[superloika]

> Paper books are just decaying bundles of plant fiber — and the ideas within them are likewise ephemeral.

We still have 1000 year old codex in quite good conditions. A paper book will still be readable 500 and 1000 years into the future, if properly stored. A digital file will be effectively lost in decades, if not mere years.

[pbhjpbhj]

Most likely though is your kids, or a company paid for from your estate, will chuck it all in a skip (dumpster) and it will be dumped somewhere to rot, or be burnt to make electricity.

Millennia old codices are extremely rare, and they've survived either by dumb luck or because they were treasured.

Maybe OP is a famed thinker, whose disciples will carefully preserve their notes; or their house is in a cave that will be at sealed in a landslide; or they will die in a peat bog clutching their notes to their pallid breast as the life force seeps from their body, submerging them in preserving ooze...

[rectang]

The current generation cannot bear the accumulated weight of all past generations. Loss and compression are inevitable.

99% of an individual's life experiences are lost when they pass. 99.99% of what's left moves from distinct memory to amalgamated collective experience within a generation.

Even for those of us who are blessed with loving friends and family, nearly everything will fade away. The adolescent me harbored mild delusions that history might care about my notes. The mature me is no longer burdened by those expectations, and my notes are better for only having a single audience.

[rectang]

When I was a child, I imagined that books and the ideas within them lasted forever. The shock is not in how quickly the written word dissipates, it's that it dissipates at all.