Just a small post here in uncategorized to voice a pet peeve.
If you frequent tech/note taking/app forums, you’ve no doubt seen the phrase “…and I never looked back” used countless times.
eg - “when they went to subscription pricing and implemented changes a, b, and c – I switched to d…and I never looked back”. I think it’s people’s way of saying “I’m not just saying this is what I’ll do…I never looked back, you understand? I did it, and I’m not changing”.
Anyway, it’s become a pet peeve of mine seeing this posted with such regularity. I want to bookmark their thread and then in a year when they mention how they use another app I’ll quote them and say – “ahh ahh ahh…see…so you DID look back!”
I know for my part, my note taking apps and approaches are in constant flux. If I’m lucky, that means over several years, not months.
I often think what you do – it doesn’t annoy me. But I do wonder how many people will soon be thinking, “No, in fact NOW I finally have it…” – again and again.
I’ve just decided to embrace this. My notes app will change; I just need to make sure I use apps that store notes as plain text, so the transition is as painless as possible.
So far so good. (But I can’t say I’ll never look back!)
While subscriptions are always something I keep an eye on, particularly in the current climate of rising costs on just about everything, they’re not usually a primary factor in my switching things around in my workflow. More often than not, it’ll be down to a realisation that I can achieve the same things using other tools, or that I no longer need all the bells and whistles. There’s also the growing concern I have about ensuring that my important documents are as future-proofed as possible, meaning plain text or PDF files are preferable, and ideally somewhere I can easily find them!
I’ve occasionally looked back at apps I’ve used before, usually out of curiosity to see if they’re a) still around, b) still maintained. Several, however, won’t be revisited because their synching capability was found wanting and I wasn’t comfortable having that data dependent on such technology.
The semantic analysis part of my brain wishes to point out that “back” is logically in the direction of the app you left. Switching to a new app might validly not be considered “back”.
If somebody leaves Roam for Notion, and then Notion for Obsidian, that’s one thing. But if somebody left Obsidian for Roam, and then a year later is back to Obsidian, yeah - that’s “back”.
Although the experiential part of my brain is pretty sure that people who use that sort of hyperbolic language wouldn’t see the problem even if you called them on it, since they’re the same sort of people who say things like “OMG I literally died.”
The point of my post was more looking at the folks who can’t just say I left. It’s always, I left…and I never looked back. Like they want us to know it’s not just something they’re saying, they REALLY mean it.
I might have missed something, but if the Discourse search result is correct, there are 8 topics with “I never looked back” inside of them. In 4 years.
So, not many mentions of this phrase in the MPU community?
I am one of the 8 offenders, though. I never looked back after I quit Setapp. What I meant back then: I had no regrets quitting Setapp and to return to support the app developers directly without an intermediate (given how many apps I actually used).
Being a non-native speaker I am quite sure that I … might fail finding the correct words to really express myself in English without realizing it. I am sorry for that. Actually, that is the reason why I keep “looking back” quite often, after I wrote a post: I keep finding mistakes (long live the edit functionality in Discourse)!
I am very impressed by the positive tone and the patience with others in the MPU community. What I am trying to say: I do not think that many of the persons who “never looked back” intended this phrase to be understood as described:
eg - “when they went to subscription pricing and implemented changes a, b, and c – I switched to d…and I never looked back ”. I think it’s people’s way of saying “I’m not just saying this is what I’ll do…I never looked back, you understand? I did it, and I’m not changing”.
