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Comment by vintermann | Hacker News Reader

There's a theory that drug use is often about self-handicapping:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-handicapping

E.g. if someone in college does poorly because they got high all the time, maybe the reason they got high all the time was that they felt (rightly or not) that they would have done poorly anyway, and now they have the drug to blame. And maybe those who smoke a bit and still do well, do it sort of to have the excuse in reserve.

I've not much experience with cannabis, it's far less popular where I live than the US, but I can certainly see that alcohol is used as this sort of "flexible excuse", both short term and long term.

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Self-handicapping is a huge effect, I’m surprised we don’t see it more frequently discussed in tech. This effect is really about creating a narrative and identity for ourselves. People attempt things and fail all of the time. If we put too much of our ego into the attempt it can be emotionally devastating when failure happens. So we protect ourselves by crafting alternative narratives. “If I succeed then great, but if I fail it’s because i choose to […]”. You are more likely to accomplish your goal if you put yourself fully into it, and the more you feed alternative narratives the less successful you’ll be. The way to live is to be fully committed and focused on your goals, and to have good skills on knowing how to recover from failure when that occurs.

[some definitional text] The purpose of self handicapping is to protect your self identity. “I could have x, but I didn’t because of y” is the narrative story. I could have gotten an A on the exam but I didn’t because I partied instead of studied is a classic example. For it to be true self-handicapping y needs to be a choice.

The people that I see doing it are doing it because of anxiety reasons. I think there are a variety of people with a variety of reasons for smoking weed.

while i agree with you there are many reasons for drug use. its likely the wikipedia article linked also applies subconsciously, so while they tellyou/think they do it for anxiety they may do it for a host of other reasons without fully knowing themselves. We all do this with many aspects of life, just pointing it out.

Yea fair point, it's indeed a lot easier to look at surface level reasons and take them at face value, while instead we should be critical of that. Good point.

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