Dear diary, hello again! ‘Journaling’ is back, and with a liberating twist for digitally overwhelmed souls

From financialexpress.com

By Sreya Deb

From teens to professionals, journalling is making a comeback as a mindful offline habit. The growing “journal ecosystem” blends creativity, mental wellness and a booming guided-journal stationery market.

Manya Jindal, 26, started ‘journaling’ when she was a teenager, at a time when the activity was still called ‘writing a diary’. “For me, it was a medium to vent out my feelings and frustrations. Over time, journaling became less about fixing something and more about understanding myself better,” says the resident of Delhi.

Despite not being regular with her diary entries as a child, she says that the instinct to document feelings has always existed inside of her. “I think many of us journalled intuitively as children before life became busier,” she says, explaining that people are largely drawn to journalling because “it helps them slow down in the fast-paced world, and also to savour the moment and feel grounded”.

Today, Jindal is a creative journaling facilitator and founder of The Irenic Store, through which she conducts immersive workshops for journaling, and makes, customizes and sells journal accessories and stickers as well.

A journalling workshop conducted by The Irenic Store (right). An art inspired journal offered by online stationery shop Living Waters (left)

Jindal’s take on the workshop

After attending her workshops, Jindal says attendees often report feeling relaxed and unwound. “The response has been really great; attendees feel at peace after finishing a journal spread,” she adds.

A new hobby has entered the mainstream, and mercifully, this one involves minimal brain rot, little online engagement and zero artificial intelligence. Journalling has made its way back into the collective consciousness of teenagers, young adults and adults alike, who no longer subscribe to, or have drifted away from their ‘Dear Diary’ days.

A major perk with journalling is that it is not an expensive hobby. “You just need a paper and a pen to build this habit,” says Jindal. While a range of accessories like stickers, charms, notebooks, markers, and washi tape is available, it is up to the individual to use them if they want to visually enhance their journal and spend money on it. “Basically, there are no real rules to journalling,” adds Jindal. 

Indeed. You can have one journal, or you can have six, or even ten—there are no rules, and absolutely customisable to your comfort or needs, as you’re fashioning it with your own hands. 

The modern journal is no longer just a secret keeper of your school-time crush and bad grades or the umpteen adolescent conflicts with parents. It serves as more than just a confidante and therapy tool. Today’s journal wears many hats— used for planning, vision boarding, storing junk memorabilia, night-time self-reflection, exclusive to-do lists, travel and more.

Those who journal as a habit have largely shared that journalling adds a level of compartmentalisation and calm to their lives, amidst the chaos of everyday life. They describe it as a grounding and highly satisfactory experience that holds compounding value.

No wonder, users, particularly Gen Z, are calling it the ‘journal ecosystem’. Although a personally built habit, it has picked up to such an extent that it has given rise to a market for notebooks, stickers, decorative tape, accessories and other stationary as well. Now, people would rather say, “I have a journal ecosystem”, rather than, “I keep a diary”.

Need a break?

Rhea Chatterjee, 29, turns to journaling for a welcome break from her job as a writer. “I used to write a diary when I was younger, I was a child with a lot of angst. One day, my parents found the diary and ended up reading the content. After that I never ran the risk again,” she reminisces. 

Until recently, though. “My journalling habit as an adult now allows me to write without a deadline, a deliverable, an outline, and even sometimes without a purpose,” she says.

“For me, it is the equivalent of stretching out my limbs after a workout, or breathing out a sigh after a work day. I’ve grown to recognise this as an almost essential exercise for my mental health and writing skills,” she adds.

Similarly, Janhabi Mukherjee, 30, another journalling and vision boarding enthusiast, journals to give her brain a break from her gruelling corporate job that keeps her chained to her computer for a minimum of 12-14 hours a day, if not more.

“I don’t journal as a daily habit, but I do take it seriously,” she says, sharing that she throws herself into decorating her journal pages whenever she gets the chance. 

