What it is
When something hurts or puzzles us, we want to write about it. When we’re happy and resting, we want to keep resting. So any journal, archive or notes app over-samples the examined half of a life and under-samples the lived half.
Then anything that summarizes that record, a therapist, a friend reading your diary, an AI, returns the dominant signal and writes the tilt back as if it were a conclusion. A quiet part of your life you never wrote down looks absent, not small.
How it shows up for me
I caught it in my own notes. A summary of my values had dropped half of what I believe about joy, because I’d only written about the analytical half. And templanza, a word at the center of my values, was nowhere in my writing at all. It’s my mom’s word. It was spoken, not written.
The counter-practice is the hardest kind: capture at rest. My first try was four words: “I’m in joy atm.”