, perhaps I could have lasted longer. Boarding up shop felt inevitable though, and in the end I wielded the work in such a way as to make it a deliberate closing of a chapter, a choice, as opposed to an ill-fated demise. All an illusion of course, but it shows the lengths to which we'll go to craft the narrative we want, the story we can live with. This essay left me pregnant with many such reflections, which I can already see emerging in upcoming writing.

Psychology of craft

“Shaping, handling, and doing something with the psychic stuff.”

A Working LibraryMandy Brown

As an officially mid-career, thoroughly unemployable contractor, I'm increasingly interested in reframing my relationship to work to prioritize work given to me by myself versus others. It is so easy to revert back into the conditioning of the corporatist workplace, just like it's so easy for democracy to slip away when not stewarded. Maintaining these states takes constant vigilance, recalibration, and this is its own massive kind of work.

Workplaces are designed as ladders and the higher you go, the more you invest yourself in that towering journey, the more impossible, dangerous, and financially catastrophic it becomes to jump off. That is why I refuse offers and subtle suggestions to be absorbed by clients even though it would be financially advantageous at the outset.

Because what is the true cost of freedom? The very fact that I'm sitting at home writing this from the comfort of my own desk, listening to rain pitter patter outside my window, is a psychic cost I would pay if I took the job, joined the ascent, got back on track. Whatever you want to call it.

As always, Mandy Brown's reading notes find me when and where I most need them. It's easy to feel scarcity when you're not growing according to the prevailing definition of the word. When instead, you're choosing to be still, to ground yourself in your convictions.

As I read this note about "growing down," I felt the abundant weight of my own presence within my home, family, community, and chosen work. I thought of the complex network of roots delivering nutrients to my soul and consciousness. This includes more time around my parents, which working for others and the systems they have designed diminishes.

These workplaces will have you believe that spending time with the elderly, people who are retired and no longer contributing to the economic engine as its overlords would like, actually makes a person like me less worthy of employment because it's time spent not climbing. The same goes for teachers and mothers who spend their time nurturing kids. Yet this is the time that most fills me with feelings of abundance. And now I have time to notice this.

What else is buried within my life that my roots may find? These are more elusive than the incentives laid forth by employers. But the more I grow down in search of them, the more unwavering I become in my pursuit and the trust I have in it.