Mukherjee carefully curates a theme for each page, selects artwork, quotes, stickers and images that speak to her. “I park myself in the corner of my bed and dedicate all my attention to beautifying that piece of paper, in a way that would speak to me even if I flipped it open years later,” she says.

Apart from thoroughly enjoying this arts and crafts exercise as an adult, “Journalling lets me make use of my creative juices, which I am not able to do in my job,” she says. “Best of all, there is no expectation for it to look presentable or impressive, so long as it is beautiful and meaningful to me,” adds Mukherjee. 

With the growing popularity of the journal ecosystem, brands have picked up on this trend and capitalised on it. When buying a journal, customers are not just looking for a simple notebook any longer, journals also come with printed prompts, affirmations, and dedicated sections to be regularly filled by the user.

These are called ‘guided journals’, and provide the user with more of a structure, if the blank page of a notebook is not encouraging enough—guided journals for sleep and mental health tracking, daily to-do lists, daily goals, self-care and mental health journals, one-minute entry journals, and more. 

Some that have caught eyeballs include the Papier Sleep Journal, the Clever Fox Self Care Journal, the Glimmers Positive Reflection Journal, Rewire your Brain Journal and a Doodle Journal, among many others. These journals are printed much like workbooks, with the name of the designer printed on the front cover as well.

https://www.financialexpress.com/life/lifestyle-dear-diary-hello-again-journaling-is-back-and-with-a-liberating-twist-for-digitally-overwhelmed-souls-4150611/

Dame Vera Lynn’s wartime archive preserved by Imperial War Museum

From museumsandheritage.com

Imperial War Museums acquires ‘Forces’ Sweetheart’ collection including over 600 fan letters, 1944 India tour diary and tropical uniform 

Imperial War Museums has acquired the complete Second World War archive of Dame Vera Lynn, including over 600 fan letters, correspondence with her husband Harry Lewis, a diary from her 1944 tour of India, and shorts and trousers from her tropical uniform.

A small selection of objects from the collection will go on display at IWM London this spring. The remainder will undergo the museum’s accessioning, documentation and conservation processes.

Dame Vera was the star of the BBC radio show Sincerely Yours, which connected troops abroad with their loved ones during the Second World War. Her tour of India from March to June 1944, where she entertained Empire and Commonwealth troops including the Fourteenth Army, established her reputation as The Forces’ Sweetheart.

                                                                                                    Alistair Hardaker Image: © IWM

The collection includes lists of names and addresses Dame Vera compiled whilst visiting hospitals in India, which she used to write to servicemen’s families informing them their loved one was well. IWM has acquired examples of these lists and letters thanking her for writing.

Dame Vera’s BBC contract for Sincerely Yours, which started in November 1941, is included in the collection. The show invited listeners to send song requests and messages for loved ones serving in the Armed Forces. She could receive up to 2,000 letters per week.

The 600 letters in the collection include correspondence from Mrs Rosamund Lindsey, who enclosed a letter from her brother-in-law Corporal David ‘Ted’ Lindsey describing Dame Vera’s appearance at an Entertainments National Service Association show in India. Dame Vera sent two signed photographs to lift his spirits. After the Lindseys were displaced by bombing, Ted later wrote directly to thank her.

                                        The Vera Lynn Collection © IWM

The khaki shorts included in the acquisition were worn by Dame Vera during the tour, designed for the same challenging conditions faced by troops.

Simon Offord, Curator at Imperial War Museums said: “Dame Vera’s presence during national Second World War commemorations for decades to come means her name is forever connected to the conflict’s memory, and we are honoured to hold these objects, which tell the story of her remarkable legacy.

Dame Vera’s daughter, Virginia Lewis-Jones, said: “These items have been kept by my parents since the beginning of my Mother’s career, and when she passed on, I took over the reins of her Archive. I am very happy to know that these particular items will be kept for posterity in IWM’s Collection, and that a selection of them will go on display for everyone to enjoy and learn about her life.”

