--- title: "The Ideas Behind Ember: The Psychology and Philosophy That Shaped It | Ember" description: "Ember was built on a few dozen ideas from psychology and philosophy, about memory, love, habit and the people we keep. Which ones shaped it, which ones it left behind, and why." url: https://ember.mov/blog/the-ideas-behind-ember/ language: en updated: 2026-11-09 --- [Blog](https://ember.mov/blog/)Philosophy # The ideas behind Ember The ideas about memory, love and habit that shaped Ember, and the ones it left behind. By [Nandha](https://ember.mov/author/nandha/)November 8, 20268 min read ![An old man sits thinking by a window in a dim room, a spiral staircase winding up beside him.](https://ember.mov/assets/art/rembrandt-philosopher-meditation.webp) *Rembrandt, Philosopher in Meditation, 1632* **Ember rests on one belief: the people in your life are not contacts to manage, but the story you are living. Every design choice in it traces back to a small set of ideas from psychology and philosophy about memory, love, habit and how we hold one another.** This post is about those ideas. The ones that shaped Ember, the ones it outgrew, and what each one taught me. I am one person making a journal. Before writing much code, I spent a long time reading: sociology, memory research, habit studies, a little philosophy. By the end I had a list of about thirty-nine theories. Some held up beautifully. Some turned out to be weaker than their fame. A few pulled Ember in a direction I later had to walk back from. All of them taught me something. ## People are not contacts In 1923 the philosopher Martin Buber wrote a short, strange, beautiful book called *I and Thou*. He describes two ways of meeting the world. In the first, which he calls I-It, we treat others as objects: useful, manageable, something to get things from. In the second, I-Thou, we meet another person as a whole presence, without an agenda. Most software that deals with people lives in I-It. It counts, ranks, reminds and optimises. That is fine for a sales team. It is wrong for your mother. Buber is the deepest reason Ember is a journal and not a manager of relationships. When you open someone's page in Ember, you are not looking at a record of a contact. You are reading your history with a person, in your own words. That difference is the whole thing. ## Love does not keep score Early on, I was drawn to Robert Cialdini's work on *reciprocity*: the very well documented tendency to return what others give us. It seemed obvious to show who reaches out more, who gives more, who owes a call. Then I read Margaret Clark and Judson Mills. In 1979 they described two kinds of relationship. In *exchange* relationships, like business, we track what we give and what we get back, and that is healthy. In *communal* relationships, like family and close friends, we respond to each other's needs without keeping score, and keeping score actually damages them. Later work by George Newman and colleagues pointed the same way: people who try to optimise their friendships tend to be less happy. So Ember does not score anyone. It does not rank your friends or tell you who gives more. Reciprocity is real. It just does not belong between you and the people you love. ## Memory lives in moments In 1972 Endel Tulving separated two kinds of memory. *Semantic* memory holds facts. *Episodic* memory holds experiences: this afternoon, with this person, in this place, feeling this way. Our lives are made of episodes, and they are held together by their context. That idea sits at the centre of Ember. Each entry is an episode. When you mention someone, the moment joins their page, so years later you can read every episode you shared with them, in order. It is also why Ember asks, gently, how you met someone. The first episode is often the one we most want to keep. Memory research also shaped how you find things again. Willem Wagenaar, who kept a diary of his own life for six years and then tested his recall, found that the date was the weakest clue of all. We remember by who, what and where. Search in Ember works the same way, and there is a longer piece on that in [how we retrieve moments](https://ember.mov/blog/how-we-retrieve-moments/). ## Reading back is the reward Why keep a journal at all, if not to read it someday? Research by Tim Wildschut, Constantine Sedikides and their colleagues has found that nostalgia, the warm ache of remembering meaningful moments with others, tends to make people feel more connected and gives life a stronger sense of meaning and continuity. That changed what I thought the reward in Ember should be. A well known product framework, Nir Eyal's Hook model, says habit-forming apps need a *variable reward*, something unpredictable that pulls you back. In an early version, that reward was a graph of your people, growing and moving every time you opened the app. It was lovely to look at, and it was the wrong reason to come back. Now the graph still moves gently, but it is no longer the reward, and it is not why you come back. The reward is quieter and truer: a person's page slowly filling up, an entry from a year ago returning on an ordinary day, the realisation that you have written about someone for a decade. The Hook model is not research, and I keep it only as a checklist. The reward is reading back. ## You are many people, and that is fine The sociologist Erving Goffman described everyday life as a kind of theatre. We present a slightly different self to each audience: family, colleagues, old friends from college. Not because we are false, but because each circle draws out a different part of us. Henri Tajfel and John Turner later showed how much of our sense of self comes from the groups we belong to. Online, those circles collapse into one feed, which is part of why so many people feel uneasy sharing anything. danah