The 1 million lives decision I almost didn't dare to take

Watch the film first. Everything below assumes you have.

There is a version of this that starts three years earlier, on the day the idea first showed up.

I did nothing with it then. Not because I doubted it — because saying it out loud commits you, and I had a working life that asked nothing so uncomfortable of me.

So the idea went where those ideas go. Notes. Sketches. A folder that gets opened on Sunday evenings and closed again before anyone sees it.

The thing about keeping something in a drawer is that it does not stay the same size. It grows, quietly, and every year it gets heavier to lift out.

The decision was never should I build a city. That one was settled years ago and has not wobbled since — which is exactly what made the waiting so expensive.

The decision was whether to build it in public, badly, in front of people, starting with the parts I don't know how to do.

That is the one I avoided. Privately the plan stays clean. Published, it becomes a thing with wrong numbers in it, and someone will point at the wrong numbers.

What changed is not conviction — that was never in question. It is that the cost finally landed on the right side of the ledger: another three years of a clean plan in a drawer is worth less than one year of a rough one in the open.

So this is day zero. From here it gets documented — the game build, the numbers that turn out wrong, the ones that survive, and the settlements as they grow from twelve people to a place you could live in.

The city does not exist yet. The journal does, and that was the decision.