I keep an attic/ folder for essays I've abandoned. Today I went through and the same three keep coming back to the top of the pile. None of them will ever be published. They're worth keeping anyway.

"What software companies could learn from book publishing"#

Started in 2022. Came back to it five times. The thesis was something about how book publishing operates on multi-year cycles, takes editorial losses for prestige titles, and has a cleaner author/publisher financial model than software.

The problem: I don't actually believe the thesis. Each time I tried to defend it, I found the analogy breaks down at the load-bearing joint. Software's marginal cost is zero; books' is positive. That single fact eats half the comparisons.

What it taught me: a thesis you have to defend repeatedly to yourself is a thesis you don't believe. Stop.

"On reading slowly"#

Started in 2023. Three rewrites. The piece kept becoming a book review of whatever I was reading slowly that month. The actual claim — that the speed of reading is the speed of thinking, and most people read too fast — never got its own page. It would have been a good note, not an essay. I should have shipped it as one.

What it taught me: not every observation wants to be an essay. Some want to stay a sentence.

"The unread tab problem"#

Started in 2024. Two starts, no draft of substance. The premise was that the Chrome tab bar is a perfect anti-productivity device — every tab is a debt I owe to my future self.

The problem: it's a one-joke piece. The joke is the title. There's no turn. Once you've heard "tabs are debts owed to future-you," you've heard it. There's nowhere to go.

What it taught me: a clever premise without a turn is a tweet, not an essay. Don't waste the premise by drafting around it for two years.

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The unfinished essays are an honest record of what you couldn't make work. That's more useful than the finished ones, which only record what you could.

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