I'm glad to hear from someone else who's honest about their negative experience.
Psychedelics seem to somehow have simply amazing PR: plentiful testimonies of their life-changing abilities, encouraging us to try them, but very little acknowledgement of their dark side. The subculture is very quick to brush away anything that goes against the narrative of the "mind-opening wonder drugs that big pharma doesn't want you to know about."
My experiences with psilocybin over a few months started with awe and wonder and spiritual awakening (or what seemed to be at the time), and ended with horrifying lasting harm. Insomnia, constant vivid nightmares, sleep paralysis, intrusive thoughts, anxiety, tics, and all kinds of weirdness at the periphery of conscious experience that I can't really explain.
It feels like I flashed my brain's firmware with no way to undo it. I took all the precautions I thought I was supposed to. I wish someone had warned me.
I had a similar experience. I took psylocibin a few times, but after the last one I started getting panic attacks and feeling derealization quite often. This led to negative recurring thoughts and I felt really bad for a while. Got better after a year of cognitive behavioral therapy and six months taking a light dosage of antidepressants. Routine exercises and zen meditation helped tremendously as well. Get help, it is possible. Your brain can heal itself with your help.
People seem to think they can just take a load of mushies and it can solve all lives problems. The great art requires a lot of hard heart work and suffering.
Well, its like people who describe Ketamine therapy. The process itself can be deeply traumatizing, even if the after-effects make up for it. I've heard it described as deep hallucinations, often touching on dark places in your psyche, while you can't get up or do much or get away from it. On the plus side, it can make you face some difficult internal issues, but on the downside, not everyone actually responds well to that. Some people this can cause a psychological break.
Anyone who has been in the hallucinogens scene long enough knows someone who either did too much over the years and is a basket case or just had one really bad trip and never recovered or were the same after.
It's certainly not as dangerous as other drugs, but I'm fairly tired of people acting like it is inert or can only produce positive experiences.
I did two sessions of psychedelic IM Ketamine four months ago. The place I went requires a therapist sitter during the experience, followed by an hour of integration therapy, and a few days after the final session a follow up integration.
I cannot imagine doing this substance without someone else there. There were multiple times I simply needed a hand to hold as I was… descending, and my second trip was a “bad” one. The therapist was absolutely critical for helping me frame what happened in a positive light.
Geese. I occasionally get the sleep paralysis and I hate it. It makes me feel like I'm being pinned down to my bed. Never tried any psychedelics though, and sometimes I think I should stop being so stiff when it's around/available. Reading this is helpful and I genuinely appreciate the warning.
> The subculture is very quick to brush away anything that goes against the narrative of...
Oh here we go again. Give me three comments below (in direct links) that "brush away" the obvious risks. I think you just made stuff up. Of course there are risks.
Maybe the reason a whole lot of people are not complaining about bad experiences is that they are maybe, maybe, not as common as you want them to be.
If you want rational drug discussion then you should probably start with yourself – not everyone suffers from significant harm in drug use.
> I wish someone had warned me.
A little bit of reading around would have shown you there are risks. Either you didn't do your due diligence or you ignored them.
He claims things get brushed away by a certain subculture but can't or won't give examples.
He provides his bad experience but seems to believe that must overshadow any good experiences of others' like mine. It doesn't because my experience with drugs has been generally positive and MDMA actually turned my life around. Without it my life would not be worth living now (and I assure you it's not much fun even now) after a childhood you could not imagine.
He laments that nobody told him the risks but clearly didn't make sufficient effort to determine them. Two words and one click on the web and he would have found plenty.
Respond to what I said, not what you want me to have said.
> But I am terrified of the increasingly bleak looking future, and despite putting a lot of effort into conservation and living with as small a footprint as possible, I don't see much hope for our broken civilisation, much less our species
Yeah, I struggle with that too. At the same time, there is a huge amount of opportunity for average people to make an impact in whatever small sphere of influence we may have.
If I always frame my efforts in relation to the entirety of the world's social and environmental problems, of course those efforts are going to seem insignificant; but I think that's as misleading as, say, viewing my personal spending habits as inconsequential based on how much they impact the global economy. Small changes in your local community or social circle really do matter!
