How Big Is Your Multiverse, Really?

A few years ago, I met a man at a bar who told me he used to own pigeonstock.com. He said it with a kind of reverence. Like he’d once held something sacred.

“I thought it was going to be the Bloomberg Terminal of urban bird racing,” he said, sipping a light beer with both hands. “I had charts. I had color-coded icons. I had dreams, man.”

I asked what happened. “Nothing,” he said. “Life. Kids. Knees. My ex-wife hated birds. I let the domain expire in 2014.”

Then he looked down at his phone and said something that hit me harder than it should have: “I don’t really buy domains anymore.”

That was it. But it wasn’t just about domains. It was about possibility—the kind that barges in at 2 a.m., demanding you register eight URLs because you’re sure you’ve reinvented shrimp logistics. The kind that doesn’t care how old you are, how busy you get, or whether you’ve ever followed through before.

We all carry a multiverse—the sum of all futures we’re still willing to entertain. Each domain? A breadcrumb into one of those futures. Scan a portfolio and you can read a life: startup ideas rubbing shoulders with would-be band names, half-serious nonprofits parked beside fly-fishing blogs, ukulelejam.com flirting with rocketparts.ai. Count the names and you’re really counting latent futures—how many parallel universes someone is willing to imagine before breakfast.

Domains are just the easiest breadcrumb to spot. Some people stash their multiverse in half-filled Moleskines, in dusty guitars, in a garage shelf of forgotten Arduino kits, in an Airbnb wish-list that stretches from Kyoto ryokans to Patagonia yurts. Others keep it in half-written Substack drafts, unopened watercolour sets, or a bookmarks folder named “Someday.” Whatever the container, it’s the same signal: evidence that tomorrow might still surprise them.

So yeah, I measure people by how big their multiverse still is. Not their net worth, not their job title. I look for that dusty row of half-baked, unpaid-for, possibly embarrassing schemes because it’s a cardiac monitor for the soul. It tells me you still leave the porch light on for possibility; that competence hasn’t calcified into complacency; that you can risk looking foolish—the shared super-power of every inventor, late bloomer, and newly-in-love parent. It means the machinery of hope is still humming beneath the polished LinkedIn headline, and that tomorrow might yet ambush us both with something glorious.

Because when we stop renewing those little deeds of faith—be they domains, notebooks, guitars, or bookmarked grand plans—we’re really saying: “I’ve seen enough of what could be. I’ll just stick with what is.”

And that, my friend, is how universes die quietly. Not with a bang. But with an expiring auto-renew, a guitar gone silent, a notebook gathering dust.