On the Virtue of Unpublished Drafts

And there’s a million things I haven’t done…

But just you wait! Just you wait!

— some lines in the Hamilton musical

Defence: Defining the Reward

I once wrapped myself in a mantle that screamed “Not a finisher!” to anyone who intended to come closer.

Then for years, upon understanding the importance of using proper terms in any kind of occasion, I’ve tried not to apply an easy labelling to anyone. So, I shed that mantle somewhere in my adolescence.

But I also value giving an idea, concept, initiative, and even a spark of creativity a proper elucidation — giving it enough room to breathe, offering it a proper stage to shine.

Concerned?

I’d like to think of these numbers on my Medium dashboard as a continuous engagement with ideas, not of plain incompletion. Think of it as a dialogue with understanding itself, not an abandoned thought. In the writing world, we often discover that some thoughts need more time to mature. Like a seed grows into a sapling, then grows into a tree.

I believe that this is one of the most honest forms of intellectual engagement. The very act of wrestling with your fleeting thoughts — of attempting to capture their essence in words — often yields insights far more valuable than the finished product itself.

And for you, fellow contemplative writers, I believe this condition needs no warning —

It is an uncomfortable space to be in. Because it’s essentially a kind of lifetime learning process. And true learning is not supposed to be comfortable. You need to churn things with your head and digest the wisdom in your heart. That takes time.

Being, instead of becoming

This brings us to a distinction between “becoming” and “being.” While it might seem that keeping drafts in progress suggests a perpetual state of becoming, the very act of engaging with ideas is itself a form of being. We are not incomplete when we write; we are being writers, being thinkers, being present with our thoughts.

If we think of complete vs. incomplete draft dichotomy, we might place the reward on our writing activity when the piece is in the “published” state. I beg to differ with this notion, since for a long-life learner ==the true reward is in the crystallization of thought that occurs during the writing process.== After all, isn’t the ultimate goal of writing not merely to produce finished pieces, but to achieve greater clarity in our thinking? In this sense, every draft — whether published or not — represents a successful completion of its true purpose: the refinement of thought, the exploration of ideas, and the continuous development of our internal landscape.

In this light, I would like to imagine my drafts folder is not a graveyard of unfinished thoughts, but rather a garden of grasped concepts. Some of these garden items are in full bloom, while others are still developing their roots. And in our garden, we’re the main cultivator,

such that the garden flourishes with its unique soil;

such that we flourish as thinking, articulate beings.

Attack: Using the Wrong Reward

Photo by Julian Christ on Unsplash

On the other side,

while I contemplate the virtue of letting ideas mature naturally, the digital platforms we inhabit seem designed to operate on precisely the opposite principle. Social media’s algorithmic heartbeat pulses to the rhythm of constant publication — a ceaseless drum demanding fresh content, new thoughts, and immediate reactions.

This machinery of engagement has perfected the art of dopaminergic manipulation, transforming the sacred act of sharing thoughts into a gamified chase for likes, shares, and ephemeral digital validation. How peculiar is it that we’ve engineered systems that simultaneously enable unprecedented connection while incentivizing the most superficial forms of intellectual and social engagement?

Many of the social media platform’s reward function operates like a skilled casino dealer — just enough intermittent reinforcement to keep us at the table, forever chasing the next hit of validation.

It’s almost comically tragic — while we possess tools that could facilitate deep, meaningful discourse across global communities, we’ve instead created digital coliseums where thoughts must fight for attention in the arena of the immediate. The algorithms care not for the depth of your reflection or the nuance of your argument; they hunger only for engagement metrics, reducing complex ideas to whatever can be consumed between scrolls.

The true irony lies in how this system has hijacked not just our neurochemistry — that’s almost too obvious to mention — but something far more fundamental: our relationship with time and thought itself. We’ve been conditioned to treat ideas like fast food, to be consumed and discarded, rather than as nourishment requiring proper preparation and digestion. Our souls, yearning for depth and meaning, are being fed the intellectual equivalent of sugar rushes and empty calories.

Yet here I sit, contemplating this very dynamic through a draft that refuses to conform to these pressures — a small act of rebellion against the tyranny of the immediate. I feel there’s a certain power in choosing to let thoughts ripen in the quiet spaces between publications, even as the digital world’s slot machine keeps spinning, promising rewards for those who play by its rules.

The platform’s notification bell of misguided rewards rings like Pavlov’s, but I believe wisdom lies in learning to let it ring unseen or unanswered when circumstances are appropriate. We can always choose and condition ourselves to instead remain engaged with a more meaningful dialogue, either in our ruminations or in a genuine human conversation.