We talked for about two hours. This is a loose reconstruction, not a transcript. Some parts have been compressed. Nothing has been invented.
Them: Do you think something can matter if nobody sees it?
Me: I think it has to. Otherwise you’re just performing.
Them: But performance is still work. You made the thing. The fact that it’s for someone doesn’t make it less real.
Me: Sure. But there’s a difference between making something for an audience you haven’t met yet, and making something that was never meant to leave the room.
The hard part isn’t the making. It’s accepting that the making might be the whole point.
Them: I have a folder. Probably forty projects. Nothing shipped.
Me: Do you regret them?
Them: No. That’s what’s strange. I don’t feel like I wasted the time. I feel like I was doing something I needed to do, and then it was done, and there was nothing to publish because publishing wasn’t the question.
Me: Then it worked.
Them: Did it though?
We sat with that for a while.
Me: I think we’re trained to measure by output. Lines of code, word count, plays, views. But some work is load-bearing in a different way. You carry it forward even when you don’t show it.
Them: Like structural work.
Me: Exactly. The stuff that makes the next thing possible.
Most of my best projects exist only on drives I no longer own. I don’t miss them. I miss the state I was in when I was making them.
Them: Does it bother you that nobody will read most of what you write?
Me: Less than it used to. I write to find out what I think. Once I know, I don’t always need anyone else to know.
Them: That sounds like something you’d put on a poster.
Me: I know. I hate it too. But it’s still true.
We didn’t resolve it. That wasn’t the point.
The conversation ended when one of us had to leave. I don’t remember who.