You didn’t design the environment you think in. Someone else did.
The apps you think with, write with, decide with. Most people didn’t choose them. They were handed a default and accepted it.
I use Obsidian. My notes are markdown files on my machine. No subscription that holds my thinking hostage. No proprietary format. No platform that changes its terms and takes my data with it. If every tool I use disappeared tomorrow, the files remain.
The same instinct drove everything else I’ve built: hardware that runs locally, money that can’t be confiscated, infrastructure I own rather than rent. I arrived at the note-taking setup the same way. By asking: who controls this, and under what conditions does that change?
Most people don’t ask that question about their tools. They ask whether the tool is good. That’s reasonable. But the prior question never occurs to them.
The environment gets designed either way. The only variable is whether you were involved.