“Well, Stan, the truth is marijuana probably isn't gonna make you kill people, and ...it most likely isn't gonna fund terrorists, but... Well son, pot makes you feel fine with being bored and... It's when you're bored that you should be learning some new skill or discovering some new science or... being creative. If you smoke pot you may grow up to find out that you aren't good at anything.” [0]
To be clear, I don’t wholly agree, I know too many talented and hard-working stoners, but it does sum up the passive danger of cannabis rather nicely I think.
[0] https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/My_Future_Self_n%27_Me/Scr...
It's why there was a moral panic in the 1800s over Jane Austen style fiction, in the 1930s over radio, and so on.
Being addicted to cannabis is not really any different to playing computer games 12 hours a day, doing endless marathons, watching sports, investing, or many similar activities.
you can do something else while you listen to the radio or smoke pot (e.g., clean your house, hang out with friends or family, with weed you can even read or program)
phones and books both consume your attention, but a book at least demands a bit of effort to follow and might introduce you to new ideas or vocabulary, even if you're reading pulp fiction
on the other hand you can scroll twitter or insta or watch tiktok absolutely mindlessly, and doing so will tend to become a habit all while it chips away at your attention span and your willpower
weed can make boredom feel ok too, and can certainly affect attention, willpower and memory, but if used in moderation it can also magnify your curiosity and sense of wonder, help you introspect, etc
cannabis is a powerful entheogen and it deserves far more respect and restraint than it currently receives
smartphones give us enormous powers but they can also exert massive power over our minds and actions, they too should be treated with caution and used with far more restraint
cannabis might make you lazy or suggestible, and it can even be dangerous for some people or if used irresponsibly, but it won't spoon feed you mind-melting pablum or ads or propaganda or spy on you
Books, TV, the internet, cell phones all have the potential to benefit you. They often don't, but it's not the medium that's the problem, it's our own choices - except the spying on you bit. That's 100% a problem with TV, the internet, cell phones and now even books.
Yesterday I saw a TV ad for Meta suggesting that with VR you will be able to stand in a small conversational circle with Socrates.
Yea, it will be educational.
But skepticism aside, with a personal instance of AI some benefits could be significant. Just having a personal AI critic to read your writing and give feedback could be a huge benefit -- or if not your writing, your thought process.
Queue the spying on you part.
So yeah, targeted ads and spooky tv sets are annoying at the least but the poing is that the infrastructure could easily support 1984 style monitors.
Regardless of the purpose of current usage, this is infrastructure for a surveillance society. That is the issue. The infrastructure is not going to go away unless we rip it down [down to and including transport layer] and rebuild with privacy and other human rights protections as a primary requirement of ubiquitous networking. DARPA was not concerned about these matters so all these fall under the 'operators discretion'.
I want to start by saying this isn't your Cold War sheen propaganda. This is Harmonious Society, "river crab" propaganda. This method can belie and camouflage the salient points of persuasion, sure. But it's not only intended to stream a deluge of coercive media. The purpose is to dominate the aesthetic discourse around topics, learning as much about you as they can, while ingratiating their clusters of community norms at the same time. There isn't a monolithic identity either. It's about picking the winners of our long form cultural evolution. Country to country data definitely shows varying preferences, but aside from the initial exposure to determine what clusters you associate with, these feeds are tailored heavily by user interaction.
The public description of their process divulges the use of object and character recognition, along with audio/tag keywords, to all items in a video. So even on a virtual machine with no app permissions, this site is making an incredibly detailed profile of your media consumption habits. For example, when you stop watching a video at a certain point, TikTok records what items were in it up to that point making you stay, and what audio/objects occurred at the point of losing interest. This catalog culminates as a set of meticulous preferences that end up correlating to all sorts of useful suggestion information; preferences for video formats(do you like dance videos, rants, or documentary content?), types of speech(language and culture obviously, but also intonation, volume, frequency of use, monologue vs dialogue), length and pacing, even framing of the camera, its all logged and associated with your device and you. Along with this, topics and community clusters are accrued.
This goes way beyond blanket brainwashing or disinformation propaganda in it's effectiveness. It's like if a personal interrogator was assigned to billions of people to know every minute detail of their personal media narratives. And at the same time, became a congenial friend who is coaxing all of them to subtlety shift their identities and preferences. Mass media always takes this trend to some degree, but TikTok isolates the individual's identity. (I didn’t write this lol)
If a store thinks I make more money than you, I might for example be told they've got a return policy that is much more generous than what they'll tell you. There are places where you will wait longer on hold, getting repeatedly bumped back to make room for people who have a better "consumer score" than you do.
