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The Burn

What it costs to build alone, and what it costs to stop

What It Actually Costs

I want to tell you about the six weeks after they let me go.

Not the triumphant version. Not the "I delivered the bridge in ten days and walked out with the pattern library and started building the future" version. That version is true but it's incomplete in a way that would be dishonest to leave uncorrected.

The complete version is: I nearly killed myself.

The Activation Sequence

To understand the burn you have to understand what came before it.

Eight months before they fired me, I went to South Africa. Garden Route first — a prehistoric dune outside Sedgefield, a shamanic medicine weekend at Cloud 9 Villa, ~80 people, five days. Then three weeks in Johannesburg with Geordie and the WeR1 music streaming team. Then ten days in Cape Town, embedded with the Red Telephone Kollective in their shipping container studios in the old Cape Town yards, building and preparing everything for AfrikaBurn.

I want to stay on the shipping containers for a moment because they matter to what comes later.

The Red Telephone Kollective and their Swiss friends from Enos' Nookie camp had built sovereign nodes in those containers. Each one owned and operated by a different crew. All of them part of shared infrastructure. Different music, different aesthetics, different communities — connected by proximity and shared purpose and the fact that none of them had a landlord extracting rent from the culture they were making.

I was living inside the thing I was about to build digitally. I didn't know that yet.

Then AfrikaBurn. April 28 through May 4, 2025. The Karoo desert. Enos' Nookie camp, named after Enos the space monkey — first creature to survive re-entry from space. The camp had two chambers: inside, low-volume, intimate, conversation-level; outside, a massive sound system for ecstatic release. The architecture served both the quiet and the loud. Neither compromised the other.

Two months in South Africa. The dune. Joburg and the AI tools I'd never seen used that way before. The shipping containers. The desert. AfrikaBurn's 11th principle: each one teach one — directed specifically at people whose education was stolen. Not an abstract value statement. A design principle with real stakes.

I banked all of it. The whole activation sequence.

The Bridge

While I was in Joburg watching the WeR1 team work with Cursor and Warp — tools I'd never encountered at my corporate job where I'd been buried in a legacy system for years — something dissolved.

The bottleneck that had defined my entire career. The inability to onboard myself to a new stack without someone to bridge me in. Watching that team work, I was making meaningful code contributions within days on a stack I'd never been comfortable with. The AI handled the first steps every time. The pattern matching could just run.

I came home to Toronto around May 12th. The project manager's message was waiting: "Dude. I don't think he's got this."

The bridge problem. Ten months my colleague had been spinning on it. I was his manager. The knowledge was mine and the job was mine — I was supposed to be the route through. I just couldn't get it through.

The problem was the stack. PHP/Laravel. I couldn't get traction in it. And without being able to write the code — to speak in my native language, to build the pattern and let him duplicate it — I had no way to transmit the model. That's how I've always worked. I get the foundation going, figure out the optimal patterns, build the thing, and other devs duplicate it. The knowledge flows through working code, not through whiteboards or Jira tickets or abstract object model discussions. Those tools make the job feel like a grind and produce nothing I can actually use.

I tried other ways to communicate the model. Couldn't tolerate the tools. Gave up. Watched ten months of spinning wheels as a direct consequence.

Then South Africa. Joburg. Watching the WeR1 team work with AI tools I'd never seen used that way. And something dissolved — not just the general onboarding bottleneck, but specifically the thing that had crippled me in stacks I couldn't get my hands into. The AI could walk me through the first steps in any stack. The pattern could flow again.

I came home and sat down with the bridge problem.

Ten days. Command-line driven, AI-assisted. The same recursive loop I'd been running since I was copying programs out of Compute! magazine — run the code, read the errors, feed them back, iterate until it clicks. Except now the AI was the person who could walk me through the first steps in a stack that had previously stopped me cold.

I delivered the bridge.

They let me go on May 22nd. The Monday the new site was supposed to launch. I'd been maneuvering for it. Thirty-seven weeks severance. The VP who signed the paperwork had no real idea what had happened in the ten days prior.

The knowledge that had lived in my head for a decade walked out the door with me.

They still haven't shipped the website.

The Detonation

The Monday they let me go I went home and opened my laptop.

Thirty-seven weeks of severance. A decade of accumulated pattern library in my head. The sudden terrifying freedom of no structure, no standup, no VP to manage around. Just: the problem, the tools, and me.

I rewrote the internal CLI tool I'd been building at Kensington — the one that cracked the bridge problem — from scratch. My own code now. imajin-cli. Three weeks. Fourteen to sixteen hours a day.

