One Month of Forever: The Loading Bar That Never Finished Its Business With Me

There's a specific kind of modern grief in watching a loading bar crawl to 99% and stick there. We've all felt it — the flight deal that won't check out, the streaming movie that freezes at the good part. So I decided to weaponize that feeling, politely, on my own website.

For the entire month of March, the homepage of myxy554 displayed nothing but a thin, softly pulsing progress bar. It inched forward, never quite reaching the end. No text. No navigation. No explanation. Just the eternal promise of content that was never, under any circumstances, coming.

The Rules of the Void

The setup was almost insultingly simple. A CSS animation that advanced the bar on a logarithmic curve — fast at first, then slower, then glacial. At no point would it ever hit 100%. I didn't put a fake error message or a joke at the end. That felt like cheating. The whole point was the waiting itself.

I told no one. I posted nothing about it. The bar simply appeared, the way loading bars do, and I let the internet find it on its own.

What the Logs Said

Here's where it got interesting. Over thirty days, the homepage logged about 4,100 unique visits. Roughly 85% were bots — crawlers from every search engine you've heard of and seventeen you haven't, all patiently timing out. One crawler from a major search company hit the page 312 times over the month, apparently convinced that persistence would be rewarded. It was not.

But the humans. The humans were the story.

The average human visit lasted 41 seconds. That's an eternity in web time. People were waiting. Watching the bar. Maybe refreshing once. Some stayed over three minutes, which means somewhere out there, real people sat in front of a loading screen for the length of a sitcom commercial break, waiting for my nothing-page to become something.

And then there was the stranger.

The Person Who Wouldn't Leave

One visitor — same browser, same general region, IP shifting like they were on a phone moving between Wi-Fi networks — returned 47 times over the month. Always to the homepage. Never to the contact page, which still worked. Never to the archive, which also still worked. Just the bar.

On day 19, they found the contact form and left a single message: "is it broken or is this the thing"

I didn't answer. The experiment wasn't over, and honestly, their question was better than any answer I could give. Is it broken, or is this the thing? That's the whole internet, isn't it? Half the time you can't tell the difference between a malfunction and an art project.

Why We Wait

There's real psychology here. Researchers who study waiting — yes, that's a field — have found that people will wait longer for something if they can see progress, even meaningless progress. Airports discovered this decades ago: give people a baggage claim farther from the gate and complaints drop, because walking feels like progress. Standing still feels like losing.

A loading bar is the digital version of that walk. It converts dead time into a journey. My visitors weren't waiting for a page. They were waiting for completion — and completion, as a concept, is so deeply wired into how we use computers that a bar at 87% exerts a kind of gravitational pull. You can't leave. It's almost done.

Except it was never almost done. That's the trick. That's the whole trick.

The Ethics of Fake Waiting

A friend asked if this was cruel. I thought about it. A fake loading bar on a personal website is a prank at worst — nobody lost money, nobody missed a flight. But the same mechanic runs the real world. Dark patterns in apps use false progress and artificial delays to keep you hooked. Every "almost there!" in a sign-up flow is a bar that lies.

Mine lied too. The difference, I'd argue, is that mine lied about nothing. There was no prize behind it, no conversion, no newsletter. It was a loading bar with no ulterior motive — maybe the only honest kind, because it had nothing to sell you at the end.

After

On April 1st, the bar finished. It reached 100%, held there for exactly one second, and the actual site appeared underneath — the same weird little archive it's always been. I got two emails about it. One said "finally." The other, from an address I suspect belongs to my persistent stranger, said only: "knew it."

I don't know if that's true. I don't know if anyone can know a thing like that. But 47 visits says they waited it out, and waiting is its own kind of proof.

The bar is gone now. The waiting, I suspect, is not. Somewhere, right now, you're probably watching a progress bar that will never keep its promise. Good luck. It's almost done.