Other objects in the collection include 160 wartime contracts for over 200 engagements, receipts from The Decca Gramophone Co Ltd for records she sent to servicemen and prisoners of war, a fan club address book compiled by her mother Mrs Annie Welch, and account books showing earnings and expenditures from April 1941 to February 1947.

https://museumsandheritage.com/advisor/posts/dame-vera-lynns-wartime-archive-preserved-by-iwm/

AI Educator: Why I Tell Students To Keep A Frustration Diary

From forbes.com

By Dan Fitzpatrick

There is a line from Mustafa Suleyman’s book, The Coming Wave, that I keep returning to. Suleyman, the co-founder of Google DeepMind, writes about children who grew up travelling by horse and cart in the late 19th century, but spent their final days flying on airplanes, living in houses heated by the splitting of the atom. All in one lifetime, from horse and cart to nuclear energy.

I mentioned this last week during a talk I gave for the UAE Girls in AI programme, founded by Abeda Natha, director of digital learning at GEMS Wellington International School. The students who joined me are going to live through something even more dramatic. The real question, I feel, is whether our education systems can get them ready for it or not.

A survey commissioned by Kingston University, which polled more than 2000 business leaders, found that 74 percent of those business leaders do not believe current graduates are prepared to succeed in a world of artificial intelligence. That is not a fringe concern; that is a near consensus.

What Has Changed?

To help the students make sense of this during my talk, I decided to walk them through some economics 101. That is, how the four factors of production have shifted across economic ages. Looking at the work of 18th century economist Adam Smith and then Alfred Marshall, we explored the classic framework of the four factors of production: land, capital, labour and entrepreneurship.

Going back to the feudal age, land was king. If you owned the land, you had the power. Then industry came along, the Industrial Revolution, and capital surged. You needed factories, machines, serious investment. At this time, labour became enormously more valuable than it ever had been because someone had to run those machines. Then the information age flipped it again. Suddenly you needed knowledge. Skilled, educated workers became the dominant factor.

Here is the thing. I think we are now entering the intelligence age. The economics are shifting again, quite radically. Capital requirements are collapsing. A laptop, a Wi Fi connection and a subscription to a powerful AI. That is your start-up kit.

Land barely registers for huge swathes of knowledge work. In the talk, I showed the students an image of a young woman sitting in a Starbucks with a laptop and asked them to look. All four factors of production were right there. The table was her land, her laptop was her capital, she was the labour, and the idea in her head was entrepreneurship. The barriers to build something have never been lower.

If capital costs have cratered and land is becoming irrelevant for digital work, what is left? I think it is entrepreneurship. By entrepreneurship, I do not mean in the sense of the Silicon Valley pitch deck, seed round culture. I mean entrepreneurial thinking, the ability to spot a problem, the creativity to imagine a fix, and the nerve to try building it.

In the session with the students, I gave them a simple exercise. Finish this sentence: “Someone really should make it easier to…” Then write down the first thing that pops into your head. Do not overthink it. Notice the friction in your daily life. This is where it starts.

I encouraged them to keep what I call a frustration diary. Every time you think this is annoying or why is there not a better way to do this, write it down. Then pick one a week and ask three questions. Who else has this problem? Would someone pay to fix it? Could I build a first version of this solution within a week?

That last question would have been laughable five years ago. In fact, it would have been laughable 12 months ago. Not anymore. A teenager with an idea and access to a powerful AI agent can prototype faster today than a funded start-up could manage even five years ago.

Humans Of The Gap

There is a concept I keep coming back to in my work, something I call the humans of the gap. As AI fills more of the capability space, writing code, generating content, crunching data and more, there is a temptation to place ourselves in the gaps, to get skilled in what AI cannot yet do. I get this question from parents almost weekly. What should my child be learning?

It is rooted in a flawed idea that we can thrive in the gaps where AI cannot perform yet. I think this is futile. The capability of AI will continue to increase and squeeze us out of those gaps. Instead, our human abilities become more valuable. Our judgement, our empathy, our ability to earn trust.

