Opinion | Why a Digital Diary Will Change Your Life

But Day One differs from social networks in one key way: It’s unsocial. Indeed, it’s downright antisocial. Nothing about the app is meant to be shared — it is protected with your Apple security credentials and backs up its data to the cloud using end-to-end encryption, so that the only way someone can get into your diary is by getting hold of your device and your system passcode.

Day One creates something so rare it feels almost sacred: A completely private digital space.

The best way to describe this feeling is to liken it to friendship. I feel comfortable dishing to Day One the way I would to a close friend I trust completely. What I write there I hope no one alive today will ever read. (However, there are ways to pass on your passcode to your heirs, so that someone may read your journal in, say, 50 years; your entire diary can be exported as a PDF file or printed as a book.)

I found this sense of privacy invaluable and liberating. The app feels like an oasis on your phone, one of the few digital spaces that provides you mental space for contemplation and consideration — for thinking about the world more deeply than as raw material for clickbaity memes.

Some of these benefits aren’t about Day One specifically but about journaling more generally. Like meditation — another new-agey practice that has become my daily, life-altering jam — journaling has been shown to be good for mind and body, reducing stress and anxiety, improving interpersonal relationships, and promoting creativity. If you’re already a regular journaler, you might not find much use in Day One; my wife, who has kept a dead-tree journal for much of her life, found the app convenient but anodyne, lacking the organic, precious warmth of committing one’s thoughts to paper.

I get that. But for me, a digital journal offers several benefits over paper. Easy accessibility is a big one — Day One works anywhere you take your phone, even when you don’t have an internet connection, so you can tap out a journal while you’re in line at the supermarket or on top of a mountain. And because so much happens on screens now, Day One offers greater fidelity to daily life. Instead of describing the insane conversation I had with my co-worker, I can just post a screenshot.

And then there are all the glories of photography, which adds emotional heft to the rigidity of text. A few months ago, after a particularly brutal parenting fail that left me and my kid in tears, I found myself crumpled on the bathroom floor, staring at the toilet while I tapped out a journal entry. From that angle, I noticed, the toilet looked a bit like a very sad face. It was everything I felt right then. And so I snapped a picture and added it to my post — recording for posterity a little moment I’d otherwise have forgotten, forever.