You deserve and have earned many yays for this! I am looking forwards to future posts with a more specific breakdown of how you accomplished it.

A decade ago, I decided to save the world. I was fourteen, and the world certainly wasn't going to save itself.

It's interesting how different this is from my 14-year-old mindset. I remember reading a lot about peak oil and climate change and other mundane civilizational (not necessarily existential) risks, and concluding that the world had a good chance of getting a lot worse (or a lot better; I was also reading Ray Kurzweil's writing on the Singularity at around the same time) and that, realistically speaking, I wasn't going to be able to do anything about it. I didn't exactly lie down in despair; I decided to learn as many generally useful skills as possible, so that I'd have a place and be ale to survive in either future. This is a big reason why I chose nursing as a career.

To a large extent, my monkey brain still believes that the world is too big and the forces are too strong and I don't have the power to affect the future or save the world. Of course, after absorbing some of the LW hero memes, my monkey brain also thinks that I ought to want to save the world.