Wrong Things Are the Point

My desk currently looks like I am losing an argument with my own brain.

There's an M5Stick running a half-finished book reader. 3D printed stuff. A tiny e-ink dashboard I said was "for urgent stuff," which is a lie. I just wanted to build it. A cassette player on a tiny LCD that plays one album. An ambient RPG squeezed onto an ESP32 with a screen the size of a stamp, generating events, cities, and people from WIFI and BLE scans. Two terminals open to trading charts I've been staring at for weeks. And a directory named benzcore, which is my attempt to create a new musical microgenre programmatically, because apparently I need it to exist.

None of this will grow my business.

That's the part I keep getting stuck on.

I'm supposed to be figuring out what comes next. My company is shrinking. There's a question sitting on my chest: what do I build now? And instead of answering it like a serious adult with a strategy deck and a twelve-month plan, I have been messing around with tiny screens and weird little machines.

I keep waiting for someone to tell me I'm wasting time.

Then I remembered Graham Wallas.

In 1926, Wallas wrote The Art of Thought, where he described how ideas actually arrive. Preparation. Incubation. Illumination. Verification.

You do the work. You step away. The answer appears while you're in the shower, or walking to the shop, or doing something apparently useless. Then you come back and see if it holds.

The important part is the stepping away.

That's the bit nobody schedules. It looks like doing nothing. Worse, it looks like doing the wrong thing.

But the wrong thing might be the point.

There's a thing in the brain called the Default Mode Network. It lights up when you're not focused on anything in particular. For a long time, people treated it like idle mode. The brain on screensaver.

It isn't.

It's the brain wandering around without supervision. Connecting things that don't obviously belong together. Trying doors your focused mind would walk past. Making strange little combinations in the dark.

That's where the shower thought comes from. You stop thinking about the problem, and the problem finally gets room to move.

It happened to me a few months ago. I'd been quietly furious at Spotify for years and doing nothing about it. Then one night — too late, too much coffee, brain finally off the leash — I remembered Shoutcast stations. The early-2000s kind, broken images and goth streams out of Leipzig, stuff I hadn't thought about in fifteen years. That's where the cassette app came from. Not from sitting down to solve "Spotify sucks." From not thinking about it at all, until my brain handed it back to me at 1am.

I'd done the preparation. Years of low-grade annoyance counts as preparation. But the answer didn't arrive at the desk. It arrived once the mind had wandered off.

There's evidence for this too. Researchers have found that incubation can improve problem-solving, especially over longer breaks with low mental load. People sleep on problems and sometimes dream their way into the answer.

So when I say I'm letting it simmer, I am not only being lazy.

I am also being lazy.

Both can be true.

The science is the easy part. The feeling is harder.

There's a word I keep coming back to: liminality (I know, it's everywhere now). Anthropologists use it for the in-between stage of a rite of passage — you've left the old role, but you haven't entered the new one.

You're not who you were, and not yet who you're becoming.

You're stuck in the doorway.

That is where I feel right now. Not at the end of something exactly, and not at the start of something clean. Just between.

And the trouble with being between is that it feels like failure. "What am I doing with my life?" does not announce itself as a creative stage. It arrives at 3am with its shoes on, asking to be medicated.

The pressure is to resolve it. To ship something. To have an answer when people ask what you're working on. To turn the fog into a deck. To make the uncertainty presentable.

Keats had a better phrase for it: negative capability. The ability to remain "in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts," without grabbing too quickly for an answer.

I love that he called the reaching irritable. That is exactly the texture of it. The itch to conclude. To explain yourself. To have a clean story.

Incubation is mostly the discipline of not scratching the itch too soon.

So that's the generous version of what I'm doing.

The less generous question is: am I incubating, or am I hiding?

Because from the outside they look identical.

Both are a person at a desk full of toys, not shipping the Big Important Thing.

The difference is in the output.

Avoidance produces nothing. Or it produces infinite preparation. One more book. One more course. One more framework. One more clean notebook before the real work begins.

Incubation produces strange little artifacts.

A cassette player. A microgenre pipeline. A tiny RPG. A dashboard nobody asked for.

None of them are the answer. But they are movement.

That's the test I've landed on. If I can't point to anything I'm making, I'm probably hiding. If the bench is covered in half-built nonsense, I might be incubating.

The work doesn't have to be useful yet.

It has to exist.

Every weird thing you make changes the set of things you can make next. You don't get the whole map at the start. You walk into one room, and then the next doors appear.

It's a dungeon crawl. You can't warp to the boss room. You map it one square at a time.

The trading bots teach me something the RPG will need. benzcore teaches me about pipelines in a way that will probably surface somewhere else later. The tiny cassette player is just the Mac app I built last year — the trashy net-radio thing with the tape filter — finally clawing its way into meatspace. It's the object I daydreamed about in that post and then talked myself out of, except now it has a screen and spinning reels and lives on my desk. A door I'd already opened without noticing.

None of these projects will generate cash (maybe the trade bots).

All of them are me feeling along the wall for the next door.

Creativity is mostly old things wired together in a new way. Which means incubation is the collecting phase. You gather without knowing what the shape is yet. The connecting comes later, usually when you stop trying to force it.

So I'm going to keep building.

I'll let the question sit there on my chest a little longer. I'll trust that something is happening under the surface while I'm not staring directly at it.

Worst case, I end up with a stupid little device that plays lo-fi out of a speaker the size of a coin.

Which, honestly, is amazing. I'll make more coffee and get back to it.