Almost every app or service these days is social.

Your notes app encourages you to collaborate with friends.

Your music app shares what you're listening to with anyone following you.

Even your finance app announces your transactions to strangers.

We are conditioned to follow, like, share and comment. And to an extent, there’s nothing wrong with that. We're social creatures by nature.

But when everything we do is seen by others, we act differently. We start curating our identity, whether consciously or unconsciously. We shape our personality into what we believe our audience wants to see. In an effort to influence how we are perceived, we lose who we are.

“One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Vanity metrics (ie. engagement and follower counts) can work to our advantage, but they also make us anxious. We are constantly deliberating, considering, performing, hesitating, editing, filtering, waiting. There is no moment of rest for the mind.

Even a harmless collaboration feature changes the way we behave. There's a certain pressure that comes with knowing someone can see what you're doing as you do it. We edit ourselves, question ourselves, suppress our first instincts. Collaboration is important, but it can also limit your creativity. Who thinks and moves freely when they’re aware they’re being watched?

“When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer–say, traveling in a carriage or walking after a good meal or during the night when I cannot sleep–it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly.”

— Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Creativity begins in solitude. And that’s what mymind offers. Your mind is your mind. It's your private space, where you can be yourself and collect your thoughts without the pressure to curate or censor. Think of it as a reservoir of your ideas, inspiration and references in their purest form.

With mymind, you don't have to manage what's private and what's shared with others. You can safely assume that everything in your mind is for your eyes only, by default. In the landscape of digital tools today, it’s a foreign concept. We are so accustomed to performing, we miss our audience. But then you warm up to it. Your real mind loosens up and gets more comfortable. Eventually, the fragile subconscious – so often waved away, shoved in a corner, kept in the dark – comes out to play. You start to find yourself again.

“The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone—that is the secret of invention: be alone, that is when ideas are born.”

– Nikola Tesla

Sharing ideas is one step of the creative process, but it's not the first one. Spending time alone with your own thoughts allows you to bring something to the table. And that's when true collaboration can take place.