Comment by delegate | Hacker News Reader

Comment by delegate | Hacker News Reader

True story. Friend of mine takes mushrooms for the first time, has a massive 'bad' trip, sees himself dying and realizes that life is short and fragile and if he survives the trip, he will make something out of it. Of course he survived the trip.

Next day (eg. soon) arrives at the conclusion that he's wasting his life working for an investment bank, quits his high-paying programmer job, invests most of his savings into bitcoin and starts working on a bitcoin-related application (I won't name it, because this is a private story), decides it's his mission in life. This was 4 years ago.

At today's exchange rate, his BTC are worth a couple of million and the app is currently in beta.

Now of course this is a good story, because a guy took mushrooms and is now a millionaire, but I suspect that the story could just as likely gone south (together with BTC's price) so then his actions could have been interpreted as quite reckless - giving up a good job and investing in 'speculative tech'.

Psychedelics are quite safe physically and even psychologically - however, the consequences of the decisions taken after a psychedelic 'enlightenment' experience should also be taken into account.

In other words, know that your life might change dramatically after a powerful trip - and that includes relationships, career, education choices and so on.

With that said, I still think the revelations themselves are worth it and the more people have them, the better the world will be as a whole.

tl;dr eat magic mushrooms, become a millionaire

Survivorship bias! :P

Typical story:

"Took magic mushroom, realized futility of my life's direction.

Took life savings, bought 1600 bitcoins at $250/BTC.

Invested all BTC in more magic mushrooms.

Next step...contemplating writing an 'Ask HN' for advice, but unsure where I left my house."

It's definitely not "eat mushrooms; become millionaire". It's unlikely that there's a highly predictable way a mental change will effect your life, but the "typical story" is also a misrepresentation.

It's possible that it has positive mental consequences with some regularity. My impression is that this might be true. Some reasons for this may be it's culture of use, perception of the drug, and most importantly its biological effects. Most psychedelics alter the serotonin receptor system(Psychedelic Drug, Wikipedia), and are culturally, and more recently medically, associated with "higher consciousness" (Guardian).

At the risk of highly simplifying complex mental/neurological interactions, I think one of the things mushrooms provide is perspective as a result of examining everything from an altered mental state.

Having experimented with small to moderately high doses, my hypotheses as to what my personal version of the altered mental's state's characteristics are are:

  *some effect on attention and mental effort that unify attention to an abstract focus and allow extended mental effort.
  *maybe it makes every thought feel very profound.
  *maybe it allows us to emotionally react to simulated outcomes which can make long term thinking more statistically accurate.
  *introduces some new mental illusions.
  *various effects on the whole perception black box. The same one that stitches, both eyeball inputs together, ignores your nose, and removes blurry eye images,etc.
  *makes mental associations more observable

The biggest impact that it had for me personally was greater self awareness. Not in the sense that I immediately knew more about myself afterwards, but I could perceive more of my inner interactions if I wished.

Hopefully people do studies. I'd volunteer for low-to-none toxicity drugs like mushrooms.

Citations:

(Kahneman): "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11468377-thinking-fast-a...

(Psychedelic Drug, Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychedelic_drug

(Guardian): https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/apr/19/brain-scans-...

You can actually have those very same epiphanies simply by actually taking the time to think long and hard about what your current circumstances are, what you've learned about it so far.

"Simply".

It's indeed simple but that doesn't mean it's not difficult.

Yeah recreational thinking about your circumstances sounds fun too

I didn't say it was recreational or supposed to be fun. I just wanted to point out that you don't need to rely on drugs to suddenly understand your life a little better than you did before.

True you don't, but they are easier on some level and give you no real escape once you commit to taking them. Sitting down and putting the work in is certainly as effective, but you can bail on committing to that where as there is no escape from the chemicals once they're in you.

That's a very good point and something I had not considered !

Have you ever had a psychedelic experience?

hmmmm...no, I do not believe you are correct about this. the nature of an epiphany is that it is NOT a variety of normal thinking.

there are certain contemplative disciplines that can lead to similar epiphanies of a psychedelic experience, but "taking the time to think long and hard" is not really one of the method's I'm familiar with. meditation is not "thinking long and hard".

Well I have had several moments where I suddenly experienced equal parts gut-wrenching and liberating realizations about my life an life in general. Whether or not these count as epiphanies is perhaps up for debate as I can't access other people's subjective experiences, but based on the descriptions of epiphanies given to me by others it sure seems extremely similar.

I'm assuming that thinking hard about my life led to additional subconscious thinking which led to these realizations, just like any other eureka moment. It seems the wheels did churn out something behind the scenes, they just had to be prompted to do so.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com