When talking with the students, I introduced them to an idea I have worked on with other groups: “the AI entourage”. I asked them to imagine that money was not an issue. Who would be in their entourage? What skills would their team have? The thing is, money is increasingly not the constraint. Any professional with AI “know-how” can work alongside a team of agents.

Think of it as an amplification layer. One person directing an AI entourage can handle work that used to require an entire department. The human directs. The AI executes. We outsource the doing, not the thinking.

This is a critical message for schools. In too many cases, we are still training students to be the doers, to store all knowledge, to follow instructions, and to produce standardised outputs. In the intelligence age, the doing is increasingly automated, and the value lies in directing, deciding, and imagining. It requires a fundamentally different educational model from what many are used to.

A young woman wearing headphones is focused on her laptop in a busy cafe, sipping coffee while immersed in work during a sunny afternoon in the city.      getty

The Liminal Space

I then moved on to something that matters just as much as the skills conversation. The awareness that we are in a liminal space right now. We are somewhere between the old world, where a degree automatically led to a career, where knowledge was the currency, where institutions could afford to move slowly, and a new world that has not quite taken shape yet.

In that in-between zone, it can feel disorienting, anxious, and uncertain. There is also something else in that overlap space. A chance to create the future. Not just react to it, but create it. For young people feeling overwhelmed by change, that is a powerful reframe. We can be agents in what comes next.

Finally, I shared the Japanese concept of Ikigai, a framework for finding your reason for being at the intersection of what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. In this intelligence age, I would argue ikigai matters more than ever. When barriers to building are low, and AI handles much of the doing, the question that matters most is not what job should I get. It is what problem do I care about enough to solve? That is a question no AI can answer for you.

What does this mean for schools?

Every idea I shared with the UAE Girls in AI, from the economic shift to the frustration diary to the AI entourage, challenges how many schools currently operate. We are still preparing students for the information age. In some cases, we are still preparing them for the industrial age. Asking them to memorise, follow instructions, produce standardised outputs.

The intelligence age demands something different. Entrepreneurial instincts, creative problem solving, comfort with ambiguity and the ability to work with AI as a genuine partner. If graduates are falling short, then adding a coding module or hosting an AI awareness day will not be enough. The response needs to be structural and cultural. We need to rethink what we assess, how we teach and what we are actually preparing young people for.

Are we playing a finite game, optimising for exam results and university placements? Or are we playing an infinite game, building humans who can thrive at 25, 35, 45 and beyond?

William Gibson once wrote that the future is already here. It is just not evenly distributed. Some young people are already using AI, building things, thinking like entrepreneurial founders. Others are hearing these ideas for the first time. Some have yet to hear them at all. The distribution of the future depends in large part on the educators who choose to shape access to it.

The stakes have never been higher.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/danfitzpatrick/2026/02/14/why-i-tell-students-to-keep-a-frustration-diary/

Diaries of Real New Yorkers 1870s

From ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com

Peek into the diary of a Manhattan schoolboy growing up in the booming city of the 1870s

“This morning I got up and had breakfast and went to school,” wrote Addison Allen on September 10, 1877. “When I got home from school at 3 o’clock I went out and played marbles and then I came in and picked some grapes . . . .Today it has been a nice day.”

Addison Allen is a name few New Yorkers would recognize. Born in 1865, this schoolboy and his family lived a middle-class life in a house at 31 East 127th Street in the urbanizing district of Harlem (but not too urban that residents could not still pick grapes in their own backyard, as Addison did.)

What makes Addison significant is that he kept a diary for a few years in the late 1870s, which he started at age 12. Even more incredible is that his diary is now part of the indispensable collection at New York Historical, perhaps donated by a relative who deemed it to be valuable.

And valuable it is. Newspaper archives and nonfiction deep dives are wonderful references, but personal diaries offer an intimate view of how people lived day to day—the activities they pursued, the holidays they celebrated, and their family dynamics.

