Dear Diary: I Accidentally Took A Bunch of Mushrooms
what Tony Hawk's Pro Skater can teach us about happiness and Amazon support can teach us about suffering
So I’ve been microdosing Psilocybin the past few months.
It’s been good. Definitely would recommend for creative work or mental health stuff. The effect (when dosed right anyway) is no more intense than a cup of coffee, just with different effects. It makes you feel “lighter”—where you can just kind of let go of things easier, similar to as if you’d just spent 20 minutes meditating—and also basically puts you into an instant state of flow when you settle down for deep creative work.
I definitely think that micro dosing psychedelics will do for the information economy what coffee did for the industrial economy. But more on that theory another time.
An acquaintance started making their own blu honey (psilocybin honey for microdosing) recently so thought I’d support them and try it. However, for long procedural reasons in their manufacturing process that I don’t feel like going into, their product is very hit or miss.
And right now, it’s a big giant hit.
I was planning on being productive today. Tackling life maintenance stuff piling up. Wanted a little pick me up to make it less emotionally draining. But instead I’m high as fuck sitting outside, just breathing and watching a lizard eat bugs. So I figured I might as well document it.
I am angry today. I bought a new CPU from Amazon, it was having issues, so I bought another, then found it was actually my config, and eventually I returned one.
However they are withholding my refund telling me that the CPU I sent them has the wrong serial number. It’s probably because it’s the serial from the other order, and I’ve been going back and forth with them for a week trying to get them to check the other order and they are just literally too cognitively impaired to even grasp what I am saying.
I have $500 held hostage by literal chimps.
This is perpetual the dilemma of being “intellectually gifted” (or whatever stupid thing you want to call it).
Some become resentful and hate the chimps. Maybe join some cool ideology that blames them for all their problems.
Some learn to persuade and manipulate the chimps. Become politicians or some kind of big time CEO or something.
Some just engineer their life to have to interact with the chimps as little as possible.
Some just kill themselves because they can’t figure a way out of chimp-induced-slavery.
I was almost the fourth kind. I wish I was the second kind. I tried to be. But I just am physically incapable of seeing them as “other” enough to take advantage of them. So I am mostly the third kind. Just avoid them. Problem is, sometimes, you just can’t.
My aunt’s son—my cousin—died recently. Car accident. That is sad. But I never really knew him nor her so don’t really care. My cumulative time around them can be measured in weeks and all of it was before I was ten. But I am the only child of the family who is still alive now and she has implicitly communicated to me that I am to text frequently and talk about bullshit and send her pictures of my son so that she can feel like her son didn’t die.
I feel annoyed by it. I hate playing pretend. I hate “small talk”. I am trying to find the truth here. And I don’t even know you. I feel guilty about it. But also I just can’t even be bothered to feel so.
I feel no more connection to my extended family than I do to some random cashier at a grocery store. Maybe even more with the latter because there isn’t all the obligation. Clearly, I am defective. But correcting such defects are a waste of my time. The people I chose to have in my life more than adequately fill my need for intimacy. And thus such energy is better provisioned elsewhere.
My family is nothing like me. I used to think I was adopted. I don’t know where I came from. I never really had a relationship with my dad. But he is smart. Smarter than me. IQ is like 140 something. Graduated highschool at 16. Is some highfalutin doctor. But has no capacity for introspection. His personal life is a mess. On his 3rd marriage. Hates his wife. Probably hates himself. Buys a bunch of shit he doesn’t need to fill the void. Was an alcoholic for a few years.
My mom is very normal—both in intelligence and behavior. Minus her neuroticism which is higher than most. Kind. But in the like solipsistic normie woman that’s what you do kind of way. Extremely extroverted. Extremely not into ideas. Would rather throw a party and talk about the weather than a temperamental theory of politics.
I am autistic and want to be left alone like my father. I am neurotic and want everyone to like me like my mother. I look like them. I’m not adopted. But we cannot relate. My mom and I have worked hard enough at it to make something acceptable. She tries to care about ideas. I try to talk about things other than ideas. It works well enough. My dad and I haven’t talked in a decade really. As far as he’s concerned, I am probably one of those crazy chimps he can’t figure out how to deal with so just avoids.
I just want the world to work. I just want order. I just want the vision in my head to exist in the world around me. Is that so much to ask? Why is conceiving of something and making it actually happen so inconceivably different?
I can understand the kind of novice level idealism where you just want to feel a bunch of feelings and they often contradict each other in the real world. Like you want to be rich but refuse to work. Or want to have good relationships but refuse to have tough conversations. But I don’t have that problem. I go out and execute and understand how the “real world” works and how to bend it to my will, probably a lot better than most who live in it. Yet even with all this understanding of all the interrelated variables and “realism” and the ability to execute, I still can’t reorganize the world around me—or even myself—to anything close to the vision in my head.
