Obsidian
The Markdown-based PKM app that shows up in the library less as a productivity tool than as a place to link ideas, write "absolute junk," and archive Readwise highlights.
Obsidian is the local-first, Markdown note-taking app that quietly underlies much of this library's thinking about writing and knowledge management. It appears in the highlights not as a feature list but through three uses: as a graph for connecting the pieces of a story, as a case study in the discipline of removing rather than adding, and as a highlight archive fed by the Readwise plugin. Taken together, the notes treat Obsidian less as software to master than as a workspace whose real value is the freedom and the pruning it permits.
The graph view as permission to write junk
Robin Rendle's most striking use of Obsidian is for fiction, not essays. He treats a story like a codebase: each document links to others ([[Jupiter]] was a demi-god that befriended old [[Ansel]]), and the graph view swarms into a map of which characters connect and which scenes "just sit out there in the void." He is explicit that this is not a general-purpose organizing trick — mind maps stress him out and are, in his words, a bad way of organizing information — but that for narrative it lets him see the missing edges between characters and events.
The payoff the user flagged is psychological, not structural. Seeing the shape of the story from a distance frees Rendle from the pressure of getting each sentence right: "with the graph view, I feel like I'm free now to write absolute junk. And this is vital for any creative thing! You have to feel like your mistakes won't be judged."1 The tool's job is to remove the fear of the great American novel, which he reckons is the surest route to failure.1
A philosophy of removal, not accumulation
The second thread is about system hygiene, drawn from Steph Ango's essay "What Can We Remove?" — a fitting source, since Ango is the maker of Obsidian, and the piece reads as the design instinct behind a tool built to hold a lifetime of notes. The core diagnosis: "Our bias is to always add more... Interdependencies proliferate, and gradually strangle us. Systems want to grow and grow, but without pruning, they collapse. Slowly, then spectacularly."2
The prescription is that a good system has a built-in counterbalance — it is designed to be periodically cleared of cruft. Without that pressure, we pile band-aid on band-aid until the only option left is to burn it down and start from scratch.3 Ango's answer to why removing is so hard is pointed: "Maybe because we attach our identity to what is visible." He distinguishes the ornamentation that defines our style from the vestigial burdens we carry.4 For anyone whose PKM vault has quietly bloated into an unusable graph, this is the antidote.
Obsidian as a highlight archive — the love-hate use
Craig Mod supplies the most candid verdict. Amid a long book-recommendation riff — Tony Tulathimutte's Rejection, Percival Everett's James, Larry Brown's Joe, Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It, Patricia Lockwood — he confesses: "I have like a love-hate relationship with obsidian. I mainly just use it with the readwise plug-in... because it's just such a great archive of highlights and notes and stuff from my Kindle books."5
The rest of his note-taking he does elsewhere — he prefers the "wysiwyg" feel of Apple Notes for capturing thoughts, and reaches for Obsidian mainly as the destination for long-form reading and Kindle highlights piped in through Readwise.5 It is a useful corrective to PKM maximalism: the app earns its place for one job (archiving what he reads) rather than as a total operating system for his mind.
Three uses at a glance
| User | What Obsidian is for | The flagged insight |
|---|---|---|
| Robin Rendle | Graph view for writing fiction | Freedom to write "absolute junk" without judgment1 |
| Steph Ango (its maker) | A system that must be pruned, not just grown | Build in a counterbalance to clear cruft23 |
| Craig Mod | A highlight archive via the Readwise plugin | Love-hate; used for one job, not everything5 |
mindmap
root((Obsidian))
Connect
Graph view links documents
Story as a codebase
Freedom to write junk
Prune
Bias is to add more
Systems collapse without pruning
Build in a counterbalance
Archive
Readwise plugin
Kindle + Reader highlights
One job, not everything