schrödinger's post

…or the superposition of posting

In 1935, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger came up with a thought experiment to poke fun at an idea in quantum mechanics he thought was absurd. Seal a cat in a box with a radioactive atom that has a fifty percent chance of decaying in an hour.

If it decays, a mechanism releases poison and the cat dies. If it doesn't, the cat lives. The math of quantum superposition suggested that until someone opens the box and looks, the atom exists in both states at once, decayed and not decayed, which would mean the cat is somehow both dead and alive at the same time. Schrödinger's point was that this is obviously ridiculous. Cats are never both. He wasn't describing reality, he was describing the flaw in an interpretation of it.

But the metaphor escaped the physics and found a second life anyway, because it names something people already knew how to feel and didn't have a word for.

That's where the unposted thought or photo lives. Before you hit send, it isn't one thing. It's every version of itself simultaneously… the version that lands and makes someone laugh, the version that offends someone and causes them to stop talking to you, the version nobody sees at all. All of those exist at once, equally real, equally unrealized. There's a kind of safety in that. Nothing has gone wrong yet because nothing has happened yet.

And there's a question worth asking before you post, am I doing this because I have something to say, or because I want the box to be opened by someone else so I can find out what I am today? Wanting a reaction isn't something to be ashamed of, people are wired for it, but there's a difference between posting because a thought is finished and wants to exist in the world, and posting because you need someone else's eyes to collapse your own uncertainty about whether the thought, or you, are any good. The second one asks the internet to do something it was never going to reliably do.

But here's the part that’s giving me heart burn… refusing to post isn't neutral either. It feels like restraint, like presence, like you're choosing to just live the moment instead of performing it. Sometimes that's true. But sometimes not posting is its own kind of hiding. An unposted thought doesn't do anything. It doesn't make anyone laugh, doesn't start a conversation, doesn't find the one person who needed to read exactly that sentence today. It stays inert and infinite, and infinite is not the same as alive.

So you end up between two versions of the same discomfort. Post, and the moment gets smaller. It goes from being every possible version of itself to being just one, fixed, public, sitting there collecting whatever it collects. Something is lost in that. The magic of maybe becomes the flatness of what actually happened.

But don't post, and the moment stays magical only because it stays imaginary. Nothing gets tested against the world. You get to feel like you're living something without ever finding out if it was real enough to survive contact. And before you know it, it has slipped through your fingers to be lost to the winds of time.

That's the actual superposition. Not dead or alive, but magical or grounded, and somehow feeling both more and less present depending on which one you choose. More present when you don't post, because you're not performing the moment for an audience, you're just in it.

Less present too, because part of you is still narrating it for a version of the internet that isn't even there yet, rehearsing the caption instead of finishing the experience. And the reverse is true of posting: it pulls you slightly out of the moment to capture it, but it also closes the loop, turns the maybe into a thing that existed, gives it a timestamp and a shape.

Maybe the more honest question isn't "should I post this" but "why does this specific thought want out." If the answer is that it's already finished and just needs somewhere to be, let it out. If the answer is that you're hoping the reaction will tell you something you haven't decided about yourself yet, that's worth sitting with a little longer, not because posting is wrong, but because that particular box was never going to answer that particular question.

That said, here are some photos that I think are both beautiful and interesting and want to be let out of my camera roll: