I'm Logging Every Google Search

The results won't shock you!

I got a notebook which I use to log every question I type into Google. I am someone obsessed with questions, both hypothetical and regular fact-type curiosities. I ask questions, and I expect answers. It’s why, way back when, my favorite subject was math; there always seemed to be an answer to what was being asked. I just had to know how to find it. Which is why people tend to think I am tech-savvy. Not because my best subject was math, but because if there is a question about any system, I know how to find it. Typically, I turn to Google.

“Why is my layer coming up as “index” in Photoshop? -ai”

This is a real question I logged into my notebook. I know my way around Photoshop, but that knowledge is a growing database for problem solving, not expansive in the way people think it is. Like I spend my time reading Photoshop updates about features I have no use for. That question, however, is now in my notebook, with an answer. Forever in my mind, hopefully. It’s always useless information until it’s put to use. The notebook itself is an analog search history minus the recipes and shopping tabs. I could easily see it as useless information, but as always, I am interested in looking at what I am searching for.

In some ways, I think it gives insight into what often bothers, inspires, or calls to me. It’s a mood board in its own right. It may not always be obvious, but oftentimes it eventually reveals itself. Similar to when I have made work in the past, unknowingly finding a common thread in my work that subconsciously was placed there. It may not look like it now, but the search

“Did people in the 1800s swim? -ai”

Could have some potential.

The longer I look at it, though, the more I realize how connected my life and interests are to my art and everything I put out into the world, including this newsletter. Of course, that is obvious, but I used to think my life had two separate sides. The artist and the influencer (for lack of a better word). But most of the time, what I put out on one social media was art that I was too afraid to legitimize. Too afraid to say I was interested in. There was a reason one of my profiles thrived while the other suffered. It’s because I was separating what I believed to be two different people, but they were both, in their own ways, 100 percent me.

The search log just reminded me that my interests are tied to everything. It’s impossible to separate. The more I search, the more I see the answers woven into my life. I am interested in exploring what it feels like to be almost every single age I have ever been. I am interested in what connects everyone. The experiences of life that make us understand a feeling. The grander look at what being in your twenties, a teenager, or just flat-out young (though maybe, to some, Gen Z, I am only youngish now) really feels like. What it all means. Oftentimes, only understanding in hindsight, but having the forethought to remember how it feels so that I can talk about it when I can see the bigger picture. The search for swimming is really something. I am trying to understand a life I didn’t live, connect with people I never will meet.

The notebook was an experiment, but it became enlightening when I stopped categorizing my life as highbrow or lowbrow. When I saw my curiosities all laid out. It is (not surprisingly) all coming back to the same things. Interests have a way of doing that, a part of a puzzle you didn’t even know you were doing. If you were to keep your own log, which I recommend doing if you’re an artist or just anyone, you would likely not be surprised by the findings but only after you saw it all laid out. I think of it similarly to a dream journal: a callback to a version of yourself you often leave behind, yet one you visit regularly.