What if you didn't have to scribble in books...

For a long time I have been watching people scribble in their books and it made me uncomfortable.

I think for a couple reasons:

1. I was afraid I would make a mistake
2. I was afraid I would be "ruining" the book
3. I was afraid that itd be unsellable if I wanted to sell it in the future (I have yet to sell any of my books)

The solution to that is to write notes in a notebook but that also has its problems:

1. Am I writing too much?
2. Am I writing too little?
3. Am I ever going to reread this?
4. Am I just rewriting the text?

This is a problem reference notes solve!

Reference Notes!

If my reference note on A System for Writing by Bob Doto is to be believed a reference note is a long note containing brief references to what caught your attention when engaging with a piece of media.

You have 2 columns. One for the page number and one for the reference that caught your attention.

Here is a thing that caught my eye when reading "The Pocket Hagakure"

Later this can become a main note and I can link it to other notes and maybe form an arguement on how authorities program their grunts to do their bidding even at the cost of their own wellbeing.

What is cool about reference notes is you can have 100 entries of what caught your attention, skim through them, revisit them at your will without having to reread the whole book OR having to reread your notes which feel like rereading the whole book.

One day you will have a conversation with someone and you will remember your train of thought, be able to retrieve it with sources. Isn't that beautiful?

That is part of the appealing nature of zettelkasten in general to me.

Zettelkasten does not let you have beliefs without evidence. When you make a claim like "The people in power normalise the people without power sacrificing themselves" or whatever you have a node in a web of examples.

You can connect that to notes about law enforcement and factory workers and farmers and office workers and more.

Imagine having to be forced to have evidence for your beliefs.