That's one reason I like platforms like iNaturalist: it's a good tool to encourage others to simply learn more about the living things around them, which is a significant step in nudging someone from indifference toward being an advocate for nature.
Sorry if that's not helpful, but I'd really like to encourage you to keep doing what you're doing, because it probably matters a lot more than you think it does (especially to all the creatures that live in and around your larger-than-average backyard!)
This sounds amazing. I'd be interested to hear more details about what "stewarding 50ha of Australian bush" entails. Do you work with a local conservation organization, and do you have any particular goals for restoration or management? Do you work on documenting the biodiveristy there? Is it home to any endemic or threatened species you're espeially interested in? Any photos you could share?
My wife throws up our photos on Flickr, which includes a great many of our efforts at sustainable farming and replanting, an album documenting our house-build, as well as our hiking, and far, far too many of our dog.
It's basically a sex-doll for wasps. The female wasps can't fly, they live on the ground and climb up to the top of a stalk of grass, and the male, attracted by pheromones, would swoop in and carry her off. This orchid presents a rough approximation of the shape, and a convincing approximation of the pheromones that the male wasps are confused and try to fly off with it, catapaulting them into the pollen resevoir. If they get tricked twice: viola! Pollen exchange.
If you ever have the desire to put together some data visualizations, stats, automation, or anything else fun or useful with your iNat data, you're more than welcome to ping me for help on GitHub (jwcook) or on the iNat forums (jcook).
Thanks @Starcruch! That's pretty cool yourself. I don't think I'm in the market for doing much with my iNaturalist data - I'm content for it to just passively be part of the larger picture, though one day I suspect I will collate it all into some kind of PDF/ebook. I wish I had more time for it to be honest.
It's lovely to live in, but it was a lot of hard, hard work. I have a sort of traumatic amnesia about it and don't have strong recollections of doing some of the work.
I joke that we outsourced it to a pair of gullible young people who did all the hard work so us older people can enjoy living in it. :-)
Good article! I agree with most of this, and in general I think these problems are exaggerated. I also can't deny that there's still plenty of room for improvement in python packaging and dependency management tooling. I notice this the most not in my own projects, but whenever I'm helping someone who's new to the language. I think it's worth paying attention to things that beginners find difficult, and it can be true that both:
1. There are some pitfalls here that are easy for beginners (and even experienced developers) to fall into, and
2. In online discussions, those problems are often portrayed as being much worse than they actually are.
Of the three categories of tools mentioned in the article, 'python version manager' is the only area where I find it easy to point to a single tool without thinking too hard about it: pyenv. It does one thing and does it quite well, and I can easily recommend it even to new developers.
On the other hand, for environment and dependency management:
> In the second case, use something modern that manages dependencies for you with minimal effort. I like poetry, but you do you.
Poetry is also my preferred tool for my own projects, but I've also seen enough ways it can go wrong that I hesitate to recommend it to beginners. I think a lot of people won't know what to do with advice like "Use something modern that manages dependencies for you with minimal effort," since "modern" and "minimal effort" are fairly subjective qualities that there isn't a clear consensus on.
Very cool breakdown! I imagine the engineer(s) who worked on the device's firmware would enjoy seeing this. There's probably some story about companion software that was intended to work with this but never made it to production. Or maybe there was some feature on the backlog for the ability to change the image palette after it's been saved, and the idea was scrapped at the last minute.
Psychedelics seem to somehow have simply amazing PR: plentiful testimonies of their life-changing abilities, encouraging us to try them, but very little acknowledgement of their dark side. The subculture is very quick to brush away anything that goes against the narrative of the "mind-opening wonder drugs that big pharma doesn't want you to know about."
My experiences with psilocybin over a few months started with awe and wonder and spiritual awakening (or what seemed to be at the time), and ended with horrifying lasting harm. Insomnia, constant vivid nightmares, sleep paralysis, intrusive thoughts, anxiety, tics, and all kinds of weirdness at the periphery of conscious experience that I can't really explain.
It feels like I flashed my brain's firmware with no way to undo it. I took all the precautions I thought I was supposed to. I wish someone had warned me.