Relatedness isn’t a property of ideas. It’s a property of you, in context, with purpose. Two concepts might be deeply connected for one task and irrelevant to each other for the next.

Every link you make, every tag you apply, and every category you create turn a momentary interpretive stance into structure. You’re not capturing how ideas relate. You’re capturing how they relate to you, right now, for this purpose. Your future self will have different questions, different goals, and a different way of seeing. The connections you’re making today encode an ontology you’ll have outgrown by the time you return to them.

The ideas didn’t change. You did.

This is why personal knowledge management systems become graveyards. You build an elaborate structure that reflects how you thought in 2025. By 2026, you don’t think that way anymore. The system isn’t wrong. It’s just yours-from-before, a static version of a mind which no longer exists.

The uncomfortable conclusion: notes are more useful for thinking now than for retrieval later. The act of writing clarifies in the moment. The archive mostly doesn’t pay off. The future self you’re building it for won’t want what you’re saving.

Future you will have new sources, new problems, and new questions. They’ll do their own thinking. They don’t need a snapshot of your old thoughts. They need you to have anticipated what would still matter. The work isn’t documentation. The challenge is projection, interpreting now with an eye towards who you’re becoming, not who you are in this moment.