Addison’s diary isn’t a collection of his hopes and dreams; it’s more like a journal where he catalogs the highlights of a particular day.

But seeing his writing on notebook paper helps me imagine him sitting at a desk every night recording his day by gaslight: school events, family interactions, and how he and his friends entertained themselves.

“Today Papa stayed home as he felt real sick this morning and vomited. “This afternoon papa felt better and he Mamma, Mamie, and I all went down to the London (?) Circus, we met Aunt Rebecka down there . . . . Tonight Papa and Mamma went out. Today has been an elegant day. Last night Auntie was here. Today was Walt’s birthday.

Addison often mentions his immediate family as well as aunts, uncles, and cousins often. His father, John, worked as a bookkeeper, perhaps in a downtown office that required him to commute to the lower city via the new elevated trains.

We don’t know his salary, but it provided the Allens with a comfortable home in a burgeoning district centered around 125th Street. Though people from all backgrounds lived in Harlem in the 1870s, it had a largely white population at this time.

His mother, Mary, seemed to take care of the home, tending to his thee siblings: older brother Walt, older sister Grace, and baby sister Mamie.

Addison wrote about his parents’ health, spending time in the park with Mamie and Grace (probably Mount Morris Park on 124th Street, which by this time was landscaped), going on family outings, and even taking a family vacation in the Catskills.

With his mom and sometimes his father, Addison went on shopping trips downtown to Macy’s on 14th Street and Brokaw Brothers Fine Clothing at Astor Place, where Addison, Walt, and Papa bought new suits at the 1878 prices of $20 and $12 (above).

What was their house like? Aside from a mention of a new rug arriving and a window being replaced, he doesn’t describe it. A tenement completed in 1905 now occupies the site of his former home.

But two neighboring Italianate brownstones were built in 1877 (second image, above), according to the Reconnaissance Historical Research Survey, East Central Harlem. The Allen house likely resembled those brownstones.

“Today I went to school. This afternoon when I came home I went into the yard. . . . The other day the boys got their monthly report and I stand number one in the class.”

Outside of his home and family, Addison’s world revolved around school and his friends. The location of his school isn’t known, but Addison was a good student. He noted his number one standing in his class in the above passage from December 1878.

“Today I went to school and when I came home at noon Will Gillmore was here,” Addison wrote on June 8, 1877, a Friday. “He and I went to the park and Mamie too.”

Later that evening, Addison talks about going with a friend to a hall “to see the views of the magic lantern.” After they’d seen “all the views, they gave all the people each a plate of ice cream. We got home at half past ten.”

A magic lantern was an early projector of visual images like photos and paintings. Think of them as the forerunner of movies, with the images forming a narrative. Magic lantern shows were a popular entertainment in Gilded Age New York, and Addison and his friends must have enjoyed the more dramatic shows.

The growing acceptance of leisure time and public entertainment in the late 19th century played a big role in Addison’s life. He goes to Central Park to watch the fireworks at 4th of July. He gets a ticket to the circus. He plays jacks and marbles. He plays some kind of ball game (and loses the ball one afternoon, according to his diary entry on June 22, 1877).

I think my favorite entries detail the Christmas mornings Addison wrote about, excitedly listing the presents he and his siblings received.

“This morning I got up at about quarter of seven and went downstairs to get my Christmas things and I got a printing press and a book [and] a large paper of candies and as Aunt Harriet and Uncle Andrew came last night they gave me a nice two-bladed knife but I liked the printing press best of all,” he wrote on December 25, 1877.

The next year, Addison hit the jackpot with gifts again. “This morning, I got up very early for Christmas. I got a lot of candy, an orange, some figs, and a nice large magic lantern, a book, and a steam engine. Mamie got candy, a book, a chair, a locket, and other things. Grace got a necktie and bottle of cologne and other things. Walt got two pins, two books, and other things.”

Addison’s diary ends when he’s in his early teens, but that isn’t the end of his story. Census data and newspaper archives reveal that he graduated from law school at Columbia, became an attorney, and continued living at the 31 East 127th Street address for several years.

