On the Singularity of the 'Drafts' Folder

The universe, according to most reputable astrophysicists—and several rather less reputable baristas in the Andromeda sector—is expanding. It is expanding in all directions, at an ever-increasing rate, much like a person with a mild dopamine deficiency and a free afternoon on the internet.

There is a fundamental, cosmic rhythm to this expansion. It is the same rhythm that drives a man—let us call him Andy—to move his thoughts from scribbles.page to Ghost, and then inevitably to Substack, only to find himself orbiting back to Astro hosted on Netlify. Before arriving back at scribbles.page.

Astrophysicists call this "Entropy." It is the tendency of all systems to move from order to disorder. Andy calls it "blogging."

The physics of a platform hop are not entirely dissimilar to the collapse of a massive star. You start with a great deal of potential energy (a new blog! A clean slate! A perfect template!). You condense this energy into a single, dense point—the "About Me" page. You spend a week meticulously aligning the margins, because you are convinced that if the text is exactly 12 pixels from the edge, your writing will finally achieve the profound resonance of a minor deity.

And then, the collapse.

The gravity of the platform’s limitations—the lack of a proper RSS feed, the slightly annoying blue of the sidebar, the sudden, overwhelming realisation that your prose is not, in fact, the next Great English Novel—becomes too much. The system destabilises. The "Publish" button begins to feel less like an invitation and more like a warning.

In the universe, when a star collapses, it leaves behind a black hole—a region of space where not even light can escape, which is roughly equivalent to a Drafts folder containing 40,000 words on why "The Matrix" is actually a metaphor for mid-life malaise.

You then migrate to a new platform. This is the "Big Bang" of your digital existence. The universe has reset. You have a new domain name, a new theme, and a brand-new sense of unearned optimism. You are expanding again. You are infinite.

But, as with all things in the cosmos, you are merely delaying the heat death of your own motivation.

The universe will eventually reach a state of maximum entropy, where all energy is evenly distributed, and nothing ever happens again. It will be very quiet, and very cold, and you will likely be forced to admit that the CSS on Astro was probably fine all along.

But until that inevitable cold silence consumes us all, we shall continue to hop. We shall continue to search for the perfect content management system, convinced that the answers to our existential dread are hidden somewhere in the "Theme Customisation" menu.

They are not. They are rarely anywhere near the menus. But looking for them is, quite frankly, a better use of time than actually writing the posts.