On Recording for Recording's Sake

I have been using Daylio, a mood tracking app, for some 1400 days, or nearly four years, logging my mood and activities each day.

I don't know why I originally started, though I do remember it was shortly after New Year's and I thought "well, no need to wait 360 days or so to start on an 'even number', so to speak". I figured seeing the data would be neat.

Here's a list of the interesting observations:

• I met my partner a month later, and there is a clear uptick in mood as we started dating.

...and that's it. That's the only really valuable (to me) observation I got out of the statistics after those nearly-four-years. (It's a neat way to see love in numbers.) But nearly every other metric I tried to track or accidentally tracked either wasn't interesting. Exercise and hanging out with friends makes me feel better, stress and sickness makes me feel worse. Okay? Or it was purely accidental trivia: I stopped regularly attending church in April 2019 -- is this important information about myself?

Which left the question. Do I keep going? Sure, it's kinda neat to have a Big Number of records about yourself, and to have kept the diligence to record each day, even if it only took ten seconds. But diligence for diligence's sake might be better pointed elsewhere, like a skill. (I wanted to start learning ASL, but that got dropped at some point. I still want to continue.)

I want the things I record to be valuable to me, and I deliberatly want to lean out of extrensically-driven mechanisms for any kind of action. That's part of the reason I stopped using Snapchat: the platform encouraged people to measure their relationships in "streaks", a rising count threatening to reset if you don't send a 'snap' to your friend each day. I don't want to measure my relationships in terms of that, and I don't care to continue viewing my own past history in that way either.