Vision Quest in the Ashes—How the Collapse of My End Timer World Built Everything That Followed

There’s no shortage of stories about coming of age, but nobody ever tells you what it’s like to build yourself out of rubble. My path didn’t follow a gentle arc. It snapped. At thirteen, in 2007, I got swept up in the Tea Party’s wave—not as a passive observer, but as a true believer, already hungry for answers the world wasn’t giving me. I radicalized myself, almost gleefully, into a mindset that fed on apocalypse. End Times prophecy, conspiracy forums, the myth that the world was about to break and only a select few would be ready. I was convinced I was among them. I didn’t just want to survive—I wanted to matter.

The comfort of certainty is powerful, especially when everything around you feels uncertain. I trained myself for collapse, taught my friends Sun Tzu, and imagined myself as a kind of teenage sentinel against the end of days. The irony is, all this discipline, all this apocalyptic rigor, was built on a foundation that was about to vanish.

At fourteen, the collapse started—not of society, but of my worldview. I made the decision to read the Bible cover to cover, determined to verify the stories that propped up my sense of purpose. What I found was not what I’d been promised. Contradictions, redactions, prophecy that crumbled under its own weight. I didn’t lose my faith piece by piece. It was more like a demolition: one day I was building a fortress, the next I was picking through the wreckage, looking for anything that might still be true.

Collapse isn’t dramatic. It’s silent. There’s a kind of emptiness that follows—the world is still there, but you’re not sure who you are in it anymore. No guidance, no elders, no ready-made rituals to mark the passage. I was left in a vacuum, with only my own mind and the awareness that the story I’d built my life around had evaporated. That’s what most people miss: when your world collapses, what follows isn’t immediate clarity or relief. It’s drift. It’s the long silence before anything new can take root.

I didn’t know it then, but what I was living through was a Vision Quest in every functional sense of the word. Forget the cultural trappings; what matters is the ordeal, the stripping away, the confrontation with the void. At fifteen, I began rebuilding from scratch—no ideology, no prepackaged belief, just the bedrock of science and philosophy, and the discipline to challenge everything I found. Every value had to earn its keep. Every conviction had to be tested in the real world. That work was slow and often lonely, but it was honest.

Then, at sixteen, I stumbled across Transhumanism. Here was something radical—not obsessed with endings, but with beginnings. Not with prophecy, but with possibility. It wasn’t faith in the old sense. It was a vision rooted in science, in the idea that the future is not set in stone but built by those willing to imagine and create. For the first time, I saw that hope didn’t have to mean delusion. It could mean discipline, creativity, and the refusal to accept unnecessary limits—on life, on potential, on the scope of what’s possible for humanity.

At seventeen, I found myself craving a Vision Quest, desperate for the experience I thought I’d missed. I didn’t realize I’d already gone through it. The ordeal had happened in real time. The collapse of my End Timer world wasn’t a loss; it was an initiation. The urge I felt was the need to honor that passage, to integrate what I’d survived and give it meaning.

That’s what the Vision Quest is at its core: an ordeal that strips away your old story, confronts you with nothingness, and demands that you start again with your own hands. It’s about the reality that when everything falls apart, you get to choose what you build from the ashes. What followed for me was a life of radical inquiry, a commitment to truth even when it hurts, and an ethic of building systems that serve real people, not fantasies or fears.

Every principle I live by—intellectual honesty, the pursuit of scientific truth, the courage to imagine a future better than our past—started in that fire. The End Timer story had to die so I could become someone capable of freedom, capable of facing reality and finding hope without illusion. My story isn’t special because it’s dramatic. It’s special because it’s real. There are millions of people who’ve watched their worlds collapse and don’t know what comes next. I’m here to say to let the fire burn. Trust what comes after. It’s not the end. It’s the only honest beginning.