a journaling app that doesn't keep everything
most journaling and notes apps treat "keep everything, forever" as the whole point. shizumu treats it as the problem.
why keeping everything backfires
a page that keeps everything is a page you write for posterity. the editor voice shows up before the thought is finished, because some part of you is writing for a future reader, even if that reader is only future-you. an app that promises permanent, searchable, forever-retained entries is quietly asking you to perform for it.
what actually happens to what you wrote
in shizumu, tomorrow's page starts empty regardless of what you wrote today. what you didn't pin doesn't follow you forward. that's the default, not an occasional cleanup pass. it isn't deletion: nothing is removed, and full-text search still finds it if you go looking. but you won't think to go looking, and that's the actual point. the stakes of any single entry drop to nothing, because nothing you write today is asking to be revisited tomorrow.
what you keep on purpose
pin a line and it survives on its own, a pointer back into the day it came from, not a copy of the thinking itself. if an entire thread deserves to keep growing, a book, a long project, put it on a trail instead of a daily page: that's the one place the default is deliberately turned off. and putting a page on a trail is not filing it. it's asking the pins you already kept there to come back onto the page, which is how you get context without ever having decided where anything goes.
the trade, plainly
some things you'd have kept in view, you'll stop seeing. what you lose is the reason to go back for them, not the words. in exchange, the writing is easier to start, because there was no structure to choose and nowhere to file it before the first sentence, and more honest while it happens, and the part you actually meant to keep, the pins, stays small enough to return to on its own.