it was like i was in every sci-fi book and mythological narrative ever written. i knew some of this had to be in my head, but it was really hard to tell what was. the startup i was CTO of having a exit in august 2012 and menot knowing how to re-adjust to the 'real world' after leaving entrepeneurship almost certainly played a role.
every day occurrences were terrifying. i was being kicked out of Game Closure for having this psychotic fit, where I kicked in a door at the office in mountain view, because i believed i was in a movie being filmed for VC's to demonstrate how game closure employees were not afraid of risk.
I went to meet with the ceo (michael carter) the next morning, and as we were walking to the cafe, i saw a few dollars lying on the ground. this terrified me, because money laying there meant something really weird; why would there just be money on the ground? it means so much! this world has to be false! my believe that i was in purgatory, seekign closure for my suicide in 2005 was confirmed by the presence of tom fairfield and martin hunt at game closure, BOTH of whom i met after the sucide in 2005! fairfield means i'm trying to restore the space, the just place. martin hunt is the warrior, who pursues truth doggedly. 'game' 'closure' - the operating system i wrote senior year had one bug: i set the 'virtual memory' bit high on the _return_ stack frame instead of the _current_ one because i was thinking about how what was 'logically correct' instead of what would make the virtual-physical memory mechanism work. i had to be dead! elysium was the world the greeks believed was at the western edge of teh earth (where they'd put california on a map) which had a climate just like california.. the hotel california, we're all actually dead! prisoners of our own device, to repeat our cyclic cosmic history of creating and being enamored of devices...
carter announcing that 'those are the bitcoins of the real world' only played into this paranoia more; i think he was trying to tell me "look, you're living in your head and you have to operate according to the perspective of the world. you think money doesn't matter but your finances are a wreck and maybe that's your problem" and instead i took this to confirm one of the many internal narratives which was running in my head - that i had broken into the multiverse and part of my consciousness was being used as a random number generator to break the bitcoin blockchain and fuck up the future...
i was obsessed with P vs NP for a long time and one thread of rationalization running in my mind was that i'd somehow 'made P = NP' and thus broken cryptography far in the future, and now i had to repair the present to prevent that.
it was terrifying. it made no sense to anyone on the outside, but my mind was rationalizing things at a million miles an hour, and it would direct my observations towards things that would confirm these rationalizations. so my view would bounce from thing to thing, i'd be drawn randomly to the view of someone waving their hands, and which i'd see as evidence they were pulling puppet strings.
i found myself -and the people around me - using specific phrases over and over. 'particular' and 'fluid' toggled between the particle and wave states of matter; a finger in your right ear was a vestigial nod to being a lizard politician from space reaching for a nonexistent microphone -- it all made too much damn sense to ignore.
it's hard to even think about this now without getting drawn into it. eventually i was able to interpret these pscyhoses as metaphors, and work my way out of the madness.