Seems to me like you did learn something. That you were not a steel-willed journyman prone to epiphanies. I know it may sound silly, but there is some true value to that. Who’s to say those experiences didn’t speed up something you may orherwise would have spent even more time and resources on pursuing.
Disclaimer: I of course do not know you or anything about you except for your comment.
Psilocybin, MDMA and Salvia divinorum have had a profound effect on my life and the person I am today. Of course it’s impossible to say who I would be, had I not tried these.
Has it been for the better? Maybe. For the worse? Maybe.
I do know that they are experiences I would not want to be without. They taught me a great desl about myself and helped shape my perception of the inner and outer world surrounding me. Am I smarter and more enlightened, probably not. May be I even shaved off an IQ point or two in the proces.
But having my reality altered, even totally disintegrated (salvia) certainly paved the way for acceptance of other states of mind that people may exist in. This is very valuable to me, as it helped break down a black and white coccon I see many people live in (some break free by orher means, some never escape it).
To me, it was bungee jumping for the mind but from the comfort of my own home. It certainly has helped me take on and be comfortable with opposing viewpoints, being very tolerant in general and able to reach further into the corners of my mind.
It’s been decades since those first jumps, but the effects will last me a lifetime.
In all seriousness, Salvia is horrible and fits the layperson’s perception of a bad trip much better than any psychedelic hallucinogen (aka serotonergic (Psilocybin, LSD), as opposed to glutamatergic dissociative hallucinogens - (Ketamine, PCP) - or cholinergic delirant ones (Benadryl, Datura), with Salvia uniquely acting on Kappa opioid receptors) could.
I’m lucky in that all I’ve gotten from it was strong dysphoria because the one time I attempted to try Salvia, the brand I ordered was bad and I got something that must have had a very low potency instead of a concentrated extract. I got off merely with rolling backwards and breaking my bong covering myself with bong water, then worrying about a leaf in my hair and thinking I might find myself snapping back to reality for a while.
Given the sense of dread and anxiety I felt afterwards while in the real world, being in that state through a fast paced cartoonish fever dream of a trip must be absolutely awful.
You will never be able to tell how you wouldn’t change had you not tried these. But I feel the same as you and I still feel the impact of my only LSD trip I had over 15 years ago like it just happened over the last weekend. However, I know someone who tried LSD for a year here and there every other weekend and I could tell that they incurred some dammage in their brain. They’ve grown in a way but feel fragmented and a bit broken in some other way.
IMO a healthy relationship with LSD is one where, after a certain point (usually single-digit experiences), you can very confidently wish the substance a heartfelt goodbye, and thank it for it's service.
After my third experience, I woke up the next day knowing I'd learned an enormous amount about myself, and learned to think in ways I couldn't previously.
At the same time though, I just... "Knew"... I'd learned everything LSD had to teach me and that any further experiences with it would be like trying to over-optimise my brain, causing more harm than good.
That was ~4 years ago, and I've had literally zero desire to even consider touching the stuff since then.
I'm glad I did (3-4 times), but I'm VERY confident I'll never do it again.
I’m not confident i’ll never do it again ever but after fifteen years I don’t need to trip yet since I’m still drawing from my last one. I feel that it’s useful when at a certain stage in life one needs a stir.
Other than a couple changes to the drug line-up, I feel like I could've written this. Surprisingly comforting. Do you ever struggle with the narcissism inherent in pondering how the world might be different if everyone experienced similarly serendipitous alignment of circumstance and constitution?
Good to hear. And not really. I acknowledge the narcisistic aspect, but wouldn’t consider it a struggle. I’d like to think that this was just my own subjective experience and not necessarily applicable in the same way to others.
This!
I’m still suprised people behave like owning an iPhone is some kind of government mandate.
Unhappy? Choose differently!
Don’t like Apple, buy a pear.
It’s like listening to offroaders complaining their Mercedes Maybach gets stuck in the mud.
“a great deal of fancy equipment — from drones, gimbals, dollies, industrial set lighting, and other recording accessories — is still required to make iPhone footage look this good.”
But that’s just a standard requirement to make stuff look that good.
Slap a cheap lens on an Alexa and light like an amateur and you will get a subpar video-result with the only redeeming factor being the sensor.
And sure, the sensor (or medium) does matter, but production design and good lighting can be used to make almost any camera look great. I don’t think thhere’s anything wrong with that.
Steven Soderberg shot a movie some years ago on an earlier iphone. Some of the shots were truly terrific because of attention to the above.
You can copy or emulate a lot of high-end/cinematic/filmic looks quite affordably.
For light you need output + size of light source, easily attainable on a budget.
Good audio solutions also exist for reasonable $$.
What you pay the most for when using expensive equpiment is more features related to interconmectedness and lifting some of the work in post-production, and durability. But it does not nescessarily translate to better images than what can be achieved by even bedroom-indie filmmakers
Hardly, and I do think that headline smells of a high school jock attitude.
I know art nerds, science nerds, business nerds, music nerds, all kinds of nerds. I see it as badge of devotion, focus and skill in an area. If you’re a grown-up.
I remember the old Ted talk with Kahneman, and while it may be fuzzy how wealth and happines scale ttogether, I do subscribe to the opposite, that “lack of money buys you misery”
What money does is buy convenience, and in some degree, status, both of which are important. But doesn't solve everything.
Nor does poverty break everything. There's poverty that's stable and people are fine with their lifestyle, and poverty that induces stress and uncertainty.
E.g. poverty as a guy in some village in a nice little community with not a care in the world, because you have the basics covered, and poverty as in homeless in Chicago, with health problems and frequent encounters with law and people beating you, etc. Not the same.
Well you took the time to comment on your feelings towards his art, so there’s that. I would argue you are proving his point. It is not meaningless enough that you just scrolled past it without mention.
That wasn't my intention (as the artist), and perhaps we're lacking a good discussion of what art is.
But I remember Scott McCloud defining it as 'everything that doesn't serve the preservance of the species'. So making people reflect about what they think what art is for them (and if it's by finding out that this isn't), would be.
