I remember him writing somewhere that he does not have another startup in him - that, at best, he can now do the YC. It's kind of a hint that doing a startup sucks.
BTW you may want to try reading Jacob Fisker's "Early retirement extreme". He's an ex-astrophysicist who became disillusioned with the way modern society is organized and wrote what is essentially a philosophy book about how one can live differently.
Good to hear you're sounding a little better, because it must be super hard to go through that.
Re pg, it's obvious to me why nobody mentions this. It's not part of the narrative, which is designed to produce useful slaves (darts) to throw at a bet (target), with a blindfold on.
If you wanna chat more about it, you can mail me [email protected]. I have a feeling it could be interesting.
But my god, the integration is hard. No one really prepares you for it. The old role models don't work because they're unwittingly or deliberately blind to this. (For example, I've never heard pg talk about this, even though ycombinator is practically a factory that inputs idealistic people and outputs people with experiences like mine) Biographies cover this quite superficially; you basically never hear from the person in their darkest hour.
I'm sure many people have gone through this, but to me it really feels like uncharted waters.