The circus freaks of open source

> The press and fan attention was deeply harmful to Terry and likely exacerbated his mental illness.

What are you basing this on? Did you know him? This person you call a "circus freak?"

> Whenever TempleOS or Terry came up online

Which was often because Terry himself made an effort to live stream his work and his opinions on computing. Which this author seems to have missed is those strong opinions were shared by a large segment of his fanbase. What made Terry unique is that he put his effort where his rhetoric was. He was out to prove something, and, largely, he did.

> voyeuristic sensation of witnessing his mental illness through TempleOS.

Terry famously refused help. A large number of people over the years reached out in an effort to improve his situation and give him the help they thought he might need. He didn't want it.

> I wish we had just left Terry well enough alone.

I just wish Terry had gotten some help and I wish he was still with us. He died alone and that makes me incredibly sad. I cannot appreciate anything this author is trying to say. It seems to me he's the voyeur and is using this opportunity to stand on a grave to chastise the crowd. I find _that_ sick.

The salient thing to me here is that their art kind of just crashed and burned (at least, I conclude so based on the post -- this is the first time I've heard of either of these people), and mental illness does not seem to have had any positive effect on it.

It’s okay when they do it, because they’re wagging a finger at all of us bad people for being voyeurs, promoted by our stochastic ringleader to throw peanuts. They’re pure, we’re not. Also, some stuff about society collapsing.

I have to disagree with the characterization of TempleOS. Perhaps other hobby operating systems have more impressive design (though it must be said that many do not), but that glosses over that it is a serious accomplishment to get a working operating system off the ground. Even if TempleOS is one of the worst hobby OSes out there, that still makes it one of the more impressive individual programming efforts out there.

Fantastic comment, thanks.

In my opinion this is a much greater variable than lions for our fight, flight, fawn response that is used to explain stress.

The explanation is that we are evolved to stress about lions, but there are no lions (in most of our lives) so the stress is irrational and should be ignored or sidestepped.

My theory is that we are more stressed and struggle more with mental health because we, in our modern societies, are part of many more groups. And the rules for inclusion are stricter since every group has to define themselves against all the other groups.

So what really happens is that our bodies react as intended to the available stimulus of all the groups we instinctively want to be part of.

There are just too many groups.

I don't have any solutions, just a theory that helps me navigate my life.