How Many Tabs Is Too Many Tabs? Asking for a Friend Who Is Me

Some people close tabs.

I’m not one of them.

There are functional humans out there who finish an article, absorb the information, maybe even take a note, and then—get this—they close the browser tab. Just like that. One clean click. Gone. As if it never existed. As if their brain can retain knowledge or trust a bookmark to ever be seen again.

Meanwhile, I’m over here running three different browsers like I’m trying to win a medal in digital hoarding. I’ve got research for a blog post I stopped writing three weeks ago, a Pinterest board of “goth office inspo,” a tab open to a discontinued pen I will definitely mourn, and at least five “helpful” ADHD productivity blogs I will never read because I’m too busy opening more tabs.

I don’t close tabs. I just… abandon them.

They live in limbo, waiting for my attention like little digital orphans. And they pile up—slowly, subtly—until I realize I’ve been subconsciously avoiding opening my browser entirely because the sight of all those little rectangles gives me hives.

But I can’t just close them.

What if I need them?

What if the energy to do the thing in that tab comes back in exactly 17 days and I don’t remember the exact Google search that got me there?

So instead of acting like a rational adult, I do what any self-sabotaging neurospicy gremlin does: I take a screenshot. Of the tab. Sometimes of several tabs.

Not bookmarked. Not saved to a notes app or filed in any remotely efficient system.

A flat, useless little image that goes straight to die in my camera roll.

That’s where I keep all my dreams now.

Between blurry pictures of my ferrets and 14 different shots of a chai latte I forgot to drink.

I call it “The Graveyard of Good Intentions.”

In my mind, I’ll come back to it. I’ll review the screenshots later. Sort them. Catalog them. Maybe print them out and create a vision board of almost-ideas and half-started projects. But I won’t. I never do. They sit. Quiet. Unjudging. Festering.

You’d think that’d be the worst of it—but oh no, we’re not done.

Sometimes the tabs aren’t even for things I want to do.

They’re aspirational tabs.

They’re a wishlist of “better me” things I think I should be interested in. Yoga routines. Meal plans. Budgeting templates. Articles on how to “declutter your digital life,” which is hilarious considering I’ve got those open right next to a YouTube tab autoplaying a 3-hour video of ambient swamp sounds because I thought it would help me focus.

I leave tabs open like they’re totems. If I close them, it’s like admitting that version of me—organized, efficient, hydrated—isn’t happening. So they stay. They rot. They multiply. They turn my browser into a house of mirrors, each tab showing a reflection of a person I thought I might become if I just got my shit together.

And you know what’s wild? I do this knowing it’s nonsense.

Knowing that I am actively making my workflow harder.

That my laptop is one cursed reload from crashing into the digital abyss.

But I still can’t help it.

Because tabs are full of possibility. Screenshots are tiny bursts of desperate optimism. They say, “Maybe later.” Maybe when the fog lifts. Maybe when the dopamine hits. Maybe when the world stops spinning and I can finally focus for more than ten goddamn minutes at a time.

False productivity is seductive.

I may not be working, but I look like I’m working.

I may not be finishing things, but I’m building scaffolding for the fantasy that I might.

And the tabs—the beautiful, exhausting, shame-drenched tabs—are evidence that I haven’t given up.

I’m still trying.

In the most ridiculous, self-sabotaging way possible.

So how many tabs is too many tabs?

All of them. And none of them.

I’ll let you know when my computer stops smoking and I find the screenshot that explains what I was even doing in the first place.