A new era - hello, again

I find starting intro posts strange, so I’m going to jump right into it. You have probably heard of Beth (formerly known as PKMBeth), and you might have heard of me, Réka. 

Beth has been writing articles and sharing her ideas on personal knowledge management (PKM) for over a year now, and encouraged me to do the same last October. It’s no exaggeration to say that in her reaching out to me and encouraging me, she changed my life. Since then, we have been in contact regularly (daily) sending drafts of articles and ideas back and forth. We levelled our friendship up from Discord to iMessage in April, and have been FaceTiming every week (sometimes twice, as there is always so much more to chat about!). 

I think Beth would agree when I say that our friendship blossomed from a mutual seeing of each other. When interacting with each other’s content, before we actually knew each other, we both had individual moments of feeling seen, feeling understood, and feeling slightly less crazy with our ideas. The true kinship we have found in sharing our ideas and building ideas together has been beautifully unique and life-affirming. The Shakespeare quote about the “marriage of true minds”, although taken out of context, is apt. I had never in my life thought someone cared as deeply about the things I cared about until I met Beth. What a blessing that has been. 

Our ideas have only grown over the course of our friendship, and they’ve begun to take form in ways neither of us could have expected. Our systems have taken root and have solidified, and we have come more into ourselves. Our values are more aligned, we know ourselves more, and we are just much happier as people in general. 

As Karl Jaspers said; “true philosophy needs communion to come into existence”. It is not a stretch of the imagination to say that what Beth and I have been doing is philosophy, cast onto the workable canvas of interactable and adaptable software. 

I don’t want to give too much away just yet, but I will say that our ideas are for; 

• People looking to examine their lives more deeply

• People who care about beautiful systems, and are looking to grow their own

• People who are curious, and aren’t afraid to follow the rabbit holes of their curiosity 

• People who feel like there has to be more to the “productivity” and “PKM” systems that everyone seems to be talking about 

  • People who don’t live to be productive - moreso, people who reject the notion of productivity as a whole 

• People looking to make sense of chaos and make meaning of the chaos 

• People who love writing, research, and taking notes

If you look through our individual platforms, you will see that we have been drip feeding our ideas for the past couple months as we have been percolating, and they have been incubating. My very first post on Medium, while I did not know it at the time, is a very light-touch attempt at working out the systems Beth and I have come up with together. Beth’s beautiful essence and traces have become a vital part of our philosophy. 

Over the course of us sharing our ideas without properly labelling them as such, we have been excited to see others taking them in stride and sharing their own takes on them. In this spirit, while our framework is not at all in its final form (and one could argue that it will never be finished as we never finish growing), we’ve decided that it’s time to start sharing our more concrete ideas. We’re keen to start getting our work into the open. Both for us, as all our fledgling ideas will serve as traces of our “final” framework when it is done, and for you, as we are hoping you can learn along with us. 

You can expect us to discuss;

• Meaning making through systems 

• Life-documenting 

• Research as a life practice/ research as a way of life

• Rabbit holes and following your curiosity 

You can also expect our ideas to change drastically over the course of our friendship. We have come incredibly far in only four months, so who is to say where we will be in another four. Or in a year. Or five. I can’t tell you that now, but I can safely say that whatever our ideas look like in the future, they will undoubtedly be excellent.