An Ode to Unfinished Projects
There is a very uncomfortable folder on my computer called "myprojects". It has the odd success like mtg-meta-analyzer, but it's truly my personal graveyard of abandoned and unfinished projects: an OSR adventure I started outlining but never got around to writing, past years' Advents of Code I never finished, TTRPG tools that never made it past the prototype, MTG tools and data analyses that never saw the light of day, Kaggle competitions I dropped when the grind stopped being fun, and that time I tried to get serious with Rust.
There is a particular shame attached to unfinished projects. If the capitalist pressure to produce value in each aspect of our lives wasn't enough, an abandoned project is just another visible stain of my failure to produce, of my inability to create value at all times. Of course this way of looking at things is silly, but I feel the pressure anyway, and I can't let go of the guilt.
My hope is that by writing this, the guilt will finally wear off. Knowing hasn't helped, so maybe speaking into the void will.
Maybe it's something in me (ADHD?), maybe I just like starting more than finishing. Maybe I lack the will to push through the hard and uninteresting middles to arrive at the glorious and rewarding ends. Maybe starting things is just my jam: the thrill of the beginning, the initial research, the first draft, the half-baked prototype.
Or maybe it's because I lack the time. But that wouldn't be true. I lack the want, and that makes the hours never appear. Time is just a proxy for will. "I'd finish it if I had the time" is a delusional version of "I don't want to anymore". It's easier to be delusional in the moment. But later... well, I'm writing this, am I not?
Or maybe it's just more complicated than that. Some of these I really do want. Rust, for example: I'm always intrigued when I see Rust code, and I keep meaning to learn it. And there's the OSR-style adventure too. I think the idea is cool, and I want to give back to the community that has taught me so much. Perhaps wanting is not enough for the will to appear.
But all of them somehow end up in the same graveyard folder of failures, even though there are striking differences between them. Some are very dead and will never be unburied, like the old Advents of Code or the 17Lands analyzer. For others, like the adventure, I still have hope. And that is the main difference: I can still stand to look at them.
But is that "I'll return to it" real, or just a mental tax? Well, both. I do come back (sometimes). I did finish mtg-meta-analyzer, and it's still alive today. Keeping the hope alive is a burden, but it occasionally pays off. So I'm fine with the exchange.
And sometimes finishing is not quite that simple. The MTG app needs maintenance. I can automate most of the work, but it will still require some care. Perhaps finished vs unfinished isn't the right lens for this. If the value isn't at the finish line, maybe it's in whether or not the thing is still alive, still worth pouring time into. And the ones still alive can peacefully coexist with the ones I let go.
But for the finished pile I have something to show. My West Marches campaign just ended. 18 months, 41 sessions, a real conclusion, not abandoned, finished. Quite amusing that the biggest thing I've completed in the last couple of years is the one I never once filed under production (take that, capitalism?!). It got finished because it was being lived, not because I made myself finish it in the name of some silly principle.
I don't resent finishing. I resent forcing: dragging a thing across the line against an appetite I no longer have, just to quiet the shame so I don't have to look at its unfinished corpse. So what I'm really after isn't to glorify the unfinished project; it's the right to move on to another thing the moment it stops being alive.
I've grown to like my little graveyard of unfinished projects. It's not that bad. It's just a reminder of everything that interested me. So let this be an ode to the projects I will never finish, not a motivational trick. I'm really not going to finish them, and I'm at peace with that.