I Didn't Have Too Many Browser Tabs Open, I Had a Second Brain

I have an unhealthy emotional attachment to my Chrome tabs. Fifty open at a time is not a bug, it’s a feature. Every tab feels important. Every tab is future me’s problem to solve. Closing one feels like loss. Like I’m letting go of a version of myself that was definitely going to read that article or finish that thought or build that thing.

There’s also real FOMO involved. What if that tab was the missing piece? What if I needed it later? What if I forgot why I opened it but it was actually brilliant?

When I started using ChatGPT regularly in early 2025, I had a small identity crisis. I realized my Chrome tabs weren’t chaos. They were my second brain. My external memory. My context window. They held questions, ideas, half-formed plans, and “I’ll come back to this” energy.

These days, I still have a lot of tabs open, mostly out of habit. But my working memory has quietly moved. It lives in ChatGPT. The threads, the drafts, the thinking-in-progress. Chrome is just muscle memory now. ChatGPT is where my brain actually goes to think.