Aidan Jones started journaling on July 14, 2024 — a date he remembers off the top of his head as “sort of a critical day.”
He had just returned from a camping trip in Yosemite to celebrate his high school graduation, and he began to grow uncomfortable with the fact that his experiences would simply become memories he might eventually forget. So Jones grabbed the nearest notebook and jotted down the highlights of his week.
From there, Jones decided he wanted to continue to keep a record of his summer plans, and the habit began to form “very naturally and instantly.”
Every night since, Jones sits down to tell the story of his day. It takes a little over an hour, filling four to five pages of his leather German Leuchtturm notebook. Separate entries are written in different colors, and pages are often equipped with scraps and receipts from the day. As Aidan explains, “each day has its own literary and visual theme.”
“I’ve never missed a day since July 14th. I can’t fall asleep unless I do it,” Jones said.
Each day is separated into scenes, always starting with the time he woke up and ending with the phrase “all is well.”
‘An Anchor‘
In Jones’ eyes, an exam score is something temporary that will go away, but forgetting pieces of his day would be “a permanent hole” that he could never get back.
“This might sound kind of insane,” Jones said, but his writing “genuinely will take priority over everything else.”
At first, Jones kept a notebook as “a repository to keep everything safe from [him] forgetting.” Over time, Jones realized he was getting more out of writing beyond just saving the memory of his day-to-day life, and thus, it began to evolve.
“The act of articulating your thoughts in general is kind of an unexpectedly challenging thing, and that challenge is so important for understanding yourself and confronting the things that you’re thinking and feeling in a way that is logical and structured,” he said.
The longer Jones writes, the more reasons he finds to continue doing so. It has allowed him to live more reasonably and intentionally. As he explains, “it’s such an anchor of my life and my identity.”
Writing has also made Jones more cognizant of how he spends his time, describing the difficulty in writing about his time spent doomscrolling on any given day.
“I became really bothered by this idea that there were gaps in my days because I wasn’t engaging with what I was doing enough,” Jones said.
While Jones does not villainize short-form content in its entirety, he believes the mindless consumption of media that does not connect to him or his life feels like giving into a “black hole of content.”
Jones said that he “got to a point where I was trying to write about something that I wasn’t proud of, something that I didn’t remember, something that I didn’t think added significant substance or meaning to my life, it was like woah — this is really terrible.”
Over time, he began to lessen his media consumption, ironing out “all of the things [he] used to do that weren’t actually consistent with who [he] was.” In order to ensure he always had something valuable to write about, Jones made the very conscious decision to lead each day with a very distinct purpose.
“If you approach living as this act of creating something that is then going to be preserved at the end of the day, you can design what you want that creation to look like,” he said.
As a result, Jones started creating more plans for each day in advance and began to view life as something he actively lives, rather than something that simply passes by.
“I will do things intentionally because I know that I’m going to write about them and they will become…a permanent block on the receipt of my life,” Jones said. “Or I won’t do things for the same reason.”
When asked if this perspective was limiting at all, Jones was quick to reply, “No, this has totally amplified my experience of being alive.” Writing at this pace is not something he preaches to people or was told to do. It is simply something he has found is really important to him.
“The main effect, above everything else that this has had on my life, is it has made me live very intentionally,” he said.
‘Life tends to rhyme‘
Jones does not omit details from his day. Writers often struggle with the fact that there is always this “conscious or unconscious idea that someone else [is] gonna see this one day,” he said, forcing them to present life in a way that makes them look better by filtering out the negative.
“I had to slowly abandon this concept that this is for someone besides myself,” he said.
Jones only cautiously shares this passion with those close to him and never reads his entries to others, because it’s a much different experience when a piece of work can be entirely truthful.
Although Jones may never read directly from his journal, he still enjoys sharing memories with close friends and describes the experience of them asking him to recount a day as “just crazy.”
“I can just reach into the past, grab some obscure thing we did, and describe it in such detail,” he said.
This thought leads to his recent journey of re-reading his entries. After noticing frequent patterns in his life, Jones decided to read his journals from the starting point. He had no idea what he was getting into — not only is this practice extremely time consuming, but it constantly leaves him dumbfounded.
“There are crazy, impossible, coincidences that I would never be aware of if I wasn’t writing stuff down,” he said.
Jones has noticed things like “life tends to rhyme in very weird ways,” or, “stuff lines up too neatly,” such as a dream that later predicts reality or a unique experience that occurs on the same date, but years apart.
With a smile across his face and eyes yielding both excitement and passion, Jones says, “real life is like — not real!” His process of looking through memories has helped him realize that being connected to the past is essential to understanding the present.
One example of this is the impromptu half-marathon that Jones ran after the realization that he had somewhat abandoned this hobby. Due to a much busier schedule, Jones had a lot less time to run this year. But the opportunity to read about how much running meant to him just a year prior, led him to embark on a familiar path from his freshman year.
Mile after mile, Jones felt the need to “close more loops” as an act of “reconciling old memories.” He describes this act of running, noticing and remembering everything that it once meant to his life as a very “spiritual experience.” Ever since this half-marathon, Jones has run pretty seriously, which he said never would have happened without his writing.
“Real life is very literary if you actually allow it to be,” he said.
Making the most of it
Journaling has given Jones a new perspective on “bad days,” as it has provided him the unique opportunity to “zoom out” on his life. He explains that each entry becomes “one day in 600 days that I’ve written about, it’s just another drop in the bucket.”
When mistakes happen, it forces Jones to reassess and reevaluate in order to make change, and he sees this in tangible ways through his writing.
In his past 660 days of daily entries, Jones has watched his life transform before his eyes.
As he’s recorded how his own actions and decisions have lead to other things in his life, Jones explains his realization that “real life is nuanced in these really fascinating ways, where you can label something good or bad, but you can never know for sure what you’re missing out on, or what could have happened had you done something different.”
In college, Jones acknowledges that he has the time to write everyday, and knows he will not be able to continue at this rate forever. It is not so much that he is attached to the streak but more so, writing’s effect of self-growth.
“I feel like I am currently experiencing a very important period in my life,” Jones said, as it feels like each day is building upon something else, something that he has built entirely himself.
He explains that sitting down to journal every night never feels like a challenge or a burden and is usually a journey he is excited to embark on.
“The change will definitely happen, and that’s okay,” Jones said. “I’ll still write.”
Currently, his journals serve as more of a documentation of his youth, as he has written everyday since turning 18, and since he began college.
“Higher education is a really crazy opportunity, this environment for learning and becoming better,” Jones said. “These are the only four years where I’m going to have an undergraduate career. So, this is me making the most of it.”