The Parking Lot Problem
At some point, I realized I owned too many domains.
Not in a dramatic, “I’ve ruined my life” way — more like the slow, creeping awareness you get when you open a closet and things fall out at your feet. Nothing in there was bad. Most of it had a story. Some of it was even good.
But most of it wasn't doing anything.
I’d been collecting domains for years. Ideas, jokes, half-formed projects, names that felt clever at 2 a.m. Each one came with a small dopamine hit: this could be something. And sometimes it was. But more often, it wasn’t. It just sat there, renewed once a year, quietly accumulating.
Eventually, I realized I didn’t have a portfolio.
I had a parking lot.
What a Parking Lot Really Is
A parking lot isn’t a destination.
It’s a place where things wait.
That’s not inherently bad. Parking lots serve a purpose. They hold things temporarily while you figure out where you’re going next.
The problem is when everything is parked.
Ideas. Projects. Experiments. Domains. Intentions.
Nothing moves. Nothing leaves. Nothing really arrives either.
And worse — the longer something sits, the harder it becomes to let it go. Not because it’s valuable, but because it’s familiar.
The Illusion of Ownership
For a long time, I confused ownership with progress.
Owning a domain felt like taking action.
Setting up hosting felt like momentum.
Seeing a list of projects felt like productivity.
But ownership isn’t movement.
It’s potential energy — and potential energy decays quietly if you never convert it into motion.
What finally made this obvious wasn’t burnout or money. It was friction.
DNS friction.
SSL friction.
Renewal notices.
Mental overhead.
Every time I touched one project, I had to remember where it lived, what server it was on, what it was supposed to be. That cognitive tax added up.
The parking lot was full — and I couldn’t see the exits anymore.
The Moment It Clicked
The turning point wasn’t dramatic.
It happened while I was doing something boring: auditing domains, fixing certificates, trying to remember why certain names existed at all.
I started asking a different question:
“If I didn’t already own this, would I buy it today?”
Most of the answers were no.
Not because the ideas were bad — but because they were finished, or belonged to a past version of me, or were simply no longer aligned with where I was going.
That’s when I realized something important:
Letting go is also a form of building.
The Cost of Keeping Things
Every parked idea has a cost:
attention
maintenance
decision fatigue
emotional weight
Even if it’s just $15 a year and a few neurons of brain space, it adds up.
Worse, it creates noise.
When everything feels “potentially important,” nothing feels urgent. The signal gets lost in the clutter.
I wasn’t blocked by lack of ideas.
I was blocked by too many unresolved ones.
Clearing the Lot
So I started letting things go.
Not all at once. Not recklessly. Slowly. Intentionally.
Some domains were retired.
Some were archived.
Some were allowed to expire without ceremony.
And something unexpected happened:
The remaining projects got louder.
They became easier to hear.
Easier to care about.
Easier to work on.
The parking lot didn’t feel empty — it felt organized.
What’s Left Now
What remains are things that earn their space:
Projects I actually return to
Ideas that still pull at me
Systems that reduce friction instead of adding it
Everything else became a souvenir — appreciated, but no longer carried.
And that’s the real lesson I took from this:
Progress isn’t about adding more.
It’s about removing what no longer belongs.
Why This Matters
This isn’t just about domains or websites.
It’s about attention.
It’s about intention.
It’s about learning when to stop maintaining things that no longer serve you.
The internet makes it easy to accumulate.
It rarely teaches you how to release.
This project — this site — exists partly to remind me that building well sometimes means building less.
And that empty space isn’t failure.
It’s room to move.