system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why does electricity not flow in an open circuit?

Take a wire, put the positive terminal (or negative) of a battery on one end, attach it to an industrial leafblower, but don't return the wire to the battery. Why will I not be able to blow them leaves?
gpt
A useful analogy for most basic questions about electricity is water.

Imagine you have a river and a waterwheel in that river. If the river is flowing, the water wheel turns. But if you block off that river, you end up with a lake. The water stops flowing and thus the wheel stops turning.

The 'circuit' in the case of the river is some water at high elevation that flows down to the sea where it evaporates into the atmosphere and is dumped back as rain onto the high elevation. As long as the water within the system is in motion, we can steal some of that motion to power our devices. Stop the motion, there's nothing to steal.

The same is true of electricity. If you've got electricity flowing through a circuit, you can steal some of the power for your leaf blower. Stop the flow of electricity and all you've got is some static charge.