Four States, Not One Record

"A trip is not a document you keep editing. It is four different truths that all deserve to survive."

The Instinct to Overwrite

The natural way to model a trip is as one record you keep editing: you write a plan, then as things change you update the plan, and at the end the plan reflects reality. That instinct feels tidy and is quietly catastrophic for a memory engine — because every edit destroys the previous truth. Waystone refuses it. A journey is held as four distinct temporal states, each preserved on its own: the departure plan, the later revisions, the actual events, and the reflection afterward.

The Four

Plan (baseline). What Dad intended at departure — frozen the moment logging starts, so "what we set out to do" is never lost.
Revision. How the plan changed along the way — each an immutable version layered on top, so the sequence of intentions is legible, not just the latest one.
Actual. What really happened — the days, events, and breadcrumbs of the trip as lived, captured as evidence before anyone knows the final shape.
Reflection. How it was remembered — the retrospective read, written once the trip is over and the meaning has settled.

Why Four Beats One

Keeping four states is more work than keeping one, and the payoff is the entire reason the engine exists. Only with all four can you ask the questions that make travel compound: What did we plan that we abandoned? When did the plan change, and why? Did the reflection match the reality, or did memory soften it? A single editable record can answer none of these, because each edit overwrote the evidence the question needs. The four-state model is the durable-memory sentence made concrete: structured state is durable precisely because it does not let the present overwrite the past.

Code

One record vs four states, over one trip·text

ONE EDITABLE RECORD                 FOUR PRESERVED STATES
---------------------------------------------------------------
day 0:  plan = A                    baseline  = A   (frozen)
day 3:  plan = A' (edited)          revisions = [A -> A']
day 5:  plan = A'' (edited)         revisions = [A -> A' -> A'']
end:    plan = what happened        actual    = what happened
                                    reflection= how it's remembered

# Left column: at the end you have ONE version and no history.
# Right column: you can still ask 'what did we drop, and when?'
# The engine's whole value lives in the right column.

Exercise

Take any plan you made and then executed — a trip, a project, a launch. How many of these four can you still recover: the original plan, the way it changed, what actually happened, and how you remember it? For most people, editing collapsed all four into one. Which state did you lose, and what question can you now never answer because of it?

Hint

The usual casualty is the original plan — overwritten the first time reality intervened. Once it's gone, 'what did we mean to do, and why did we change?' is unanswerable forever. That lost question is exactly what four states protects.