The data is handed over to the state and locked away until it's useful to them. It's can get you arrested or questioned by police when you've committed no crime. It can get you sued for things which should not be crimes but are. It's used by politicians who carve out the borders of their districts specifically to limit the ability for your vote to make any difference.
That data is used to target you with lies and misinformation. It allows you to be targeted by extremist groups. It can be used to decide if you get hired or not. You could be turned down for housing because of it. There are millions of things that might prejudice another person against you. Your lifestyle, your politics, your religion, the people you associate with, your sexual history, your medical conditions, etc. You can't know who is accessing your information or for what reason, or know how accurate that data is, or know if/how it is being protected.
It's a gross violation of your rights, which yes, sometimes is used to manipulate you into buying something you might not have bought otherwise, but increasingly is used for much much more and once the intimate details of your life have been taken from you, you can never take them back or prevent them from spreading.
However much you enjoy the products that are spying you, you can't ever say if the benefits outweigh the costs. You aren't even allowed to know what the costs are or when you are paying for them, and there will never come a time when you have paid in full and it can no longer cost you something else.
https://vigilantcitizen.com/latestnews/hello-barbie-the-cree...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/nov/26/hackers-c...
The book looks good btw! And I'm checking out her TED talk. If you're secretly an AI book ad pushing algorithm you just got me...
Paraphrasing, one of the best quotes in Turkle's book: ~We have evolved voices over millions of years to convey information, feeling and nuance. But [young people, who won't answer the phone] want to text instead.~
I mean tech is a double edged sword but I'm guessing the positive like police having a job beating people up without being filmed by some phone outweigh stuff like your roomba uploading your floor plan.
Of course, human nature and corporate greed don't change. The difference is scale. In the past stores had to know you were rich to treat you better. They weren't checking your bank account balance at the door. Now they can and increasing do exactly that.
Same with real spying. Maybe you in 1980s china you had to watch what you said around your neighbors. Today you have to watch what you say while alone in your own home. It's just even just what you say today either, but everything you've said or written over decades that can be mined. You don't have to go to the other side of the globe to see historical examples of how this would have been abused either, Joseph McCarthy would have loved to have this data.
Again, the tech isn't the problem. It's great that was can film police abuses. It's great that we have GPS. What we don't have are regulations that prevent the abuse of our data which is collected and disseminated at an unprecedented scale and never goes away. there exists a permanent record of what you've said, what you've done, and everywhere you've been. We're going to see it used to hurt people more and more often. There are already plans to use this data to attack people who have gotten abortions. It could very soon be used against those in homosexual or interracial relationships as those too are now at risk of becoming crimes.
If your insurance rates go up next year, you won't be told that it was because people in your area spent more on fast food over the last 6 months than last year. you just get the highe4r bill.
What I fear is that we'll end up with a digital caste system where people are treated very differently based on hidden scores that follow them everywhere.
In general, with a more open system, you might also have more hope to redeem yourself, or at least evaluate effective options.
I want to start by saying this isn't your Cold War sheen propaganda. This is Harmonious Society, "river crab" propaganda. This method can belie and camouflage the salient points of persuasion, sure. But it's not only intended to stream a deluge of coercive media. The purpose is to dominate the aesthetic discourse around topics, learning as much about you as they can, while ingratiating their clusters of community norms at the same time. There isn't a monolithic identity either. It's about picking the winners of our long form cultural evolution. Country to country data definitely shows varying preferences, but aside from the initial exposure to determine what clusters you associate with, these feeds are tailored heavily by user interaction.
The public description of their process divulges the use of object and character recognition, along with audio/tag keywords, to all items in a video. So even on a virtual machine with no app permissions, this site is making an incredibly detailed profile of your media consumption habits. For example, when you stop watching a video at a certain point, TikTok records what items were in it up to that point making you stay, and what audio/objects occurred at the point of losing interest. This catalog culminates as a set of meticulous preferences that end up correlating to all sorts of useful suggestion information; preferences for video formats(do you like dance videos, rants, or documentary content?), types of speech(language and culture obviously, but also intonation, volume, frequency of use, monologue vs dialogue), length and pacing, even framing of the camera, its all logged and associated with your device and you. Along with this, topics and community clusters are accrued.
