Ran Prieur

September 9.

2016-09-09T21:30:40Z

September 9. From the New Yorker, a long and balanced article about Ayahuasca. There's also some good stuff in the Hacker News comment thread, including a link to this Onion article, Ayahuasca Shaman Dreading Another Week Of Guiding Tech CEOs To Spiritual Oneness.

My experience with psychedelics is limited. Psilocybin gives me a hard body trip but no head trip, and I've never had a source for anything stronger. I've done a lot of cannabis, and it has opened paths that I never would have imagined without it. But you still have to walk the path. The problem with expansion of consciousness is that stuff has been blocked from your consciousness for a reason, and it's usually not because society doesn't want you to know that we are all one. More often it's because you have spent your life making terrible mistakes, and living without those mistakes is really hard, but now you have to do it because you know about it. Ignorance is bliss, and to emerge from ignorance is to climb through pain.

I'm not surprised to find the same idea in this long reddit comment about antidepressants, by someone who has studied them through both neuroscience and personal experience. Edited excerpt:

It's a tool. It'll help you in your battle if you need it. Other tools work for other people. The trick is to not rely on it as an easy fix. Depression is hard as fuck to fix. It requires embracing the source of your suffering, the ability to admit your brain is thinking bad thoughts, the ability to reality check yourself, and constant behavior changes to make sure you're setting yourself up for a good life.

September 6.

2016-09-06T18:00:05Z

September 6. I've been thinking about the meaning of life -- not the conscious large-scale stories about the reason (or lack of reason) that we're in this world, but about the unconscious stories and value systems that guide our small-scale actions. A month ago on the subreddit there was a massive comment thread about MGTOW, men who "believe that legal and romantic entanglements with women fail a cost-benefit analysis." Now it occurs to me that cost-benefit analysis is an optional, peculiar, and mostly unexamined story about the meaning of life.

I mean it can be a useful tool, but it's not a good script to have running in the background all the time, constantly guarding against getting a bad deal. And yet most of us do it. That's why we don't like being cut off in traffic, or being in the slow line at the supermarket, or not getting the best possible price when we buy stuff online. But when is it enough? When do we say, "Okay, over the whole span of my life I'm sure I'm getting a good deal so I'm going to stop caring about that." Most people never say that, because it would leave a void where there used to be meaning. Instead, normal behavior is to skew our perception so we always feel like we're getting a slightly bad deal no matter how good a deal we're getting.

This is part of what Buddhists call attachment and Eckhart Tolle calls ego, but I want to call it incompetent self-gamification. Gamification is "the application of game-design elements and game principles in non-game contexts," often by big institutions as part of creepy social control. But we also do it to ourselves all the time, turning everyday life into little games where we can win or lose based on events we don't fully control. And if we really examined this habit, we would find that the excitement of the game is not worth the suffering of losing.

But wait, isn't that a cost-benefit analysis? Maybe my point is that we apply cost-benefit analysis too much toward the outside, and not enough toward the inside.

September 2.

2016-09-02T14:20:29Z

September 2. Some fun stuff for the weekend. This silly quiz is actually a good execution of a good idea: What Garden of Earthly Delights Abomination Are You? My result strangely nails the deepest tension in my life, between my desire to simply have a good time, and my unseen role in some mysterious tale in which I'm supposed to be doing something or other, and if I try to have too much of a good time I get smacked down. I can relate even better to this 2014 Onion article: Man Hates Being Put In Position Where He Has To Think, Feel, Or Act.

And this might be the greatest joke ever told, Norm MacDonald's Moth Joke. It's actually an old joke that he puts his own spin on. Where other comedians play within the rules of comedy, Norm MacDonald plays with the rules of comedy.