There’s certainly a public form of journaling that happens on social media that seems to start with good intentions but then descends into self-diagnosis.

In terms of private journaling - well, it’s private, so hard to draw any general conclusions, but I tend to think that if you’re spending more than half an hour each day writing about yourself then you might have a problem.

You pass judgement pretty easily. Private journaling is not always "writing about yourself" in the narcissistic sense you seem to mean.

Plenty of people feel like their thoughts and ideas are worthwhile but can't keep track of them without writing them down. Some of them even pass the 30 minute cutoff doing so.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m 100% behind keeping a private journal, even one where you just write about yourself, but you can have too much of a good thing, and I see 30 minutes a day as the reasonable limit.

Yes, and addressing those problems is what I seek to accomplish by writing to myself about them. :)

Highly verbose and time consuming journaling has gotten me through divorce, major career changes, single parenthood, relocation, a new relationship and a bunch of other life changes. I usually journal only a few times a week, but in the thick of that stuff, I needed much more than a 30 minute window each day to check in with myself about where I was at and where I was trying to get to each day. Sometimes I spent hours. I took a year and a half away from it — which turned out to be by far one of the most impulsive and reckless periods of my life!

Public journaling it seems inevitably devolves into glorifying the highlights and seeking attention and acceptance, rather than honesty. Which expectedly the media platforms exploit for engagement metrics.

What are the effects, in your opinion, of an overexamined life?

Anxiety, dissatisfaction, relentless comparison of oneself with others, etc.

It would be very strange if gratitude journaling would lead to those kinds of thoughts.

I have heard people say the unexamined life is one not as gratifying

There is an optimal middle ground

I agree self examining requires middle ground.

I made an Apple Watch App and then Shortcut[2] to record by voice how I spend my time and write it to my calendar. The goal was to make it so easy (<10 seconds) to record when and how I spent my time that I would record even every time I went to the bathroom. I did it consistently for a few weeks and just couldn’t bring my self to continue, I was recording only ~40-50 activities per day and I still felt burden by such detailed self examination. What did I learn? That I was playing a lot of Xbox with my son and too much alone. That the free form text I was recording needed categorization and keyword analysis to even hope of being useful and that I really love spontaneity and aimless wandering, curiosity, and learning—but ultimately what a weight it is to do such detailed analysis of one’s own self. I do still some times have dreams of doing something similar with all of my Google data[1] at some point maybe bringing both ideas (recording how I spend every minute and full Google download) together for analysis and self awareness.

[1] https://takeout.google.com/ [2] https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/66271d52e6174d1a8b61c48e700...