The Long Middle

It’s easier now to start things. Ideas arrive fully formed, tools are ready at hand, and answers appear instantly, often without asking much of us in return. What’s less obvious is what this ease has done to the middle of things — the quiet stretch after the excitement fades, when effort stops being rewarded with novelty and before anything becomes a real commitment.

Starting something new is fun. Staying with it has become harder. I’m trying to understand why staying feels harder now, even when I care.

This difficulty doesn’t feel entirely personal. The systems surrounding us — the tools, platforms, and workflows we rely on — are built to reduce friction and accelerate progress. They make starting things effortless and abandoning them painless. Starting is always encouraged; staying rarely is. When novelty is endlessly available, the long middle begins to feel like a design flaw rather than a necessary part of the work.

I’ve felt this tension for a while. For several New Year’s Eves, my main goal has been the same: focus and stick to my personal projects. One idea I kept returning to was an app that would advise you on what to pack for a trip, using only a destination and dates as input. The algorithm would pull from weather forecasts and historical patterns to suggest what to bring — and just as importantly, what to leave behind.

Working on the algorithm was enjoyable. But as the project moved past the initial excitement and into the slower work of refinement, another thought crept in: people could already do most of this themselves. The ease of simply checking the weather made the effort of building something more robust feel harder to justify. The project didn’t fail. I just didn’t stay with it long enough to see what it might have become.

Looking back, the project itself feels less important than what it exposed. This wasn’t the first time I’d drifted away from something I cared about, and it followed a pattern I’ve seen before — one where starting felt natural, but staying didn’t. What stood out was how naturally moving on presented itself as the reasonable choice. In a world where beginnings are frictionless and exits carry no cost, staying demands a kind of commitment that no longer feels supported by default.

I still have the files for the packing app, tucked away in a folder I haven’t opened in months. They sit alongside half a dozen other beginnings—proof of how easy it is to start, and how quietly we allow ourselves to disappear from the middle.