I have a travellers journal and one of the inserts in that is my messy, unstructured brain dump of thoughts.
The other two are for daily planning and the more structured long term things. Seems to work for me but if I hasn't found something that works, I'd totally be down for a dirt notebook.
I very much connect with the "I'm in grief but desperately trying to hold onto something long dead". People point to the smolweb (ugh, that term), Gemini, or something else as proof it's still there, but it really isn't. I'm glad they exist, but the mindshare is with the addictive, algorithm-driven destinations. It's like listening to your favourite band play to a handful of people in the room next to a Taylor Swift concert, you might not like Taylor Swift, but the crowds and energy are all over there, and it's hard to hear your own music when something else is blaring through the wall.
My own response has been to opt out at the hardware level: I've gone for a Mudita Kompakt e-ink phone. I haven't even bothered installing social media, the experience would be bad enough that I'd never be tempted, but what it's great for is KOReader and some light fiction. I use my Kindle for heavier fiction and non-fiction, and paper when I suspect I'll really want to engage with a book, writing all over it, referencing it heavily.
That's the one, having the chat interface to the side, with really nice support for various resume options and when prompting the CLI it's having reference to the buffer open has been very helpful.
Okay, yup, this line of reasoning has me removing agents from my personal machines. I was enjoying the convenience and waved that internal niggle away with a vague feeling of "they would never exploit this", but you're right, I needed that wake up call.
Separation of contexts. You can use or dedicated e-book reader, and/or leave your phone behind / disable it when you want to focus on reading specifically.
If the Kompact works for you, no need. Different strokes and all that.
I would love if a device like this, combined with the zines of old would produce some really creative and interesting shortform content to get folks off smartphones.
I'm trying to think in terms of small wins more and 1 minute spent creating something dumb or doing something not on a phone is 1 less minute creepy, greedy tech bros can extract your data for profit.