Obsidian

How it entered my life

I have a long history of scattering notes across every surface available to me: Apple Notes, Notion, Google Docs, Google Keep, sticky notes, a physical notebook I kept losing under other notebooks. None of them aware of the others.

Obsidian arrived because someone on Twitter posted a screenshot of their graph view, this dense web of linked notes that looked like a nervous system. I installed it that evening, mostly out of curiosity.

There wasn't a single moment where it clicked. It was more gradual than that. I'd be writing about a problem at work and half-remember jotting something down weeks earlier, search for it, find it, link the two notes together. Then it would happen again a few days later. Obsidian didn't make those connections for me, but it was the sort of tool where making them was easy enough that I actually bothered to. Over a few weeks I noticed my older notes were becoming useful again, not because anything had changed about them, but because they were finally reachable. Nothing magical about it, really. Just a system where things stay findable long enough to matter.

The core problem, what it does well, what's broken

The problem: Most of what you read, think about, and jot down is lost within weeks. Obsidian's wager is that if you let people link their notes the way thought actually works — associatively, messily, full of tangents — they'll build something they return to, rather than another graveyard of forgotten documents.

What it nails: Ownership. Your notes are markdown files on your machine. There is no lock-in and no proprietary format. If Obsidian disappeared tomorrow, you'd still have everything. This sounds like a technical footnote, but it changes how much you're willing to invest. I suspect it's why the community is so unusually devoted. People have put real work into their vaults and they know that it's theirs.

What's broken: Out of the box, Obsidian is a markdown editor with folders. That's more or less it. To arrive at something useful you need to seek out and configure community plugins yourself: daily notes, templates, any sort of structure. The plugin ecosystem is remarkably good, but the consequence is that the best version of Obsidian only exists for users who already knew what they wanted before they opened it. Everyone else is met with a blank screen and a faint sense of having been left to fend for themselves. The most important thing Obsidian could do is not to build another plugin. It is to ship a thoughtful default setup. One working system on day one, customisation after.

The final world, five years out

I don't think the end state is about notes at all. It's closer to: one place where your thinking accumulates, connected enough that when something becomes relevant again, it finds its way back to you.

The AI dimension makes this even more exciting. You're preparing for a meeting and your notes surface something you wrote months ago, a half-finished thought, a saved thread, not because you searched, but because the system has enough context to make the connection on your behalf.

The daily experience is simply less forgetting. You write things down with some confidence they'll return when useful, rather than disappearing into a folder you'll never reopen. Obsidian doesn't win by being the best notes app. It wins when taking notes stops being a distinct activity altogether, when it's simply how you think, and the tool has the good sense to stay out of the way.