On December 31st, I finished a ten-year daily journal. Every single day for a decade, I wrote an entry. The format was simple: one page per day, laid out so that when I flipped back through, I could see exactly where I was on any given date ten years prior. It was a satisfying thing to complete.

Most of what I wrote about was pretty boring. The weather, what I was thinking about at work, the cats doing something funny, a nice walk. Nothing extraordinary, nothing special. Just the texture of an ordinary day. Those days turned out to be among the best.

I rated each day with a number between one and ten. Over ten years, the distribution settled into something I wasn’t expecting. The vast majority of my days were eights. After that, sevens. I had maybe nine or ten days in the entire decade that I rated a ten, and maybe four or five ones. Everything else gravitated toward that seven-to-eight range, with a few threes (usually when I had a cold), and fives when I was fine, but annoyed. I kept coming back to the sevens and eights when I was reading, though. How good most of my last ten years was! How much of life is just folding laundry and playing video games and having a perfectly fine day.

The harder stretches showed up too, of course. There were losses in my family, more than once. There was the pandemic. There were days that were rough. I could see them in the journal, a cluster of low numbers, a note about something difficult. I could also see them end. The numbers would creep back up. The entries would shift back toward the mundane. The same thing happened in reverse with the extraordinary periods. Something wonderful would happen, and for a while everything felt right, and I tried to write about that feeling when it was there. Sometimes I managed it. Sometimes I didn’t. Either way, it didn’t last forever. Nothing did. The days kept moving back toward the middle, and reading that pattern across ten years of actual entries was one of the more satisfying things I took away from the whole project.

Then, on January 1st, when I sat down to write my entry for the day, the thought came up almost immediately: I don’t want to do this anymore.

It surprised me. I enjoyed journaling. It had been part of my daily life for a decade. There was no frustration with it, no feeling that it had gone sour. The issue was that it had become a chain. Don’t break the streak. Keep going. Finishing the ten-year milestone cracked that open, because for the first time I could actually step back and ask whether what I was getting out of it was worth the time and attention I was giving it every single day. Once I asked that question honestly, the answer was pretty clear.

What I’m losing is real, though. I don’t have a great memory. There are so many details from the last ten years that I’d completely forgotten, a concert we went to, a restaurant that became one of my favorites, small moments that mattered at the time and then just disappeared. The journal brought those back. Without it, they stay gone. I know that going in, and I’m still making the choice.

I’m not sure what replaces it, if anything does. I already do a lot of debriefing in other parts of my life, for professional stuff and creative work, and I’ve been thinking about whether something like that might work for the day-to-day. Something less like a record of what happened and more like a way of processing it. The logistics aren’t hard; I could probably make it work with a set of weekly files, something I could look back on. Whether I actually do it, though, I don’t know yet.

But I do know this: the ordinary days are the good ones. I’m glad I have ten years of writing them down to help me see that.