“Hypothermia”, Moxie Marlinspike (psychology)⁠:

“I made a series of mistakes that culminated in the worst sailing accident of my life, and almost took me to the bottom of the ocean.”

[One fall evening after work, Moxie Marlinspike and a friend made a simple plan to sail a 15-foot catamaran out 600 feet into the San Francisco Bay, where they’d drop anchor and row back in a smaller boat, leaving the sailboat to wait for their next adventure. (Anarchist sailors don’t like to pay dockage fees.) Marlinspike headed out into the bay on the catamaran with his friend following in a rowboat. Only after Marlinspike had passed the pier did he realize the wind was blowing at a treacherous 30 miles an hour. He decided to turn back but discovered that he’d misrigged the craft and had to fix his mistake. As the sun sank toward the horizon, he shouted to his friend that they should give up and return to shore, and the friend rowed back to safety.

Then, without warning, the wind gusted. The catamaran flipped, throwing Marlinspike into the ice-cold water. “The suddenness of it was unbelievable, as if I was on a tiny model made of paper which someone had simply flicked with their finger”, he would later write in a blog post about the experience. Soon the boat was fully upside down, pinned in place by the wind. Marlinspike tried to swim for shore. But the pier was too far away, the waves too strong, and he could feel his body succumbing to hypothermia, blackness creeping into the edges of his vision. He headed back to the overturned boat. Alone now in the dark, he clung to the hull, took stock of the last hour’s events, and realized, with slow and lonely certainty, that he was very likely going to die.

When a tugboat finally chanced upon his soaked and frozen form he was nearly unconscious and had to be towed up with a rope. When he arrived at the hospital, Marlinspike says, the nurses told him his temperature was so low their digital thermometers couldn’t register it. As he recovered over the next days, he had the sort of realization that sometimes results from a near-death experience. “It definitely sharpened my focus”, he says of the incident. “It made me question what I was doing with my life.”

Marlinspike’s time at Twitter had given him an ambitious sense of scale: He was determined to encrypt core chunks of the Internet. A normal person might have quit sailing. Instead, Marlinspike quit Twitter. A year and a day after he had started, he walked away from over $1.25^$1₂₀₁₆ million in company stock.]