Paul Ford contemplates his past emails:
[I]t kept happening: I'd have an idea, search through my archive, and find that I'd already had that idea, some variation on it, six years ago. I was, without a doubt, repeating myself. Spinning the wheels of my hobbyhorses.
He abandons searching for specific words and examines a few random days' emails:
There was, without the acute knife-edge of a search query slicing my life, a wealth of goofiness, a catalog of wasted flirtations and dumb thoughts and mistakes made, all displayed without consciousness of the future. … Unlike the portrait of self that emerged from my tightly constrained searching, this fellow was hard to classify. He was alive in his own moment, not mine.
The Dish 