Shared Melancholy of Unfinished Ideas

I am a compulsive idea collector. Over years, I have scribbled ideas on pretty much every surface I have touched. They’re mostly lame, some worse. A tiny fraction are worth typing into Google. As I press enter, I hope that my curiosity is validated by the internet.

Sometimes I find the same idea I have, proposed by someone else, two months or ten years ago on Reddit. Comments bashing it, or calling it possible. Some discussions dig deep and stretch for weeks. Then silence. One day the discussion stops and the visionary moves on with life. Thread marked as archived.

I experience a strange melancholy when I see this. Because there was a moment when someone full of life tied their dreams to a balloon and made a jump for the parallel world, but was blown back in the same place. I notice it because I’ve been him.

My ideas come from a parallel world that I could not enter. A world that I would’ve preferred to live in, where I didn’t have to think of that idea. Where it existed without me trying to thump its chest into life.

You could argue that nothing was lost, since it never existed. Yet it feels like a tiny death. When a part of me had to be gotten rid of because it didn’t belong to the world it lives in, and doesn’t know how to reach where it can breathe.

I recognize these strangers. If they lived down my street, I think we'd have been close, the kind of friends who go on long walks and disappear in time, who don't need it explained why a small useless idea matters. Maybe we'd have found in each other the world neither of us could get into.