Welcome to the Museum of Unfinished Ideas

There’s a folder on my desktop that I avoid the way some people avoid mirrors.
It’s called Future Me — which sounds hopeful, but mostly feels like a personal challenge.

Inside: a scattered labyrinth of subfolders with names like “App Concept – Urgent,” “Writing Ideas,” “Next Big Thing,” and, hauntingly, “Do Later (For Real This Time).”
Each one is a quiet artifact. A fossil. A fever dream.

Design mockups I never built. Half-written essays with great first lines and no endings. Voice memos full of conviction and bad audio. Diagrams, domains, doodles. Some of it still excites me. Some of it makes me cringe. Some of it I don’t even remember making.

But all of it carries the same echo: this could’ve been something.

That’s the weight I’ve been carrying. The weight of what I haven’t made.

I used to think this was a time management problem. Too many ideas, not enough hours.

But that’s not quite it.

It’s a momentum problem. A clarity problem. A fear problem.
Because starting is easy. Starting is thrilling. Starting gives you the illusion of progress.

Finishing, though... that’s where shit really gets personal.

Finishing means making decisions. Exposing the flaws. Inviting judgment.
Finishing is a road where the fantasy dies, and puts itself back together.

So instead, I create these little altars to potential.
I tuck them away in folders, notebooks, archive drives.
I tell myself I’ll come back to them later — when I have more time, more energy, more certainty.
But later rarely comes idly. And generally, when it does come, I’m someone else by then.

There’s something oddly sacred about an unfinished idea.
It’s still perfect in theory. Still yours.
No one else has touched it. No one’s picked it apart.
It exists in this strange, glowing state. Full of promise, and untouched by reality.

But here’s the quiet truth I’m starting to face:
Ideas don’t age like wine. They age like fruit.

Hold onto them too long, and they start to whither — not just the ideas themselves, but your connection to them.
Suddenly, you’re not excited by your backlog. You’re burdened by it.
Guilty. Overwhelmed. Creatively constipated.

So I’ve started treating my idea pile less like a sacred archive and more like a compost heap.
Not everything needs to bloom.
Not everything should bloom.
Some ideas are there to decay and feed the next one.

I don’t need to build everything I think of.
But I do need to finish more. Even if it’s small. Even if it’s imperfect.

Not because shipping is morally superior.
But because it clears the air. It breaks the spell.
It reminds us that we can actually make things real, not just imagine them.

I still keep the folder. I still open it sometimes.
Not to rescue the ghosts — but to remind myself:
There’s always more where that came from.

And the best thing I can do for all those "almosts", is to finish something today.