Re:Ask HN: I'm writing a book about white-collar drug use, i...
by Eilene on Monday February 26, 2018 @02:12PM
(#16468065)
it was enormously freeing to finally be able to write about what happened to my family, yes, thank you. I felt like I was living in a John Grisham created hell, afraid of telling anyone what really happened and instead acting like Peter was the victim of his own stringent work ethic (which is true and not true). May I ask you what you do for a living? Are you a developer?
Re:Ask HN: I'm writing a book about white-collar drug use, i...
by IfOnlyYouKnew on Monday February 26, 2018 @03:33PM
(#16468739)
I earn my living running a small company selling a consumer product online. The business is mostly automated these days, and my productive time is spend on two projects in the machine learning space, one focussed on politics and one on music.
While still in high school, I started a software company selling mostly to large business and government. It was there that I noticed that I'm incapable of functioning in a corporate world with multi-year 7-figure projects. So the next business was deliberately focussed on many, smaller customers, each of whom I can hang up on if I so feel.
You can email me at anthonyDOTk e m p AT protonmail.ch (remove spaces, replace DOT with . AT with @) if you have more questions.
I'm in tech. My first experience with drugs other than weed, which I just don't enjoy, happened relatively late. I was around 30 at the time when I joined friends of a friend taking MDMA at a club.
I have experienced chronic depression for as long as I can remember. I was rarely actually "sad", as one might think. I was simply experiencing most emotions through a sort of fog. The most troubling symptom has always been what one would just call "extreme laziness". Even though I frequently attempted all sorts of methods to motivate myself and acquire discipline, I always failed. Recently, I found a "contract" I made with myself when I must have been around 12 years old, specifying all sorts of activities such as sports, reading, and socialising to be completed on a schedule for certain rewards. Later, I sought help through the medical system. But even though I tried three different anti-depressants and two therapists, their valiant efforts failed to make a dent.
After three years of recreational drugs I cannot say that they are the answer to my problem. But it is certainly an experience that has helped me make some inroads. Much like learning to bike with training wheels, they gave me an appreciation of the range of emotions one can experience. Both exhilarating, all-forgetting thrill, as well as content serenity, were states I only knew from literature.
I've consumed MDMA, 2CB, LSD, Speed, and Ketamine. I'm staying away from Cocaine, all opiates, and GHB. I do consume speed at work. The enjoyment of working in a flow-like state is magnificent, although it comes with its own downsides, mostly a tendency to dive into time-wasting side-issues. Even though I have overdone it on multiple occasions, sometimes working for four days straight, I've have never had trouble not taking anything for a few weeks when I was travelling, or simply ran out. I've also almost completely stopped drinking alcohol.
I've been in a joyful relationship for the last five years, and we've used drugs to find previously unthought-of depts of sexual pleasure.