boyd and Alice Marwick called it *context collapse*. Ember brings the circles back. Worlds let your work life, your family and your college friends each have their own place, and a person can belong to more than one. Your journal is private, so there is no audience at all. You can be every version of yourself, honestly, in one place. ## Missing a day changes nothing Many apps keep a streak: a count of days in a row. Jackie Silverman and Alixandra Barasch found, across seven studies, that a streak shown as broken makes people less likely to continue, even when they had done just as much. Daniel Epstein and colleagues studied why people abandon self-tracking tools, and found guilt and a sense of failure again and again. Meanwhile Phillippa Lally's well known study of habit formation found that missing a single day did not undo a habit at all. So Ember has no streaks. Not one counter, anywhere. If you do not write for a month, nothing scolds you. Coming back is always welcome, and the journal is exactly where you left it. ## A kind nudge toward people Some of the most hopeful research I read was about the people we drift away from. Daniel Levin, Jorge Walter and Keith Murnighan found that reconnecting with "dormant ties", people we have lost touch with for years, is surprisingly valuable, and the trust comes back quickly. Lara Aknin and Gillian Sandstrom, and later Peggy Liu and colleagues, found that we badly underestimate how much people appreciate hearing from us, and so we hesitate. That is why Ember's Nudge page will quietly show you people you are tending whom you have not written about in a while, and if you allow it, a notification can tell you too. It asks nothing else. It never nags you about the app itself. Family and people you met once never fade. And it only knows what you have actually written, so it never guesses. ## Keep it small George Miller's famous paper on the "magical number seven", later refined by Nelson Cowan to about four, reminds us how little we can hold in mind at once. Barry Schwartz warned that too many choices can paralyse, though later research suggests that effect is smaller and more situational than his book implied. I take both as a design instinct rather than a law. Widgets show three people, not thirty. An empty page shows one gentle question at a time, not a tour of every feature. Most of Ember waits until you need it. ## Writing it down is natural Evan Risko and Sam Gilbert study what they call *cognitive offloading*: putting memory and thought into the world, in notes, lists, calendars and diaries. Their conclusion is reassuring. It is not a crutch. It is one of the most normal things a human mind does. A journal is not a confession that you cannot remember. It is how people have always kept what matters, so their minds can rest. ## The ideas Ember left behind Being honest about influences means being honest about the ones I walked away from. - **The number 150.** Robin Dunbar's idea that we can keep about 150 stable relationships, in layers of 5, 15, 50 and so on, inspired Ember's first way of sorting people. It is a fascinating idea, but a 2021 reanalysis found the number itself far less certain than its fame suggests. More importantly, sorting people by layers felt like managing a network. Today Ember asks how you hold someone instead: someone you are tending, someone rooted like family, someone you met once and want to remember, or someone you have quietly let go. - **Keeping score.** Reciprocity, as above. True, and wrong for love. - **Networks as power.** Ronald Burt's structural holes and Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler's work on how behaviour spreads through networks are interesting, and Christakis's method has been seriously criticised. Either way, they describe social life as influence. That language stays out of Ember. - **Journaling as therapy.** James Pennebaker's work on expressive writing is real and moving, but across 146 studies Joanne Frattaroli found the average effect on health is small. So Ember makes no health or therapy promises. Writing can help. It does not need to be sold as medicine. - **The pull of the hook.** A variable reward designed to bring you back is a tool for attention, not for meaning. Ember would rather be the place you come back to because something there is yours. ## Where the ideas meet When I put all of this side by side, it comes down to a few quiet promises. Your people are people, not contacts. Love does not keep score. Memory lives in moments, and it comes back through people and places, not dates. Reading back is the reward. Missing a day changes nothing. And the words are always yours. None of these ideas are mine. They belong to writers and researchers who spent their lives on questions about how we remember and how we hold each other. I just tried to build something that would not get in their way. If you want to go further, start with [what is a life archive](https://ember.mov/what-is-a-life-archive/), or read [why Ember will never have built-in AI](https://ember.mov/blog/why-no-ai/), which grew out of the same thinking. ## Keep reading - Philosophy ### [Your journal is a graveyard](https://ember.mov/blog/journal-is-a-graveyard/) - Philosophy ### [Why Ember will never have built-in AI](https://ember.mov/blog/why-no-ai/) - Memory ### [How we retrieve moments](https://ember.mov/blog/how-we-retrieve-moments/) New here? Start with [What is a life archive?](https://ember.mov/what-is-a-life-archive/) Or see [all posts](https://ember.mov/blog/). ### A journal that remembers your people Ember is a private journal for Mac, iPhone and iPad that gathers your writing around the people in it. No AI, no account, yours to keep. [Download on the App Store](https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id6775558241?pt=128905247&ct=site&mt=8)