Thread by @leashless

I have fought in too many invisible wars. resiliencemaps.org came from sustained hellish effort for years.

Starting death in the face, until death blinks. Sure it's "disaster planning" but it all comes from meditating on my own mortality until I could see death like a force

I'm burned out on a scale that non spiritual practitioners just don't ever reach - the will has continued clear as fibre optic glass while the body aged and crisped with the intensity.

It's not just a start up. It's my final statement on what needs to be done to fix the world.

I am the hexayurt guy. I am the resilience maps guy. I am the state failure archive guy. I'm the guy that reached enlightenment at *26* without needing to go to India, and got a day job the next week. Saddhu to householder.

I seem gentle and indirect. Will like an iron pillar.

I can lay a hand in the future today. The flu work I did is largely useless for this flu: Corona just isn't bad enough to take down power grids and cave in critical infrastructure.

It's not a civilization-ending flu.

My flu was bird flu. Bird flu could kick us back to the caves

And I remember, every day for a year, simulating the course of the flu in my head. Modelling it out, spreadsheets of available calories per day, trying to predict if power grids would fail on day 60 or day 90, and how the climate would impact all of this.

A hard meditation aye.

But that kind of work takes a toll on the soul, and my soil feels quite worn through. I need a while, a few years, just building tech and shipping product, not straining beyond human limits working on problems so bleak they tend to hospitalize (depression) the people who see them

I just can't do any more save the world stuff right now.

I have established limit, and my tolerance. I just need a break: human sized problems, not existential catastrophes and holding up the sky.

I just need to rein myself in, and work on product. I need to get off existential

The pandemic flu is here, and it's just not that bad. It might even kill me, and a bunch of important old people, but it's not the civilization-ending monster that I wrestled with 20 years ago.

Bird flu could have cost us everything.

Corona is, frankly, not an existential risk.

I remember the pressure of the old flu. 50,70% fatal. Gleaning risk models from flu genetics papers. Six mutations away from civilization dies.

That was my flu. This flu is not that flu. Infectious, but so much less lethal.

It has to be handled. But. If is not That flu. Not yet

I can feel a visceral sense of well being and released tension as I get increasingly confident that I'm not going to have to turn back into a pandemic guru to plot the fate of nations as civilization tears apart.

I want to laugh and run for joy. This is not that flu. Not yet.