This goes way beyond blanket brainwashing or disinformation propaganda in it's effectiveness. It's like if a personal interrogator was assigned to billions of people to know every minute detail of their personal media narratives. And at the same time, became a congenial friend who is coaxing all of them to subtlety shift their identities and preferences. Mass media always takes this trend to some degree, but TikTok isolates the individual's identity. (I didn’t write this lol)
But the idea that the media forms and platforms play no causal role and it's all on us and our choices is nearly indefensible imo
Some do make it a lot harder to make beneficial choices than others for sure! Some are specifically designed for it.
People claim these systems dont shut down as you are still digesting body fat, but they for the most part do shut down and somewhere in doing that they heal very quickly. I have done it a few times (for NSAIDs and other pain killers having done damage to gut and stomach and when i get glutened giving me ulcers in my gut).
A benefit is that things like food dont rub against the ulcers which are basically like little cuts and that helps too heal too during the fast. You can go on having pain for months or years trying to deal with them in another way. Remember to dose some losalt for potassium and sodium ( your electrolytes ) while you fast to limit the dizzyness and fatigue. Im not sure magnesium powder would be a good idea due to it being tough on the stomach normally... it would stop the muscle cramps you will get... but it might stop the whole thing working ... i never used it while healing ulcers and lining damage .... but i have more recently when fasting to lose weight and it does make it easier .. magnesium tablets or capsules would be a terrible idea though those are really tough on the stomach and have a lot of added ingredients in the fillers and capsule depending on the company. Smaller fasts would also help. Good luck.
Based on what it's doing to your lungs and circulatory system, I'd put it more in the "it rocks, until it doesn't" category.
It is doing that for decades which messes you up eventually.
But my point is that you can run reasonably fast in races with fairly low running mileage. Do most of the base and tempo workouts cross training on an elliptical machine or something, and save the running for interval workouts.
True enough. I too have read "Born to Run", and would suggest that most modern humans aren't adapted to it (certain populations certainly, but most not). Although I have hit reasonably good times, I don't count myself among that population. In high school and in my 30's, I certainly was in the 90th percentile of runners, just by the numbers. Individual races, definitely higher. I love to look at the form and economy of top tier runners, and frankly, I'm not built like that; I could never perform like that. I'm bound to break down eventually, and I'm pretty good at running.
> on an elliptical machine or something
This is not running. This is training for running by not-running. Dress it up how you like, but it's how people like me save the damaging work for races.
Hard drugs, alcohol, gambling, duels; a lot of this stuff is if not banned then at least restricted and regulated.
Are we not tired of that story? So what if humanity does not go to Mars? Is dad going to be unhappy about our efforts when everyone is dead?
Our culture is a joke of wishful thinking and emotional abuse to achieve someone else’s goals disguised as essential application of agency.
How terrible if humans lived a completely different agency than kowtowing to yesteryears industrial necessity to rebuild the world after humanity destroyed it.
Grigori Perelman has achieved more of note than any of us; I know about his accomplishments and none of yours. He did it all with paper and pencil. IMO our low effort consumerism and industrialist slog is destroying our imaginations and keeping us from better ideas.
I'd argue that the chemical withdrawal effects of marijuana, are nothing compared to habitual smoking, alcohol or other "hard" drug use. But there are still some chemical withdrawal effects.
Personally I've had Minor irritability after not having an edible for a few days if I've been consistently having them nearly daily for few days. But I've also realized this, and moderate use more to only once or twice a week, and only 5-10mg at a time. I've grown to like the feel of 5mg in the evening overall. Accounting for the blah feeling the next morning/day.
I played it twice, and do not regret it.
I've heard professors say something to the effect of "students a decade or two ago used to be more productive". I don't have trouble believing that; so would I (I think) without the potency of modern entertainment. It's harder to do stuff while eating such good electric lotuses. :p
On a psychological level, perhaps. But it is pretty obviously not so when it comes to physical risk (if one smokes in whichever form).
Two of my kids use THC pretty regularly and they seem content with a life that is paying the bills but not really leading anywhere.
The third does not (AFAIK) and is on a much higher trajectory.
All had pretty much the same upbringing, rules, experiences, and discipline.
I've never used it, so don't have personal experience.
It's only a problem if they aren't actually content. I've known tons of people working minimum wage who sneer at "elites", don't seek higher things, and get high all the time, but really resent the fact that they never did anything with their lives. They don't build their hobbies, they don't seek higher levels of employment or skill, and they constantly talk about how they want to do great things that they never do.
There will always be an infinite amount of achievement that you never accomplished. There will always be an infinite number of things you never did. The best thing you can do is prioritize, accomplish the things that you really want to accomplish, and try to do your best to be happy with what you are able to do. Live your life happily, and make the people around you happy.
