Great insight! This is one of those real “a-ha” moments that keeps me using Obsidian today.

One concept that backlinking and a bottom-up note structure gave me insight on was actually this exact concept of “emergence.” The idea that out of a large amount of chaos, order and structure can naturally form. I’ve been able to connect it to everything from philosophy to mental health to natural language and it’s very exciting.

I am a person with late diagnosed ADHD/autism so my life breeds chaos. The assurance that you can just write without having to worry about where the note goes is so powerful.

Nicole van der Hoeven is a great resource! If you’re looking for more YouTubers, I would recommend Artem Kirsanov. He has a couple of videos on bottom-up note taking/zettelkasten, but also has some really interesting conceptual videos on how people learn and retain knowledge. He’s a computational neuroscience student but he’s great at being interesting and not overly dry about his explanations. My primary Obsidian resource on YouTube is Bryan Jenks. I’ve basically stolen most of his setup because he also has the same pain points I do (namely having terrible working memory and issues starting tasks).

Good luck and thanks for the post!

Hey welcome to Lemmy, second comment here :)

Wanted to say that I relate to the “productive procrastination” that PKM stuff like Obsidian can cause. I’m coming back to it again after Notion didn’t work for me.

If I were to give one piece of advice to new users it would be to start small! Figure out exactly what you want to achieve with the software and then try to meet those needs with as little complication as possible. There are thousands of incredible community plugins out there but don’t feel like you need to master even one to be successful.

Above all I agree with being proud of yourself for just writing things down, and accepting that your setup doesn’t have to be perfect.

Thanks again for the comment!