About

The name

Egon Schiele was an Austrian painter known for his unflinching, interior self-portraits — drawings that looked inward without flinching. There is something in his posture that feels right for this project: a willingness to sit with the difficult, to give shape to the inner life without prettifying it. Egon Notebooks is not named after Schiele's technique, but after his willingness to look.

Privacy-first

This website serves knowledge. It does not receive anything back. When you download a pack, the files live on your device — in your vault — and this website has no awareness of what you do with them. There are no accounts, no sync services, no reading of your notes.

This is not a technical limitation — it is a deliberate choice. Notes about the inner life should stay inner. We use Cloudflare Web Analytics for aggregate traffic counting (no cookies, no fingerprinting, no personal data). That is the extent of our data footprint.

Two graphs

There is a distinction at the heart of this project: the world knowledge graph and the personal knowledge graph.

The world knowledge graph is objective, curated, open, and portable. It is what the Registry offers: structured articles about human psychology — what emotions are, how the stress response works, what attachment styles mean. This knowledge does not belong to any individual. It is a shared foundation.

The personal knowledge graph is the opposite: subjective, private, local, yours. It is your journal entries, your annotations, your own map of what resonates and what doesn't. It lives on your device and nowhere else.

The power of Egon Notebooks comes from their intersection. When you download a pack and open it in Obsidian or Logseq, you are adding the world knowledge graph into your personal one. You can annotate it, link it to your own notes, and make it yours — while the underlying structure holds.

The longer vision

The Registry at launch is the beginning of something larger: a self-therapy and psychological insight platform that is locally-hosted, private, and progressively accessible to the general population.

In later phases, this means locally-hosted language models for private AI-assisted reflection, integration with digital phenotyping data (sleep, movement, mood patterns), and optional affective computing APIs for deeper insights. None of these touch a server you don't control.

Initially, this will require technical comfort — running a local model takes setup. But the intention is to simplify the experience until it is accessible to anyone who wants to take their inner life seriously.

AI authorship

The node content in the Registry is generated by Claude (Anthropic) and reviewed by a mental health professional before publication. This is disclosed in every node file and we consider it a baseline ethical requirement for publishing mental health content.

The content is intended for educational purposes only. It is not a substitute for professional mental health advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you are struggling, please reach out to a trained professional or a crisis service in your country.

What we are not

Egon Notebooks is not a SaaS product. There is no subscription, no account, no server that holds your data. It is not a walled garden — every pack you download is a folder of plain text files that will open in any text editor, forever.

It is not a replacement for therapy. It is a starting point: a structured vocabulary for the inner life, offered freely, to anyone who wants it.