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Comment by getpost | Hacker News Reader

My experience is that drugs, including prescription anti-depressants, when they work, make it easier to see that your thinking is more arbitrary than you realize. Having been seemingly locked-in to a particular perspective, taking a drug, and seeing things a different way, breaks the lock. Then you can't go back to your old thought patterns, not if you're honest with yourself. This effect is independent of the particular effects that occur while the drug is active in your system.

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Not only can you not go back, you oftentimes find yourself frustrated with people who remain locked into arbitrary thinking. Hence the proselytizing by the psychonauts, free your head and all that.

I’m going to dissent from the rest of the commentators and propose that a priest, a friend, a parent, somatic therapy, cognitive behavior therapy, etc, is likely still a healthier approach than papering over social ignorance or pathologies with psychoactive drugs. Though, I don’t align at all with chemical interventions in these sorts of things so I’m in a minority.

I think using chemicals like this can be a shortcut. Might be useful, might be dangerous.

I would venture further and say there are no shortcuts if you want to be successful and doing permanent and irreversible damage to yourself is not going to get you there. Success is rooted in persistence and consistency, not seeing hallucinations.

Way to moralize the issue.

I'm going to offer a counter point, in that all those solutions either require you to know where you want to go, or are entirely dependent on someone else's influence and opinions, as opposed to you having epiphanies from your own experiences and trains of thought.

Ibiza should really be the new Silicon Valley if this was true, anecdotally.

No doubt, but the issue is that many just switch to other pointless thought patterns and look down on people with the "wrong" patterns.

A lot of people believe they found *the* objective truth while high, and because of that they turn arrogant afterward toward experiences/thoughts of others.

I've had friends who started acting like that, I once did myself, believing that they had found the one truth other people hadn't found, but since my friend group is generally honest and real with each other, we've helped them down from their arrogance.

However, I think it can be hard for people like CEOs, surrounded by sycophantic bootlickers, to realize that. They'll quickly be convinced by their own hubris.

This aligns with my experience and you've articulated well something that I've felt for years without being able to properly explain

nice insight BUT, "drugs" are vastly different. That statement is reminiscent of a mostly-sedentary adult "discovering" exercise. The followup is "just do exercise!!" .. points for the effort, but it is a single step, not a journey.

"drugs" are an extension of "food" and "breathing" .. what ? everyone agrees that you have to eat, and people do.. yet the details of eating, and what you eat, are massively varied.. too varied to make meaningful generalizations on a text forum. Similarly, when you ingest "stuff" there are complicated interactions that happen without consciously knowing it.. the edge of those interactions are what you are calling "drugs"

Lastly, some of the old herbal drugs were awful, and we are evolving past those.. but, some of the new synthesized drugs are more awful.. some of them are being used by millions right now.

Thus “teacher” plants, medicines, substances.

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