The Notes App Is a Window to the Soul

What makes any person’s Notes app so revealing is that its contents have no audience. Unlike social media, it’s not intended for public consumption; unlike a text, it’s not even intended for one other person; unlike Evernote or Notion, it’s not necessarily organized for the user’s future self. It is essentially built-in scratch paper on a phone, and it reveals a person’s digital subconscious.

Here is an incomplete list of what people I know have written in their Notes app: a lifelong bucket list, where to find good furniture, songs to try at karaoke, celebrity crushes, what to talk about at therapy, anti-anxiety medications they’ve tried, a record of when they last had their period, a daily weight tracker, colleges to apply to, notes from a work meeting, inside jokes with an ex, inside jokes from summer camp, a draft of a hard conversation to have with a family member, a draft of a text to a romantic interest, compliments that they’ve been given, people they’ve slept with, the names of a friend’s family members, possible baby names, instructions for making animal balloons, instructions for turning off a cremation machine, measurements for bedroom curtains, packing lists, a pep talk, unintelligible late-night revelations, a five-year weekly meal plan, and many, many grocery lists.

The Notes app doesn’t have a specific purpose. Instead, it holds the jotted-down ephemera of daily life that might otherwise go on Post-it Notes and the backs of envelopes that we toss out: Why keep your Scrabble scores after game night is over? Users often don’t think about an audience when they write notes, but they also don’t always bother to delete them. Like a diary, the app keeps your thoughts in chronological order over a span of time; unlike diary entries, many notes are unmediated by self-reflection. The result is that the app functions like a years-long internal monologue—a lens into what someone is actually thinking.

In other words, Notes is fascinating—and embarrassing. Influencers sometimes share a peek into curated versions of their Notes app on social media; it’s so widely understood as an intimate medium that celebrities use apologies written in the Notes app to signal the authenticity of their (edited, vetted) statements. But the idea of unfettered access—letting another person in on your inner monologue—can be excruciating. Perhaps even more vulnerable is auditing the record of your own past self.

Kelsey McKinney, the host of the podcast Normal Gossip, uses the Notes app for “nearly everything,” including drafts of both of her novels, her body measurements for buying clothes, a lockbox code, a list tracking how many hot dogs she and some friends have eaten this year, and records of the offenses of her friend’s enemies. McKinney uses the app constantly, at her desk and on the bus and in meetings; she sees it as a secondary memory. “It feels really intimate, but in the way of looking at someone’s messy room,” she told me. McKinney is keenly aware of how her private writing could be perceived by others: She burned her diaries so that no one could read them, and thinks about emails as a kind of living archive. Yet she writes notes without an expectation of an audience, and recoils from the idea of sharing her Notes app with anyone, let alone a stranger. “I should have someone delete them when I die,” she said.

Of course, much of what we’re thinking isn’t very interesting. That’s why we edit the versions of ourselves that we show to others, whether in a memoir, a conversation, or our photo libraries. Even viral Notes-app tours on TikTok—pitched as an “unfiltered” look into someone else’s preoccupations—are curated, focusing on how random it can be to show someone your Notes app.

Choosing what of ourselves we share, or retain, helps us make sense of ourselves: “People who occasionally delete some kind of information that’s not at all relevant anymore will have a deeper connection to the things that they have recorded,” Fabian Hutmacher, who studies autobiographical digital memory at the University of Würzburg, in Germany, told me. The fascination of the Notes app, he said, stems from the fact that it’s not curated: It’s a way to see past the version of a person that they’d like to present—or the version of yourself that you’d prefer to remember.

My earliest notes are from the summer after I graduated from college, a decade ago. I remember that time in a soft, nostalgic light, but the Notes app reminds me how much my early 20s actually felt like frantic scrabbling. Evan F. Risko, who studies cognitive offloading—how we outsource tasks from our brains to our devices—at the University of Waterloo, told me that “without these kinds of external memory stores, we’d be relying on our own systems, which are imperfect.” And looking at these old notes, I see what he means. I made a grocery list for my first grown-up dinner party and a list of first-job advice, which viscerally conjure the feeling of trying so hard to perform being a successful young adult. I wrote notes about bad first dates and a draft of a confrontational text to a friend, which feel almost too personal to read. The raw data in the Notes app force me to acknowledge that while being a young adult was exhilarating, it was also exhausting: I was constantly pushing to figure out who I was, with no certainty that I ever would. Reading these notes today makes me feel tenderly toward that vulnerable version of me, but I also want to look away. Confronting the glaring proof of how young and earnest I was feels a bit like staring into the sun.

Those who grew up with an iPhone can scroll back even further in their personal timeline, to find their nine-year-old observations after losing a tooth. Elle, a 24-year-old influencer, uses the app for most of her work, including planning Instagram captions and writing essays for her Substack. (She goes by her first name only on Instagram and other social media because of her previous experiences being doxxed.) But “if I scroll all the way down to the bottom, it’s just really angsty 15-year-old poetry,” she told me, and then unabashedly scrolled to show me that teenage poetry on a video call. She has had an iPhone since the start of high school, and has been aware of her digital record for as long as she can remember. Her notes now include “things I currently love,” “things I learned in my 20s,” and “things/thoughts that make me spiral,” and she shares many notes with her followers, including in a popular Notes-app tour. “I feel like I’m desensitized to sharing these things, because I do make content with them,” she said. The distinction between personal and professional observations is already blurred, so it makes sense to her that they would all be jumbled up in the same app. “Although I do have nightmares about iCloud getting hacked.”

Yet even for Elle, there are some notes that are off-limits: a miscellaneous folder that she scrolls past in her tour, containing lists and reminders that are too personal and too messy to share. If you make your scrap paper public, you have to find another place to put the drafts.