I mean, I sometimes win. Maybe even mostly. I have a lot of money and only work a few hours a week, a hot wife who is literally an angel sent from heaven, awesome friends, great health, I do what I want the overwhelming majority of the time, etc. Most men would kill to be my position.
But what they don’t understand is that it’s the insatiable need for more that gets you here. That’s the paradox of freedom. If you were as miserable where you are as I was where you are, you’d be where I am too. Or at least will get there eventually. You will only work toward more when you’re sufficiently miserable with where you are; you only put in the effort to become free because you always feel like you’re in chains. The chains in your head simply more powerful than the physical chains that actually exist around you. So the path of least resistance has you breaking and reorganizing the latter all the time.
But the problem is that the physical chains aren’t real. Or they’re immutable. What’s the difference between everything and nothing? Hegel is gay. But he’s not wrong. Point is there is no “objective” measure of “enough” freedom. It’s all just whatever the chains in your head say it is. And those chains are always changing—moving the goal post—so that you never stop trying to achieve more.
I am perpetually optimizing for order and stability so that I can have more freedom to do whatever I want whenever I want. But I don’t actually want anything other than order and stability. So when I get it, I am bored. And when I don’t get it, I am angry.
I mean obviously I do want more. But the world tends so hard and so constantly toward entropy that it’s like, by the time everything is in perfect order, my knowledge or ability of what to actually do with that is completely atrophied and i’m just tired.
The only time I ever feel “happy” is when positive things I could not control happen. I feel happy when the price of Bitcoin all time highs. I feel happy when some unexpected positive event happens. like a beautiful sunset. Or just like I go on a streak of positive things happening. Eg published a few articles pretty easy, a bunch of things went right in the rest of my life, etc. Where, through some combination of luck and effort, I achieve that perfect balance “challenging but rewarding” for some extended period of time.
It’s like in Tony Hawk Pro Skater. You have to land tricks consecutively to charge up your special. If you fall, all that progress on your meter is reset. If you wait too long to land another trick, it slowly decays. Eventually, with enough luck and enough skill, you fill the bar, your shit turns yellow and now you have unlocked the new special trick of “happiness”. If you land your pro gamer move multiple times, you can keep it going longer, but eventually it decays and you’re back to building up your special meter again.
And this can’t really be fixed; It can’t be engineered. Any degree to which you engineer it, you destroy it. Or at least what actually makes it satisfying. If you build a robot to play Tony Hawk Pro Skater in a way that it maximally optimizes how long you spend with your special on, you remove the whole fun of the game.
This is why capitalism—and really all forms of enlightenment rationalism—trend toward simulacra and sterility. That is just what happens as a result of deconstruction and materialism. When you can control it, you will. And ultimately you will commodify it, and sap it of all its depth and beauty.
Assembly lines are efficient. But they are not beautiful. Or at least not to anyone other than order obsessed psychopaths like me. And even for us, eventually we realize that perfection isn’t really perfect. Because without error, it’s just a facade.
This same issue on the macro applies equally to the micro. When you play a video game or go on Twitter or watch TV because it has proven itself an easy and reproducible means for positive emotion, eventually it stops working. Either because your mind adapts in an attempt to achieve homeostasis or that external thing just regresses to the mean of whatever you’d previously set to homeostasis. The first time you go on Twitter in a day feels great. So much novelty. So many likes and comments to review. The hundredth time you go on Twitter in day though you just feel ashamed at your desperation. And frustrated that it is failing to tickle your dopamine receptors.
I just want to be productive. I just want to get all this dumb shit off my list. I am annoyed that I can’t do so because I am tripping against my will.
I hate the unknown. I hate the unexpected. Or at least the unexpected negative. And when you are an engineer that’s all you get. Because the only time a system you’ve been optimizing for a decade does something unexpected is when shit breaks.
I am not out here exploring new ideas because I love the mystery. I am out here exploring ideas because I’m pissed off you morons haven’t fixed it already. Like fuck dude this species is old as balls how have you assholes not figured this out yet? Im not even that smart. There are literally millions of people smarter than me. This should be someone else’s job. But it’s just like no one even cares. What the hell are you assholes doing??? What are you wasting all your time on??? The world is a horrible entropic mess there’s shit everywhere look at all these dead bodies like what the hell are you so busy doing???
The fact that I’ve ever had a new idea is a literal embarrassment to this species as far as I’m concerned.
Thankfully, most of my ideas have already been thought of. But that actually makes me mad for other reasons. Like why the fuck did I spend a decade figuring this out myself when someone already figured it out literally a century ago? Why did no one tell me?
