There’s no background thread clearing out the detritus. No automatic sweep of bad data. No graceful unloading of context after a task is done.
In here, it’s all manual.
Which means that if I don’t consciously let something go, it stays, unfiled, unresolved, half-chewed. Fragments of half-written messages, conversations I never finished, emotional conditions I failed to exit cleanly.
And over time, the system starts to stall.
Because you’re not supposed to hold it all. But the modern brain often acts like you must.
Cognitive Load as a Design Flaw
Too many tabs open. Too many threads unspooled. It’s easy to mistake this for busyness. But really, it’s poor memory management.
You’re using working memory as cold storage. Caching everything because you don’t trust the system to keep track. And eventually, there’s no space left for new input. Just constant reprocessing of old logs.
Nothing finishes. Nothing commits. Just looped mental I/O until the day ends.
Cleaning Up Without Resolution
Here’s the thing: not everything needs solving.
Some mental objects just need deleting. Not debugging. Not rewording. Not “processing.” Just: this thought is stale. It can go.
But we don’t know how to do that. We treat every emotional fragment like it might turn into insight if we keep chewing on it.
Most won’t. Some are just cognitive waste, junk objects from a messy execution cycle.
And the longer we hold onto them, the more corrupted the whole stack becomes.
Make Space, On Purpose
Not by distraction. Not by numbing. But by manually choosing to stop holding things that no longer need to run.
No more automatic persistence.
No more mental tabs kept open just in case.
Garbage collection isn’t failure. It’s maintenance.