Anti-*: The Things We Do but Not All the Way

Labeling them "anti-X" kind of makes them sound negative, which is not how I see all of those things at all. This HN comment might eventually be published by me or not, but even if I don't hit "add comment" after writing all of this, doesn't mean it was a bad comment or I didn't value the time spent writing it, it just meant I myself didn't figure out the point of actually publishing it.

But all those websites, apps, blog posts and what not that I've created/written but never published, are still useful and was time well spent. People have almost an obsession with "finishing" and "shipping" something, otherwise it was worthless time spent on it. Calling those things "AntiApps" would make me feel bad about it, instead of feeling like I feel about them now, that in the moment they were "done" and I completed whatever I wanted to complete with it, it just wasn't the typical final artifact other people would need to have in order to feel like something is "finished".

Sometimes doing things just to do it is better than forcing yourself to reach some "completed" state you didn't even aim for when you started out.

I think some other terms cover this:

ambitions, drafts, mistakes.

Not a negative connotation with "mistake" either. If I had an idea and spent money on a domain name, but never take that idea to launch, it was a mistake to spend the money. But it was also a tiny bet, a necessary step in the direction of a launch. And I probably learned something along the way, which is the great value in mistakes.

The cost of undoing mistakes varies greatly. While I can sell a book I paid $20 for, and get a few dollars back, if I ever decide I want that book again, maybe I can go to the library, or maybe I can pay $20 again. If I give up a $10/year domain name, the odds are if I ever want it again, the cost will be much, much higher. Unused sketches and designs? Those are simply drafts, and drafts can be archived or discarded. The cost of storage is often inconsequential.

I think there's potential value in reflecting on unfulfilled ambitions, and maybe learning which of those past decisions weren't worth making. I'd say I don't think this article necessary puts forth a judgement of whether you should or should not have made those mistakes, or if you should make a change going forward, but merely puts it "out there" to reflect on.

I thought anti-* is the thing, but in the opposite way you would normally expect the thing, not just an unfinished version of the thing.

A library of unread books is still a library, in fact one should have a library of books you might want to read someday but haven’t yet, as part of the enjoyment of a library is coming across many things you’ve never read.

An anti-library might be a collection of things you could never read. A restricted place with all the books banned by a government, unorganized and uncategorized, inaccessible. Where books go to die.

Maybe we want Ante-*, not anti-, if this is about the artifact existing in a pre-complete or maybe never complete state

I just finished reading da Vinci's biography by Walter Isaacson, which left me with a different sense of what it means to finish a piece of work. He famously never "finished" anything and eventually abandoned most of the projects he started.

He worked on the Mona Lisa for 16 years, adding a brush stroke here and there until his death, never handing it to the wool merchant who commissioned it or his wife who was the subject of the painting.

His work is largely a collection of drafts and anti-*'s, but that hasn't taken away from his transformative role in the history of art, science, and engineering. There is beauty in unfinished work and in what we abandon. Finality is not necessary for greatness.

Please, just no. Anti-x means "opposite of" or "instead of" x. Its etymology is sourced from antonym which is rooted in ancient Greek and was popularized by the French "antonyme" based on a book published in the mid-1800s discussing opposites.

A design of something is in support of that thing, not the opposite of it.

I have a drawerful of antiraspberrypi and antiesp devices.

This guy prefix stuff he has done partially with the term “anti”. It doesn’t make any sense.

The antilibrary, the tsundoku, is a natural desire. Google Books gave us all an antilibrary, and chatbots bring us even closer to reading them.

Completely tangential, but this is a gorgeous personal site.

I worked hard on my anti-abs this week