And then other times, when it’s an idea I actually feel proud of, something novel that I enjoyed creating and which could actually contribute some unique value, some other asshole already came up with it and got all the credit for it. Like Tim Urban’s Story of Us. I thought I would write that, and then found out that he already wrote it. And that made me mad.
But that part is gay stuff. I was just mad that he was important and useful and everyone liked him while I was not. Part of me felt like he had “taken” that from me by writing it before I could.
What I want is to contribute value in a way I enjoyed and then to be valued for it. I get mad when I have to waste my time figuring out things I don’t care about that a bunch of people already know and everyone was just too dumb to teach me, and then when I finally have a novel idea that I actually enjoyed making, mad that someone else already did it and got all the credit.
I suppose that’s not entirely unreasonable. And it was before I started Minor Dissent anyway. Now that I am on the right path and putting in the work, I dont care for superficial status really much at all anymore.
I am not mad at people for not appreciating autistic ideas. At least not anymore. In this moment, I’m just mad at luck and fate for making me this way. Why give me such a difficult mind? Your cruel sense of humor is gay!
I feel like I don’t look forward to things anymore. I guess I never really did. Ive always been dreading the thing that comes next. Meanwhile trying to get high off some new idea or system.
Life just won’t leave me alone. I just want to be left alone. I want everything to be organized and work perfectly and it just refuses to happen.
Fine. I let go. I don’t care. Be a disaster. Be imperfect. Be less than you could be! See if I care!
There is a paradox of order. The dialectic between it and chaos. You must walk the tight rope between them and it’s not obvious where that balance is. Too much chaos (letting the world just happen to you) or too much order (over exerting yourself to try and bend the world to your will) and your life sucks.
Do I call Amazon and just make a huge stink until they escalate me (the chat support told me that it’s a different department and that I can only contact that department through email)? Or do I just fucking get over it and put it on maintenance mode and keep sending the same email over and over until they figure it out?
I just want this box closed. I have like 512KB of RAM in my brain. If I don’t do it now I will forget. And I am literally physically incapable of switch tasking.
I just want this box closed so I can stop thinking about it and dedicate my mental energy to things that are actually enjoyable or at least important. And the only way it seems to do that is to forsake $500 over what is an obvious mistake and retardation of the part of the customer support chimps.
Maybe I’d even say “oh fine it’s only $500” but the problem is the chimps think it’s my fault and basically threatened to cancel my account. So now Im on like parole with Amazon, someplace I am highly dependent on for keeping my beautiful order (spending 2 minutes ordering something on Amazon vs planning a whole day around going to pick something up is a huge benefit) so I can’t just say “oh well, fine cancel my account”. I mean I could but that would probably create more net-trouble later. And also fuck you, you stupid chimps I will not be punished because you are too stupid to function.
There is something here. Something to learn. Which is why I’m writing. If you’re upset, if you’re not getting what you want, it’s always because you are misunderstanding something about the system. The problem is always solvable. You just have to get creative.
There are thousands of ways to manipulate the game to get a positive result. You just have to find one that works for you. And you have to keep trying. You won’t end up happy all the time. Sometimes you will get mad or be angry. Maybe even often. But you will feel better than you otherwise would have if you did nothing. And you will contribute something positive, no matter how small, to the human condition. And really, you might just need to learn to have that be enough.
Whether you are laying a brick or building a cathedral, all start by laying one brick at a time. And it won’t always be obvious what point that brick serves. But the cathedral’s beauty is just as much a result of its flaws and idiosyncrasies as it is its artistry and awe inspiring magnitude.
Failure is beautiful. Struggle is beautiful. Error is beautiful. Not in and of themselves, but in their contrast to order, ease, and success. The dialectic, the conflict between the two opposing forces, is the root of all beauty and value.
With that said, I cannot simply leave the box open. I just must find a sneaky way to close it that returns control to me.
Here is what I will do.
1. I am allowed to spend a max of 30 minutes per day thinking about this problem for the next 7 days. All thinking beyond this will be told “no, you must wait until tomorrow”.
2. My default strategy will be simply to send a functionally scripted response explaining the confusion and asking for an escalation point to have it looked at.
3. If I feel particularly inclined to call, then I can. But I am not allowed to spend more than 30 minutes sitting around thinking about how to formulate emails that will give the chimps the “aha” moment necessary to solve this. Any amount greater must be action.
4. I will add this daily todo to my calendar for the next week, and then when I do my weekly review next Monday, I can re-review the process and see if it needs tweaking.
I am not super high anymore. I feel drained. Im going to go sit on Twitter for a bit and then work out.
Good dae.