The age of algorithms has warped us into frenetic little task monkeys running about in search of cheap dopamine bursts and instant metric gratification. I know this because I am one such monkey.

I was having breakfast in London with an award-winning author and tenured professor friend of mine this week when he confided in me that aliens watching humans work would find us quite strange indeed: although everyone apparently has very different and highly specialized jobs, the majority of us mainly sit at computers or gaze into our phones and enter information into them. Or receive information from them. Doesn’t matter if you’re a professor, a satirist, an accountant, or biotech executive. Increasingly, our primary role seems to be responding to emails, coordinating with remote teams, and watching little algorithmically-determined pixels bounce around on a screen.

The mainstreaming of psychedelics has indisputably been shaped by this bottleneck of human experience - the way we collectively experience, think about, communicate around, and integrate psychedelics is mediated by our warp speed digital lives and the performance-based, productivity-obsessed reality we’ve been co-opted into.

Increasingly, people are online during their psychedelic experiences as well. The demarcation between our physical and digital selves is growing more permeable and indistinguishable each day - it may have already disappeared entirely for many. Many people in the world are newly forming a relationship with psychedelics while possessing pre-fabricated mental models of the psychedelic experience that they’ve internalized from online messaging and virtual reality programs.

The Timothy Leary mantra of “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out” has become “Tune In, Turn On, Stay Forever” -

There’s a sense of urgency to everything in our lives - we can’t take a break, can’t take a vacation, can’t fall out of the algorithm or appointed position we occupy and lose the momentum we’ve worked so hard to build. We can’t take a step back and evaluate the psychedelic zeitgeist outside of a deluge of decontextualized information and disembodied experience coming to us from every direction in our online worlds.

I’m not going to play the ‘curmudgeonly luddite’ role here, but it’s tempting.

So I’ll just leave this train of thought here and go back to making satire, which feels like a meaningful and original way of integrating the non-micro, non-medicalized doses of psychedelics that I take to explore and expand the limits of my imagination - not to reduce it to the cognition of a dopamine-driven task monkey.

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Peace!