The Problem with Having Ideas

I have a problem with ideas. I can't seem to leave them as ideas, even when I probably should. Once something gets into my head, I have this almost annoying need to figure out whether it could actually work.

Today it was outdoor furniture for public schools. Benches, tables and stools. Nothing revolutionary, and definitely not something I woke up this morning expecting to spend much time thinking about.

Then the questions started. Why is this stuff so expensive? Could we build it ourselves, could students actually be involved in making it, and could we use recycled plastic and concrete so we're not rebuilding the same damn things a few years from now?

Then I started thinking about the concrete. How heavy would it be? Could we remove a huge amount of material while keeping the strength, and what shape would let us make one simple mold that could be reused hundreds of times?

Before long I wasn't really thinking about a bench anymore. I was thinking about manufacturing, material science, sustainability, cost, education, community involvement and how to make the whole thing repeatable across 35 schools. I started wondering whether kids could actually help build these things and then walk past one ten years later and say, "I helped make that."

This happens to me all the time, and sometimes it's fucking exhausting. I know people who seem perfectly capable of having a good idea, thinking about it for a few minutes and then just continuing with their day. I genuinely don't understand how they do it.

My brain wants to know if the thing can exist. If I find out that it can, then I want to know what it would cost, how it would work, who could make it, what would break, how to make it better and whether anyone has already tried it. Eventually I reach the dangerous part where I've convinced myself it's possible, because then I want to actually build the damn thing.

A lot of my ideas probably won't matter. Some of them are undoubtedly terrible, and I'm sure I'll eventually read through this archive and wonder what the hell I was thinking about half the time. I actually hope that happens, because it means I kept learning enough to recognize when an older version of me was wrong.

That's also what I don't want this place to become. I'm not building an archive so I can spend the rest of my life publishing profound-sounding thoughts and trying to prove how smart I am. There are already enough places on the internet for people to perform versions of themselves for everyone else.

I think I'd rather leave evidence that I was curious. I want to document the weird paths an idea takes, including the ones that go nowhere, the ones that become something completely different and the occasional one that actually turns into something real. Maybe the process ends up being more interesting than whatever I build anyway.

So today it was a bench. Tomorrow it'll probably be something completely unrelated that I have absolutely no business trying to figure out. And apparently that's just how my brain works.

We'll see where it goes.