I have a draft folder. Not the literal kind — though I have that too. I mean the one in my head. The running list of things I think about, care about, have actual opinions on, and will probably never say out loud.
Everyone has one. The question is how full it is.
The Cost of Thinking Out Loud
There was a window — maybe it was the blog era, maybe it was the early Twitter years — when thinking out loud in public was still possible. You could float a half-formed idea. You could say "I am not sure about this, but here is what I am noticing." You could be wrong in public without it becoming a permanent record of your worst self.
That window closed. I am not sure exactly when. But at some point, the internet stopped being a place where you could think and became a place where you could only perform. Every statement became a position. Every position became an identity. Every identity became a target.
The cost of thinking out loud went from "maybe someone disagrees" to "maybe someone screenshots this in three years and builds a case against you." And most people did the rational thing. They stopped thinking out loud.
The thoughts did not stop. Just the sharing.
The Accumulation
Here is what happens when you stop saying what you think. The thoughts do not evaporate. They accumulate. They sit in the draft folder — the mental one — and they grow heavier. Not because any single thought is heavy, but because the act of not saying something you believe takes energy. Every suppressed opinion is a small tax on your cognitive load. Every "I should not say this" is a thread your brain has to keep track of.
I have thoughts about Elon Musk. I have thoughts about politics. I have thoughts about parenting and religion and the way we talk about neurodivergence and the way we do not talk about class. I have thoughts about AI ethics and what the word "consciousness" actually means and whether the education system is fundamentally broken or just underfunded. I have thoughts about things people I respect have said that I think are wrong.
All of those are in the draft folder. Some of them have been in there for years.
And the folder does not get lighter. It gets heavier. Because every time something happens in the world that touches one of those unspoken thoughts, the thought activates again. It wants to be said. And you push it back down. And the pushing costs something.
The Philosopher's Problem
I am not a philosopher. I did not study philosophy. I build software and run a business and write about technology and neurodivergence. But I think like someone who could have been a philosopher in another life. The questions that keep me up are not business questions. They are the other kind. The kind that do not have clean answers. The kind where the thinking is the point.
And that creates a specific kind of friction with blogging. Because blogging rewards certainty. The posts that perform well are the ones with a clear thesis, a confident argument, a takeaway you can screenshot and share. "Here is what I think and here is why I am right."
But philosophical thinking is not like that. Philosophical thinking is: "Here is a question I cannot stop turning over. Here are three ways to look at it. Here is why each way is unsatisfying. Here is what I notice about my own discomfort with the question. I do not have an answer. The question is the point."
That does not tweet well.
So the philosophical thoughts — the ones that are the most interesting, the most alive, the most genuinely mine — are the ones most likely to stay in the draft folder. Because they are not finished. They are not tidy. They do not resolve into a protocol or a framework or a hot take. They just... are. And "just are" is not a content strategy.
The Permission
I wrote in No Man's Land about the fear that honest words become fault lines. That is real and it is still true. But there is a layer underneath that fear that I did not fully name in that post.
It is the question of permission. Not external permission — nobody is stopping me from publishing. Internal permission. The voice that says: "Who are you to have an opinion on this? You are not a philosopher. You are not a political scientist. You are not a theologian. You are a guy who builds websites and happens to think too much. Stay in your lane."
That voice is compelling because it sounds like humility. It sounds responsible. It sounds like knowing your limits. But it is not humility. It is fear wearing a humble costume. Because the thoughts are already there. I have already done the thinking. The only question is whether I let anyone else see it.
And "stay in your lane" is how you get a world where only credentialed experts are allowed to think out loud and everyone else just consumes their conclusions. That is not a world that produces good thinking. That is a world that produces orthodoxy.
The Folder Gets Published Eventually
I am trying to publish more of the draft folder. Not all of it. Not recklessly. But more than I have been. Because I have spent two months building a body of work on this site — 67 posts, as of today — and the ones that matter most to me are not the tactical AI guides or the model rankings. They are the ones where I said something I was afraid to say. The ones where I opened the draft folder and let something out.
Those are the ones people write to me about. Every time. Without fail. The personal ones. The philosophical ones. The ones I almost did not publish.
The draft folder is not protecting me. It is just keeping the best thoughts locked up.
The Protocol: You have a draft folder. Everyone does. It is full of thoughts you are afraid to say — not because they are wrong, but because saying them makes you visible. Targetable. Quotable. And the longer they sit there, the heavier the folder gets. You do not have to publish everything. But the thoughts that scare you the most are usually the ones that matter the most. Not because they are controversial. Because they are true. Open the folder.
