A recent column contends that adding AI to journaling undermines the very practice it aims to assist. The author describes how convenience features, like prompts and summaries, risk stripping journaling of effort, privacy, and discovery — the things that make it meaningful in the first place. According to The Verge, Google’s new Journal app for Pixel goes further with AI than Apple’s, using on-device tools to suggest entries, summarize past writing, and even assign mood emojis to days.
“Inconvenience” as the point
The piece argues that journaling is meant to be wrestled with — that the blank page, far from a problem, is the core prompt: “What happened today and how do I feel about that?” The author recalls discomfort with Apple’s earlier Journal announcement, which leaned on on-device machine learning and Memories-style resurfacing, and describes a similar reaction to Google’s demo. In the column’s view, the struggle to sift through daily minutiae, choose what matters, and find words for inner life is the value of the practice, not a bug for AI to fix.
Quoting Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks — “When you render the process more convenient, you drain it of its meaning” — the author applies that idea to AI writing aids, likening them to Google’s much-criticized Gemini ad that produced a “perfect” but bland fan letter. Effort, the column suggests, is what gives writing heart.
Analog habits, privacy, and reflection
Why summaries and prompts fall short
After deleting a digital journaling app, the author returned to pen and paper and found it improved mental health, critical thinking, time management, and memory. The column cites studies suggesting handwriting benefits memory and learning, noting that analog limits — slower hands, hard-to-erase ink, no search bar — force intention and recall. While acknowledging accessibility needs and voice recorders as an option, the author argues that analog journaling better preserves privacy and personal ownership, despite claims of on-device processing and locks.
AI-generated summaries are described as antithetical to the act of re-reading messy entries to rediscover meaning. The column closes with a personal anecdote of processing heartbreak through a handwritten journal, then ceremonially burning it — a catharsis the author says deleting an AI app cannot match.
