12,000 notes in Obsidian. I just realized I haven't opened any of them in 6 months. What's the point?
I need someone to reality-check me on this.
I have 12,000 notes. Meticulously tagged. Linked. Organized into a graph that looks beautiful. I've spent hundreds of hours on this vault.
Yesterday I needed to find my notes on pricing strategy for a project I'm working on. I knew I'd written about it. I searched for it. Found 47 notes that mentioned pricing. Read through seven of them. None had the insight I was looking for because I hadn't written it down, I'd linked to someone else's article about it.
And that's when it hit me. My vault isn't a knowledge system. It's a reference graveyard. I've been filing information instead of processing it. The links look like understanding but they're just proximity. Two notes being connected doesn't mean I've synthesized them.
I'm genuinely questioning whether private knowledge management works at all, or whether the act of organizing for only yourself removes the pressure that forces real understanding.
Has anyone moved away from PKM and found something better? Or am I just using it wrong?