In 1901 he got married. Census records from 1910 have him living with his wife, a Pennsylvania native named Sally, and their maid in the East 127th Street house, yet there’s no mention of his parents or siblings sharing the home with them. By the 1920 census, he and his wife have relocated to Yonkers.

I couldn’t find any details of his later adult life. But a 1940 obituary announced his death at age 75. Fittingly, Addison was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery—returned to the city that nurtured his childhood and gave him much to write about.

[Diary entries: New York Historical; last image: The Herald Statesmen, Yonkers NY]

https://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/tag/diaries-of-real-new-yorkers-1870s/ 

Dear Diary: Confessions Of 3 Journal Devotees

From thegloss.ie 

Be inspired to put pen to paper …

A diary is more than a practical way of organising your time; it’s a repository for bright ideas, names you don’t want to forget and plans yet to be realised – each page a record of a life well lived.

For Lucinda Chambers, the co-founder of Collagerie and former Fashion Director of British Vogue, the act of keeping a diary has long been part of her daily routine. She calls them, and her selection of notebooks, constant companions. “They’re very representative of my life,” she reflects. “They keep it safe, purposeful and beautiful. For me, above all, they keep it colourful.” She has always kept a Smythson Soho diary, choosing a different colour to mark each year. This year’s colour is Cerulean.

It’s also an extension of her love of writing. “I’ve always enjoyed the physicality of pen and paper. I love to draw, one of my best Christmas presents was a set of over 100 brush felt tip pens. And, I love to write – letters, postcards – to receive something in the post with interesting stamps and writing on the envelope is always a delight.”

“When I look back at some of my old diaries, I love to see the way my life has evolved and changed through the years. You don’t think it has in the moments of hectic life, but it has and it’s good to be reminded of that sometimes. I don’t travel as much, which I love; I have a routine now that I didn’t have before. I have time to put in rituals and new habits that certainly weren’t there in my previous life!”

THE GLOSS Beauty Editor Sarah Halliwell says, “I’ve always been dedicated to paper diaries, and remain loyal to two types – Moleskine and Smythson. Smythson are luxurious, with wafer-thin paper that’s a pleasure to write on, but they’re pricey – sometimes you can get hold of a reduced-price one a few months into the year, though it does mean your life is chaos for several weeks. I judge it on a “cost per use” basis. Since it’s something that you use every single day, it’s worth having a good one.”

“I used to write a more personal diary throughout school, filling it with gig tickets (not cool ones), lengthy ramblings and angst, and even a plaster (from the time I trapped my finger in a door when drunk on cheap wine at a party, and a boy I was mad about kissed it better). Noel Coward I’m certainly not. While these teenage diaries are excruciating to read back, somehow I can’t quite throw them out. A reminder of another lifetime.”

“One constant throughout my life has been writing things down,” says THE GLOSS Contributing Editor Penny McCormick. “As a stationery addict from a very young age, I’ve accrued numerous diaries and notebooks, now locked in a trunk in the attic. I particularly like an A5 sized diary – Paperblank, Papier and Aspinal are favourites – and for 20 years I swapped to using red notebooks from Carolina Herrera as both a diary and journal. I used to carry them with me at all times, though unlike Oscar Wilde they did not fulfil his brief of ‘something sensational to read on the train!’”

“I went through a phase of writing gratitude lists each night (when processing a particularly bad break-up) in tandem with a brief synopsis of my day or quotes from films. Flicking through recent diaries I’ve found tickets, photos, postcards and the odd receipt of significant items I’ve bought – clutter to some, these often spark happy memories of people and places. This year, I’m using a much smaller leopard print Smythson pocket diary that I refer to throughout the day as it keeps me organised. I’m also trying to get back to writing in the evening, so I keep a Montblanc notebook by my bed to jot down more detailed notes.”

https://thegloss.ie/dear-diary-confessions-of-3-journal-devotees/