What is the psychology of someone who can write something like this?
I am ninety and in better health than many people 30 years younger. I am prepared for total breakdown of society with gangs of armed looters. My defences consist mainly of booby traps and camouflage. My fences are thick wide rows of blackberries and thorny shrubs. Not even bears want to go through them. I have small scattered gardens of mixed annuals and perennials that look like patches of weeds but very productive.
The booby traps are all disarmed but they can be quickly armed if needed. They are all designed to maim not kill. I don’t want to burry a bunch of bodies. The wounded need the care of their comrades and there are less to raid. It demoralizes them when they are being struck down and there is no one to shoot at.
There is a radiation proof survival shelter big enough for twenty people and is well stocked for a year My two neighbors helped build it and we will share it if the worst happens. It looks like a hill and is over grown with blackberries. People think it is an underground house that failed.
A small hydroelectric generator provides the electricity. It is underground and buried pipes bring in the water from the river and discharge it downstream. A good well supplies the water.
It took ten years to do this and I hope it gives you some ideas of what can be done to avoid armed conflict, which can be fatal.
crazyoldcoot January 16, 19:38
Psychologically, this reads less as pathology and more as a coherent worldview built around a few recognizable traits:
Need for control and mastery. Ten years of methodical building — shelter, water system, camouflage, garden layout — suggests someone who manages anxiety about an uncontrollable world by exerting maximum control over a small, tangible domain. That’s adaptive, not delusional, when channeled into actual competence.
High systemizing, low need for social validation. The tone is matter-of-fact, almost like an engineering report. No bravado, no appeals for approval — just specs. People who post like this tend to be detail-oriented thinkers who find satisfaction in solved problems, and the internet post is just an externalization of that, not a cry for attention.
A specific ethical framework. The “maim not kill” reasoning is the most telling part — it’s not bloodthirsty prepping, it’s a thought-out (if grim) cost-benefit calculus about deterrence and demoralization. That suggests someone who has spent real time thinking through second-order consequences, not just fantasizing about a doomsday showdown.
Possible generational/experiential shaping. At ninety, this person has lived through events most of us only read about — possibly the Depression, WWII, Cold War civil-defense culture. Self-reliance and distrust of “the system” holding together under stress is a common throughline in people of that cohort, especially rural ones.
Mild grandiosity or isolation, worth noting but not alarming. The framing (“I hope it gives you some ideas”) has a touch of self-mythologizing — casting himself as both survivor and sage. Could reflect genuine isolation (a person whose major life project has no other outlet for sharing) more than instability.
None of this reads as someone in crisis or dangerous to others. It reads as an unusually capable, somewhat isolated elderly person who has spent a decade turning anxiety about societal breakdown into a very literal, very elaborate hobby.
That’s a sharp reframe — and it tracks. Starting a decade-long fortification project at 80 isn’t really about fences and blackberries. It’s a man who can feel time closing in and is doing something concrete instead of just sitting with it.
There’s something almost poignant in the contrast you’re drawing. A young man’s run has nowhere it has to end — it’s pure expenditure, joy for its own sake. An old man’s run has a finish line he can feel getting closer whether he runs or not, so the running becomes a way of arguing with that fact. Same with the bunker: building shelter, stockpiling a year of food, rigging booby traps that wound rather than kill — it’s a way of insisting I still have agency here, I am still the one making the decisions about how this goes. The elaborate non-lethal ethics of the traps fits that too — even in his imagined apocalypse, he wants to remain a person who acts with restraint, not just a survivor at any cost.
It’s worth sitting with the fact that he chose this output for his fear rather than passivity or just talking about it like most people do. Whether that’s wisdom, denial, or stubbornness probably depends on the day you ask him.
That’s the line in sharp focus, isn’t it. Dylan Thomas wrote it for his dying father, and at twenty you read “rage” as defiance — a young man’s idea of fighting, all noise and fist-shaking. At your age you’re reading it as instruction: rage isn’t an emotion, it’s a daily practice. Get up. Move. Do the maintenance. That’s what raging against the dying of the light actually looks like in a body that’s running out of road.
Your mother-in-law’s calculus is the same thing in starker terms. She’s made a bet that staying mobile, even with a bad ventricle, beats the certainty of never walking again — and she’s choosing the version of her remaining time that has motion in it over the version that might have more time but no motion. That’s not denial. That’s someone who has decided what life means to her and is refusing to trade it away for safety, even at real risk.
The crazyoldcoot, your mother-in-law, your own running — they’re the same gesture from different angles. None of them are fighting death, exactly. They’re refusing to let stillness arrive early.
“Still…” — sounds like there’s something that humor doesn’t quite cover.
The joke makes sense for who she is — that generation, especially German women who came up in the rubble years, often metabolize fear through dark, deadpan humor rather than talking about it straight. It’s a way of saying I see what’s coming without having to sit in the feeling of it. But the fact that she only jokes about it when you’re not in the room is its own kind of data — maybe she’s protecting you from it, or protecting herself from your reaction to it.
What’s the “still” doing there for you?
That’s a heavy kind of love to carry — choosing someone fully, including the part of you that knows exactly why others have stepped back, and knowing the clock is the thing that makes repair with everyone else impossible now. Not “I wish she were different,” but “the window for that is closing and I’m still here anyway.”
Is the “too late to fix things” mostly about her relationships with others — her and the rest of the family — or does it touch something between the two of you too?
None of that search turned up anything that matches what you mean — sounds like “Omi” is a personal or family term rather than a documented legend I can find.
What’s the story behind it?
That lands. The line is “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend” — and what you’re saying is that everyone outside the family got the legend, not the fact. The version of her that alienated people, that’s harder on outsiders, that’s been written off — that’s the printed version. You and her grandson got the fact: someone who is hard, sure, but also someone worth this much loyalty.
There’s something almost protective in choosing to think of it that way, rather than just “she’s difficult and most people gave up.” It lets you hold both — that the complaints about her aren’t wrong, exactly, and that they’re also not the whole story. The legend isn’t a lie people tell out of malice; it’s just the simplified version that’s easier to live with once someone’s worn you down.
What is the “fact” version, for you — what’s the thing about her that the legend leaves out?
That’s a clean, honest answer. No elaboration needed. And yet here you are — the one person outside blood who got past it, who sees both versions clearly, and chose to stay anyway. That’s not a small thing. Most people, when they see the fact behind the legend, use it as permission to leave. You used it as context.
The cousin you mentioned earlier who was the same way — that probably wasn’t accidental. You’d already learned how to read that pattern, how to not take it as the final word on a person. Someone who is harder on family than strangers is often someone who only really lets their guard down with the people they trust most — and the guard, when it drops, isn’t pretty. It’s the price of being let in.
Which you were, from the beginning.