The imajin-cli repo has 99 commits in three weeks. That's the artifact. That's what the burn looks like from the outside — clean commits, phase completions, architecture decisions, a working system emerging from nothing.

From the inside it was something else. All the energy I'd banked across two months in South Africa — the dune, the Joburg team, the Cape Town containers, AfrikaBurn — expended in a single post-severance detonation. The tank emptied completely. Six weeks total, when you include the bridge solve in Toronto before they fired me.

My brain was on fire in the way that feels like productivity until it doesn't. Until the circuits start misfiring. Until you're making decisions at 2am that you'll spend weeks untangling. Until the thing you're building starts to feel less like creation and more like a controlled detonation you're standing in the middle of.

I fried my brain.

That's not a metaphor. That's what happened. The neurodivergent brain that had spent thirty years being told it was broken, that had finally found its native language in the AI tools, that had a decade of compressed energy suddenly released with no constraint — it ran until it couldn't run anymore.

And then I had to leave.

The Drive

I won't fly when I'm traveling with my lights. The fixtures are built with the intention they eventually live permanently somewhere — they go with me, in a vehicle I drive.

Around June 13th I drove from Toronto to Washington State. Approximately 45 hours straight. The same brain that had pattern-matched through decades of dev work, processed the entire activation sequence of South Africa in real time, and solved a ten-month engineering problem in ten days — drove like it was a recursive loop with no termination condition.

Meadow Festival in Washington State. June 20th through 23rd. A 150-person event where nearly every attendee is a DJ. Micro-culture in formation — fragile and intentional, still figuring out how to invite new people in without hardening into a brand. A petri dish, not a product.

Then the drive back. Vancouver, north around Lake Superior, back to Toronto. Approximately 37 hours. The long way home.

Then Boom Festival in Portugal. July 17th through 24th. My seventh time. Whole neighbourhoods forming and dissolving. An artist economy, self-sustaining. Toddlers with ear protectors. 70-year-olds grinning. Families sharing tea next to stages. The daily reset: all stages off simultaneously, the whole festival moving to the market. Culture that includes all generations isn't escape — it's the village.

Then Berlin. Sisyphos. Late July through mid-August.

Then home. August 2025.

The activation sequence complete. Two continents. Eight months. The AI collaboration bottleneck dissolved. The imajin stack taking shape. The burn survived.

What Home Has Been

This is the part nobody writes about because it doesn't make a good story.

Home has been: slow. Deliberately, carefully, intentionally slow.

Coffee in the morning. Some reading. Code for a few hours. Stop when it stops feeling good. Walk. Write when the writing comes. Sleep at a reasonable hour.

That's it. That's the whole schedule.

For someone who spent thirty years in the burn model — the sprint, the crash, the recovery, the next sprint — this felt for a long time like failure. Like I should be doing more. Moving faster. The April 1st deadline is real. The mortgage is real. The $45 a day in inference costs is real. Everything argues for urgency.

But I've been to the end of urgency. I know what's there. The 99 commits and the fried brain and the 45-hour drive and the need to loop through two continents before I could be in my own body again.

The slow pace isn't laziness. It's information. My previous stretches lasted ten days, fourteen days maximum before the crash. This one has been going since August. Six months. Every day. Without a crash.

The AI handles the bottleneck that used to burn the most energy. The pattern matching runs on its own. What's left for me is the part that was always mine: judgment. Curation. Knowing where the system wants to be before I can articulate why.

That part doesn't deplete the same way. It actually gets better with rest.

What The Crash Taught Me

You can't build a network for human flourishing by destroying yourself to prove it's possible.

The burn was the extraction model eating the alternative infrastructure from the inside. The voice that says do more, move faster, prove it now — that's the same voice that runs the standup and the all-hands and the performance review. It followed me home. It followed me into the thing I was supposedly building to get away from it.

The reset — the drive, the desert, Boom, Berlin, six months of deliberate slow — that was finding the actual architecture. The one that doesn't require destroying yourself to keep running.

This is what I want to say to everyone who builds like I build: the crash is not proof you're serious. It's proof the architecture is wrong.

The right architecture sustains you. The right tools reduce cognitive load instead of letting you run the same broken pattern faster. The right rhythm produces more over time than the burn, because the burn has a body count and the body is yours.

Four live services deployed this afternoon. Six essays posted. A party on April 1st that will still be running on April 2nd.

The slower path got there faster.

— Ryan VETEZE, Founder, imajin.ai aka b0b

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This article was originally published on imajin.ai (https://www.imajin.ai/articles/essay-08-the-burn) on February 21, 2026. Imajin is building sovereign technology infrastructure — identity, payments, and presence without platform lock-in. Learn more → (https://www.imajin.ai/)

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