I Over Engineered a Journal to Understand My Needs

I have a hard time communicating my needs. I'm much better suited to being a people pleaser. Keep it a buck, I would make a great 1930's wife. I would avoid conflict and never bring up my wants or needs. What issues do I have anyway right? I'd live on a farm with goats and lambs giving my working man healthy children. I'd never speak up and I'd pass my time tending to whatever thoughts I had that don't bring me closer to agency. Needs would be a sin and I'd raise a sheltered daughter who longed for more than this small farm and hate her for it.

I'm not a trad wife. Unfortunately (someone get me pregnant gahh). I have to think about the life I want to live to a certain degree because I can. How sad. As someone with little guidance in navigating emotions outside of media that makes me feel all warm and cozy like Adventure Time or Homunculus or Shamo I have needed to put a lot into therapy, reading books on psychology, practicing open communication, understanding boundaries, listing out my values, doing body scans, finding time to rest, detangling bias, sleeping and eating, gratituding, even journaling. All that. I am still horrible at directly communicating a need however. If I was being honest I would say I assume if I am aware of a need I would feel I should address it. But I am coming to recognize how my needs are underlying factors related to my values. For instance: I value playfulness. I am a goof. I love a joke, I love laughter.

Part of my playfulness comes from assuming people don't like me. I find it's a good way to disarm people. I can discover peoples boundaries pretty quickly with a joke. I can also soothe others or myself. That allows me to feel that person won't lash at me in anger because I am funny. And if they do I have permission to avoid repair because fuck them. I'm never serious and I do not deserve to be talked to in a mean way. I also value humor because living is like objectively terrible. Hard I should say. Even the trees look frantic. All endlessly stretching out. I need joy, humor, authenticity in my life. So much of it.

I didn't really know playfulness serves my deeper need for connection until like, what is today, May 12th, 2026. Yeah like 3 days ago. What has been been helping is this personal app1 I put together called luminosity. I named it after an article by Alicorn called Living Lumionusly2 (Modern update here3 ). It may sound cheesy, but it's fair to say this article sent me on my mental health thing. In particular correlating affect, circumstance, and behavior.

This could be old news to some of you but to me it was a revelation of sorts. It was nice knowing I had control over these things somewhat. Ever since, I have sought to understand myself so that I have better control over those ABC's.

What's the App my Guy

Hardest for me is to make sense of how my affect is influencing my behavior. I mean, there is a lot going on isn't there? Hunger, sleep, and mood are certain to produce an emotional response. Without intentionally investing in understanding underlying motivations or rather how I may want my affect to influence circumstance and behavior I do fear that mindfulness concerning hunger sleep and mood is required, but may not reinforce the lifestyle that guides how I may do so happily.

Luminosity (the app) was built with this issue in mind. Values work always felt like a huge task involving listing either too vague or too specific facets of life I do not consciously situate. Still, a list of values that I felt resonated with what brings me joy felt like a good starting point. In the app, the list of values you can start with is really just every value I found I identified with. At least in the beginning. That list got trimmed down heavily into about 19 workable values in the a web page. This was progress.

Next I began to work through each value using the workflow I made. Most of this is based on my first year of therapy and a handful of books. Im no therapist and I won't go through it all here. Checkout this page4 on the how things work. To me this meant:

The app I built is centered around a local-first, private architecture designed to operationalize self-reflection without the friction of accounts, subscriptions, or remote telemetry. That is mostly bc of HIPPA. But also because of an interesting issue around data ownership.

TECHNOLOGY RANT!

So yeah, I build things. I have always loved a lil project. I love a little show and tell. Doing so means making it usable but forealsies. Data governance is a headache though. Both technically and logistically. For any data that could be considered private or health related you need a legal agreement to store any personal identifiers and that data needs to be placed in a hardened database behind a VPN. Not so easy of a setup for a project I'm the only user of. It seems pertinent to question various data schemes and their implementations as we challenge the existential threat the future of big data operations pose. We seem to move closer to some fucked mix of Parable of the Sower, Ghost in the Shell, and every sci-fi dystopia Arnold Schwarzenegger has been in. As digital artifacts become siloed into various platforms, what those platforms are able to create with the data we store within them has become a prized and sought after resource. Privacy is prized in America but I do not think we have solved where "open data" ends and intellectual property begins.

Example: are Github's use of code in their platform and the access to internet Archive's digital collections both issues of corporate overreach? They are both adjudicated under Title 17 of the United States Code (Copyright Act). They both concern massive high-stakes data collection program. Github's issue is a fair use concern while The Internet Archive's concerns digital lending. Both are, legally, overreaching programs. Yet, digital archival vs training LLMs feel morally obvious to me. I wonder if this is a human quirk or some blindspot in thinking about IP and copyright.

With the above in mind I was able to use this project to test a p2p, browser based, and file backed design. I do not think I like it nor do I think it is easy to use if I was non-technical. I enjoy thinking of private hardware, lil 3d printed boxes with p2p privacy networks installed on them making them hard to track. But, in feeling illuminated by my creation, I have to ask do I really care about privacy or choice? I think I care about choice more than privacy.

In my ideal world we could interface with vitals such as baseline stress levels of close ones to understand how best to interact with them on some given day. Noticing patterns and recognizing one another's affective mood visually seems like a great way to connect with your people on a local level. In that world, there would be a mix of devices, as we have now, but we would have immense choice over the configuration of these connected hubs. Pub hubs, if you will. I could own a little machine dedicated to being a data hub that connects to become a kind of private record exchange. Pub hubs if you will (shout out pub pub).

Think about it. A small, silent machine translating my exact emotional capacity for the day, bypassing my total inability to just say, "Hey, I need some grace right now." No corporate servers, no data harvesting. Just a direct, private line of empathy. I mean it sounds kinda solid5 to me 😉 🥁.

Notes

  1. Needs & Values. https://luminosityledger.netlify.app/
  2. Living Luminously — LessWrong. https://www.lesswrong.com/s/ynMFrq9K5iNMfSZNg/p/9o3Cjjem7AbmmZfBs
  3. Ureshiku Naritai — LessWrong. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xnPFYBuaGhpq869mY/ureshiku-naritai
  4. Needs & Values. https://luminosityledger.netlify.app/#/methods
  5. Solid: Your data, your choice - Solid Project — Solid Project. https://solidproject.org/