I thought the same thing when they mentioned he was emaciated with food near by. I would rather die doing something enjoyable than sitting at a desk at work, so maybe a terminal diagnosis prompted his trek. I would assume they would have found most health issues in an autopsy, unless maybe it was something very unusual or difficult to identify after decomposition.
That doesn’t fit. You don’t discover you’re terminally ill and then brainstorm a game while you're out trying to find yourself. If you think you're terminally ill then your notebook is likely to be full of meditations on the day's endeavors and thoughts about your legacy, and your mortality, maybe even your family. You write about a game when you're nowhere near a computer, it's because you're imagining eventually being back at a computer. Or if you have the hubris to think someone will type your ideas into a computer and this game is gonna be your enduring legacy, then you write with an audience and try to tell people what they are reading -- not a private notebook.
But I think you're onto something. Non-terminally ill could be a different story.
This is almost certainly not what happened, being hyperspecific, but let me tell you a compelling possibility. If you were a programmer with a really mild form of epilepsy that was slowly getting worse and worse, you could imagine thinking that it was related to all of your time playing games and staring at screens, like you find that your eyes just kind of lock on a screen where action is happening and your heart starts beating too fast as your brain goes into overdrive processing too much action and you know you have to tear your eyes away but your eyes are not cooperating. Really uncomfortable and after a really bad episode you will probably feel like your brain is out-of-joint and any encounter with the wrong stimulus might send you back into an "acid flashback" type of situation. Possibly that sort of situation includes hiking for too long or so. Supposing you were of that mindset you might be thinking that this was environmental and, “I am going to get out in nature and these things will quiet down and I will plan my follow-up game." Mild recurrences on the trail are explained as just "no I haven't finished healing yet." Then triggered by heat and being lost and stressed in a Florida swamp, maybe you have another really big one. Zapping in and out of consciousness, maybe you don't have the mental wherewithal to figure out where you are and how to get to safety. Something like that.
Again, that particular scenario is deeply unlikely, but it shows off the basic features: he's writing in his notebook because he expects to return to work, he's taking an extended vacation in nature because he cannot stand to keep working in his current situation. Maybe.
I am really reluctant to post this, something about joining the internet's quest to solve this guy's case seems... I dunno. Fetishistic. I don't really have much to contribute except that I wish the scans were better so I could read this guy's notebook more clearly.
"That doesn’t fit. You don’t discover you’re terminally ill and then brainstorm a game while you're out trying to find yourself. If you think you're terminally ill then your notebook is likely to be full of meditations on the day's endeavors and thoughts about your legacy, and your mortality, maybe even your family."
That might work for some people, but everyone is different. It's possible he doesn't have a family, which is supported by there not being a missing persons report. If I didn't have a family, I probably wouldn't care about legacy, or musing on philosophical topics. I even told my wife that when o die she should donate my body to science, have them pay for the cremation, then spread my ashes in the garden.
The epilepsy example is quite solid. That would be something that may present in different ways without being apparent in an autopsy. It'd be a little odd that the woman he hiked with for a couple months didn't notice it if it was getting worse.
I don't think he's sick tbh. He looks like a lot of guys that I know within CS -- interested in video games and smaller, more technical subjects, very skinny because he forgets to eat, the beard/long hair because he doesn't care to shave, and these big solitary adventures. I know like 10 young men who all fit this profile.
Skinny is one thing, emaciated is something else. I'm not sure what explains how he became emaciated or the unknown cause of death, but being sick could be one explanation.
You're thinking of a person who is fighting the terminal illness. But not everyone chooses to fight, some choose to spend their remaining time doing something they want to do. It's quite possible for someone to decide the cost in suffering from fighting the disease isn't worth the extra time the fight would gain them. Note that this isn't from ignorance, those more medically knowledgeable are more likely to make such a choice.
The problem here is what would it have been that wasn't picked up in autopsy?
