The Privilege of Having Too Many Ideas
In Sandman, Neil Gaiman tells the story of Richard Madoc, a writer who kidnaps Calliope, one of the muses from Greek mythology. As punishment, Dream causes ideas to pour into his mind without end, appearing in an endless and suffocating stream. Madoc produces new ideas constantly, but each one adds to his suffering. Creativity becomes a torment.
I’ve been thinking about that story over the last few days.
Ideas have been arriving faster than I can keep up with them: a new app, a feature for another project, a post I’d like to write, a reflection that could become an interesting article. The list keeps growing while the amount of available time remains exactly the same.
Over the last few days, I managed to build two applications:
- Mímir, named after the Norse god of wisdom, is my bookmark manager;
- Janus, named after the Roman god of doors and transitions, is a secrets manager that I plan to open source soon.
Both use my preferred stack and solve problems the way I think they should be solved. Every line of code was written without clients, deadlines, or external constraints.
Truth be told, shipping two applications in a matter of days is a result I’m quite happy with.
Meanwhile, the writing had to wait. I went through ideas about the job market, reviews of local AI models, prompt engineering techniques for smaller models, and even observations about cat behavior. I wrote some of them down, let others slip away — and published none of them.
There’s a certain discomfort in that situation. It feels like ideas arrive faster than I can turn them into something tangible. There are always projects waiting for attention and topics that deserve more time than I can realistically give them.
When I look at that feeling more carefully, I realize it points to something positive.
If my challenge is choosing between several interesting ideas, it means I have the freedom to make that choice. I can decide where to invest my time. I can build projects simply because I want to build them. I can leave an idea on the shelf without worrying that it might be the last one.
That’s a privileged position to be in.
Many people carry concerns that take up far more space in their lives: paying the bills, financial instability, health problems, uncertainty about the future, for example. Compared to those, having more ideas than available time is a fairly comfortable limitation.
Madoc couldn’t stop the flow of ideas, but I can. I can choose what deserves attention right now and accept that the rest will wait for another moment. The posts I didn’t write are still there; some ideas will return in a more mature form, while others will disappear without being missed.
Creativity paired with freedom of choice is very different from creativity paired with obligation. One expands possibilities, while the other consumes the person who has it.
The discomfort is still there, and it will probably continue to show up from time to time. Even so, I’d rather deal with an excess of possibilities than with their absence.