Why I Built MemryLab
In late 2023, I downloaded my Google Takeout archive. 47 GB of emails, searches, location history, and YouTube watches spanning a decade. I also had three years of Day One journal entries, an Obsidian vault with 800+ notes, a Twitter archive, and WhatsApp exports from half a dozen group chats.
I had all the data. What I didn't have was any way to understand it.
The Moment That Started Everything
I was reading through old journal entries when I found this from March 2022: "I value stability and predictability in my career. Taking risks feels irresponsible."
Then I found a Twitter thread I'd written in November 2023: "The biggest growth moments came from embracing uncertainty. Playing it safe is the real risk."
I'd completely reversed my position on risk — and I hadn't even noticed until I stumbled across both entries by accident. How many other belief changes were hiding in my data?
What Exists Today (And Why It Fails)
I tried every personal knowledge tool I could find:
- Notion/Obsidian: Great for writing, terrible for cross-platform analysis
- Google Takeout viewer: Raw data dump, no intelligence
- MyLifeBits-style apps: Focus on storage, not insight
- ChatGPT: Can't access my local files, and I don't want to upload 47 GB of personal data to OpenAI
The fundamental problem: every tool treats your documents as independent retrieval targets. They answer "what did I write?" but never "how has my thinking changed?"
I call this the meta-narrative problem — and it's what MemryLab solves.
How MemryLab Works
MemryLab is a desktop app (4.7 MB) that:
- Imports from 30+ platforms — Google Takeout, WhatsApp, Twitter, Obsidian, Reddit, Telegram, Day One, and more. Drop a ZIP or folder; it auto-detects the format.
- Extracts structured beliefs — An 8-stage AI pipeline identifies themes, sentiments, beliefs, entities, insights, contradictions, and narratives from your writing.
- Detects contradictions — The core innovation: embedding-based pre-filtering + LLM verification identifies when you've changed your mind. My career-risk reversal? MemryLab found it automatically.
- Generates evolution narratives — Second-person prose ("Your writing shows...") that tells the story of how your thinking shifted, grounded in your own words.
- Stays private — Everything runs locally. Your data never leaves your machine unless you explicitly configure a cloud LLM.
What I Found In My Own Data
Running MemryLab on my 14,653 documents revealed:
- 47 unique themes across 24 months, with career development appearing in 22 of them
- 127 belief-level facts extracted from my writing
- 4 genuine contradictions — including the career-risk reversal that started all of this
- A clear evolution arc from "optimize for stability" to "optimize for growth" between 2022-2023
The most surprising finding: my writing about creative work shifted dramatically — from treating it as a hobby to treating it as a core identity. I never consciously made that transition, but MemryLab showed me the exact month it happened.
Open Source, Free, Private
MemryLab is MIT-licensed. It supports 9 AI providers (8 with free tiers). The app is 4.7 MB. Your data stays on your device.
If you've ever wondered how your thinking has changed — or if you've changed in ways you haven't consciously recognized — give it a try.