Listen to the letter online here
When most people hear open loops they think of small things.
Emails that were never answered.
Projects that were never finished.
Tasks that remain on a list somewhere.
But the heaviest open loops are more existential.
The relationship you never fully released.
The career you never fully committed to.
The dream you never fully pursued.
The version of yourself you never stopped believing you might become.
Most people carry these things for years.
For decades.
Sometimes for an entire lifetime.
Not because they are incapable of deciding.
But because leaving a loop open preserves something.
As long as the possibility remains alive, a certain version of ourselves remains alive with it.
The writer.
The entrepreneur.
The traveller.
The artist.
The person who might one day finally become who they were meant to be.
This is why open loops can be surprisingly difficult to close.
Closing a loop is not merely the loss of a possibility. It is often the loss of an identity. It is the recognition that a future you carried for years may never arrive, and that a version of yourself you have quietly protected may never become real.
And so many people choose neither commitment nor release.
They choose suspension.
Not pursuing the possibility.
Not abandoning it.
Simply carrying it.
At first this seems harmless.
After all, what is wrong with keeping your options open?
The problem is that open loops rarely remain still.
They occupy attention. They consume energy. They quietly divide a person's life.
An unanswered question has a strange quality.
It continues asking to be answered whether you want it to or not.
What if I had?
What if I still do?
What if this is the wrong path?
What if there is something better?
Most people assume this questioning is a search for truth.
Often it is not.
Often it is simply the consequence of refusing to find out.
This is one of the hidden reasons so many people feel scattered.
Part of them is here.
Part of them is somewhere else.
Part of them is still negotiating with a future that exists only in possibility.
A person can spend years living two lives at once.
The life they are actually living.
And the life they continue imagining.
Neither receives their full attention.
Neither receives their full commitment.
The result is a strange kind of exhaustion.
Not the exhaustion of effort.
The exhaustion of division.
The exhaustion of constantly standing between worlds.
This is the real cost of open loops.
They continue competing with reality.
Every future we preserve asks something of the present.
Attention.
Energy.
Consideration.
Eventually a person discovers that they are not carrying one life.
They are carrying five.
The one they are living.
And the four they still refuse to release.
What makes this particularly tragic is that most of these questions cannot be answered through thought.
They can only be answered through reality.
This is where many people become trapped.
They attempt to think their way toward answers that can only be discovered through experience.
They spend years evaluating.
Years researching.
Years imagining.
Years preparing.
Years trying to achieve certainty before taking action.
But certainty is rarely found where people look for it.
There is a reason the question persists.
It persists because thought is incapable of answering it.
Thought can imagine.
Thought can predict.
Thought can analyze.
But there are certain questions that only reality can answer.
You can spend ten years wondering whether a different city would suit you.
Or you can spend a month living there.
You can spend years wondering whether a business is right for you.
Or you can start one on evenings and weekends.
You can spend years wondering whether a path belongs to you.
Or you can begin walking it.
But most dreams remain protected.
Untouched.
Unchallenged.
The dream must be exposed to the real world.
It must be brought closer.
The question must stop being asked exclusively in the mind and begin being asked in the world.
Many loops would close the moment they touched reality.
Not because reality is cruel.
But because reality is clarifying.
Few things are exactly as we imagine them to be. The business contains responsibilities we never considered. The city contains inconveniences we never saw from afar. The relationship contains complexities that fantasy conveniently ignored.
Reality introduces friction.
And friction reveals truth.
Some dreams become stronger when they encounter reality.
Others collapse almost immediately.
Both outcomes are valuable.
Because both replace speculation with knowledge.
If the dream survives reality, pursue it wholeheartedly.
If it does not, release it wholeheartedly.
Both are victories.
Both return your attention to life.
This is not failure.
This is information.
One of the great gifts of reality is that it resolves questions.
It strips away fantasy from possibility and reveals what is actually there.
This is why action is so valuable.
Not because every action succeeds.
But because action produces truth.
And truth allows a person to move forward.
The answer may not be the one we wanted.
But there is relief in no longer wondering.
Relief in no longer negotiating with possibilities.
Relief in no longer carrying futures that exist only in imagination.
I suspect many people are carrying possibilities they should have tested years ago.
Questions they should have allowed reality to answer.
Instead they remain suspended between worlds.
Neither committed.
Nor released.
Simply waiting.
But life rarely rewards endless evaluation.
Because the real danger is not discovering that the dream was wrong.
The real danger is spending your whole life wondering.
Eventually the question must be answered.
The path must be walked.
The possibility must either become real or be released.
Anything else is merely postponement.
This is what many people misunderstand about freedom.
They imagine freedom means preserving possibilities.
Keeping options open.
Remaining uncommitted.
But there is another kind of freedom.
The freedom that comes when a question has finally been answered.
The freedom that comes when attention returns to the life directly in front of you.
The people who appear most at peace are often not the people with the most options.
They are the people who stop carrying futures they no longer intend to live.
They stop negotiating with alternate lives.
And they begin living.
Not perfectly.
Not without doubt.
Not without loss.
But fully.
Because every meaningful life requires the sacrifice of other lives.
Every meaningful commitment closes a thousand doors.
And while part of us mourns what might have been, another part finally becomes free.
Peace does not come from having every option available.
Peace comes from no longer needing them.
Sincerely,
Milo Morrison