When I was a kid, I had a profound and often-present sense of loss over all the lives that had been lived centuries or millennia before my time that could no longer be known. I felt aware that being able to live one day in the skin of even the most mundane person of 2,000 A.C.E. would be immeasurably valuable to a person of my own time. I wished I could do it myself!
I started trying to keep a journal. I wrote an entry for most days from about the age of 12 or so, with some significant gaps. From there, I naturally wished I could simply keep a passive record of my every waking moment, to grant some future version of myself their wish of seeing through the eyes of some person, any person, of the distant past. As it turned out, there were people involved in the quantified self subculture that were doing exactly that sort of thing.
The quantified self subculture also dovetailed well with my desire to build systems that would help me make as much as possible of every moment of my life. I figured I needed to make as much as possible of my own mind and body to in turn live my life as fully as possible. I began working on better organizing my efforts, my nutrition, and my sleep. My primary tools were Astrid, MyFitnessPal, the Narrative Clip, and Zeo. To better understand what made me tick, I began building a tool to find correlations between data from various services. I used a lean-management-style points system for Astrid to track my productivity, a software timer to try to measure time-versus-estimated-points, my Last.fm scrobbles, and Echo Nest for getting "energy" levels for the music I was listening to. I also briefly began building a startup around this tool, working on it during the evening and on my lunch breaks, but shortly into this I was rudely awakened by the Snowden disclosures. I realized that, however noble my intentions, I would never be able to secure people's data and was effectively just contributing to the global surveillance apparatus. I had been "bootstrapping" the venture and was still the primary contributor, so I killed the project. Shortly after, Astrid, Narrative, and Zeo all went out of business as well. I abandoned the use of the tools I'd built around them, stopped recording most things in general, and have not returned to the quantified self community since then.
Lately I've been building out my own systems with the same goals as before, but without the same reliance on external service providers (especially not capitalist ones!). I feel confident enough now in my ability to secure my own data well enough; I also feel confident that the global surveillance apparatus has enough aggregate data from the people surrounding me that getting to my own records would be of marginal utility anyway.