A lot of people build a second brain, use it for a few weeks, and then quietly stop. The setup that was supposed to help became one more thing to maintain. This happens often enough that it's worth looking at why, because it usually isn't a discipline problem.
The upkeep compounds
You start with folders. Folders fill up and stop mapping cleanly to how you think, so you add tags. Tags multiply. You add links between notes, then rules about what kind of link, then a naming convention. Each addition is small. Together they turn the tool into a filing job that runs alongside your actual work instead of supporting it. At some point it feels less like building a second brain and more like data entry for fifty tiny files.
Structure you have to decide up front
Folders force a choice at the worst time: the moment you're saving something, before you know where it's going to lead. Where does the note about cheese go, food or ingredient or recipe or dairy? You don't know yet, so you guess, and later you can't find it because you guessed wrong.
For anything exploratory, you can't predict how a note will connect to the others. Deciding the structure first means deciding it with the least information you will ever have about it.
What tends to survive
The setups that last are the ones with almost no upkeep. Notes go in one place. Structure, if it emerges at all, emerges after the fact and stays loose. The test is simple: if organizing your notes takes longer than using them, the system is upside down.
How Graphia avoids it
Graphia has no folders to maintain and no link taxonomy to keep consistent. You put things on the canvas and move them around when it helps. The connections between them are something the AI surfaces when you ask, not something you classify by hand. You write the reason a card matters in your own words; you don't file it.
The goal is a workspace you can leave for a month and come back to without a cleanup session first.