Day 1490

https://suno.com/s/1kgdleFniojKrM07 got to many tabs

Tabs, Tabs, Tabs.

I GOT TOO MANY TABS.

I made an AI song that opens like that and it is honestly way better than it has any right to be because man, is that true. I have too many tabs open. Browser tabs, brain tabs, app tabs, idea tabs, random-half-finished-project tabs, “I swear I’m going to come back to this later” tabs.

All of them are fighting for one of my scarcest commodities: my attention.

On one hand, it is incredible. AI has made it possible for me to build things I never thought I would be able to build. I can have an idea, talk it out, turn it into code, turn that into a website, turn the website into a song, turn the song into a video, then somehow end up researching strawberry seeds at 11:47 p.m. while a terminal is yelling at me in another window.

This is the magic.

This is also the trap.

AI is one of the greatest enablers the world has ever seen, but I need to get better at focusing. I need to stop moving on to the next thing when I get 80% of the way there. That is where I keep catching myself. I get the thing working. I see the shape of it. I get that little dopamine hit of, “Oh wow, this could actually be something,” and then my brain goes, “Cool, now what if we built a robot garden monk that quotes Marcus Aurelius and waters basil with a Raspberry Pi?”

Ridiculous.

But also, kind of a good idea.

This is the problem.

The last 20% is where the real value is. That is where the polish lives. That is where the thing becomes useful instead of merely impressive. That is where the idea stops being a screenshot in a group chat and starts becoming something people can actually use.

I know this, but knowing something and living it are two very different sports.

Speaking of sports, I am thinking about starting a strawberry garden.

Yes, this is where the essay takes a hard left turn into farming, but stay with me because this is part of the point. On the way home from Tampa, we stopped at a roadside stand that had fresh fruit and vegetables. The strawberries were delicious. Not “grocery store red water balloon” delicious. Actually delicious. Like the strawberry remembered what it was supposed to be.

So I scraped off some of the seeds to plant them. They are drying out now as I write this, sitting there like tiny little promises. I also used the tomatoes we picked up to make chicken Parmesan tonight, and it turned out fantastic. Swiss cheese on chicken parm may get me removed from polite Italian society, but I regret nothing.

Anyway, back to the point at hand.

If I do not focus, I will never see things through to their full potential. I’ll keep planting seeds and forgetting to water them. That applies to software, writing, gardens, health, family, faith, all of it.

They do not teach this in school. Then again, that figures. I do not think school was designed for most people to become dangerous, independent, creative builders. It was designed to make people good at following instructions. Sit here. Do this worksheet. Memorize this. Regurgitate that. Bell rings. Move along.

But life does not work like that. At least not if you want to build something meaningful.

Life rewards attention. Deep attention. The kind where you sit with a thing long enough to understand it. The kind where you push past the fun beginning and keep going through the boring middle. The kind where you finish.

And I am incredibly hopeful. I really am. I know I can be successful. I know I can achieve what I set my mind to. I know there has never been a better time to build strange, useful, beautiful things. The tools are insane. The opportunity is insane. The only real bottleneck is the little maniac steering the ship between my ears.

And yes, I absolutely started talking about farming halfway through this piece to show what it feels like to live online now.

That is the real tax of AI and the internet. It is not just that everything is faster. It is that everything is always available. Every idea can become ten more ideas. Every project can become five side quests. Every tab can become a rabbit hole. You can 10x your output, but you can also 10x your confusion if you are not careful.

Trying to hold all these different ideas in your head is exhausting.

Not that I have millions of fans reading this every day, which honestly helps. The lack of pressure makes the writing more honest. But I am sure if someone fed all my writing into an AI agent and asked it to analyze me, it would come back with something like:

“Subject appears optimistic, spiritually convicted, obsessed with Bitcoin, and possibly operating with 734 browser tabs open inside his soul.”

Fair.

At this point, if you use technology every day, I think we all have a little bit of that in us. The modern world is basically an ADHD simulator with subscription billing.

So I’ll wrap this one up.

Today’s to-do list is simple:

Your attention is scarce. You only have so much of it. Use it wisely.

Close some tabs.

Plant the strawberries.

Finish the thing.

4.20.26

Conor Jay Chepenik