I mean, you can certainly argue that the meaning of life is entirely arbitrary, and there is indeed nothing wrong with that if that's what someone wants to do. But I feel like the world is generally a better place when people in it strive for more than mere contentment. And for me personally, a couple of the key things that give life positive meaning are building relationships with other people, and striving to better myself—learning things, building skills, etc. I'm glad I do these things, rather than living an alternate life where I was equally (or maybe even if I were somehow more) subjectively happy, but less active.
I'd be happy for them. I wouldn't be proud. An infinite amount of possible achievements is no excuse not to strive for anything.
If they're striving for happiness and they are happy, mission accomplished right? I assume they'd still have their own goals and hobbies outside of work or things which bring in money. Why assume those things don't matter?
I can't even imagine what a life of passive, mindless, consumption without any creative outlet would even be like. It's frankly depressing to think about!
I honestly don't know how anyone (good person or not) can properly take care of themselves on a Taco Bell hourly salary.
Really dumb take.
That said, I think the argument of “stepping stone” job salaries is less crazy in the context of people who are dépendants of other adults. If you’re a teen and you live with parents who provide food and housing and basics like that, you’re needs from the wages are different. Plenty of jobs make sense as “silly shit teens do for spending money” that would also be considered “awful life for full time adult worker”. Some of these jobs only exist because there are short term employees willing to do it for low pay. It’s fine IMO that they exist but it’d be wrong to assume that an adult should have to live of it.
I think we should push for livable wages and ensure everyone can be happy and healthy from their salary. I don’t know if it’s even possible to protect the adults in “low skill” jobs without making it hard to have “stupid summer part time jobs” for teens. If it is possible, then we should allow those teens to have their dumb low pay jobs and not raise too much of a fuss.
35 million Americans are on snap. 53 million Americans used a food pantry in 2021 (thesev groups don't always intersect)
Whether it's urban, rural, or suburban (high percentage shift since 2008), the percent of Americans that have parents that can provide food, shelter - much less plan for education and their own retirement is not a very high number for this phrasing.
Imagine if the expectation was that a part time fast food job could pay even half of college expenses.
Why not just limit some jobs or minimum wages to teens who can demonstrate that they're already financially supported? Most people earning minimum wage are adults, but we could require companies to pay adults or teens supporting themselves higher wages. We could also set age limits on certain types of work, but then you run the risk of not having enough kids looking for work with everything else they've got going on.
Those same jobs definitely only operate outside of school hours, to help promote their employees growth, right?
The harder the achievement, the harder it is to automate that achievement, the prouder I will be.
Working at Taco Bell is not that hard to obtain and may very well not exist in 10 years.
I say this as someone with at least a little experience, not to be judgmental.
There are moments in later life where everyone feels that way.
Statistically, some paths might be show up in studies as more reliable in terms of late life contentment, but on an individual level, we all end up noticing that we left a lot of doors unopened, and can find ourselves stuck wishing we made different choices or had different opportunities.
Innumerable careerists and dedicated parents and globe-trotters find themselves stuck discontent, bitter, or resentful. And innumerable people of all paths look back, wonder what could have been different, and reconcile themselves to contentment again. And heck — some people just die before reaching their goals at all.
There’s no point speculating whether the chill dude at the Taco Bell is doing it right. They know themselves better than any of us do, and may easily end up more durably content than any of us.
old Successful Career guy: should have spent more time with family and friends <starts sobbing>
old Poor Artist guy: should have worked harder and more conservative then I could have afforded a house, now I have to rent <gets all whiney>
--
the question is the mental state developed. are you somebody who regrets everything and is never happy with what you have because you alwaya need more? or are you able to be grateful and enjoy calmly small things and accept how life is?
I agree, but I think there is value in speculating whether the contentment we feel on weed is really just distraction from discontent. This applies to far more than just weed, of course, but my own experience is that weed is particularly tricky in this regard.
I don't have the insight to guess whether George should prefer to be skinnier and hornier but too depressed to meet his career goals, any more than it's my business to guess that Jane should put down the blunts and be more tuned in with all the drama in the news.
I'm busy enough trying to make those choices for myself.
That's a big rabbit hole right there. Ancient wisdom says that there's nothing in the material world which can give you true happiness/contentment/satisfaction. The world is transient and so is the happiness you get from it. Moksha/Nirvana/Samadhi is the only way to become truly happy, forever.
Weed invariably leads you to such questions. No wonder it's the gateway drug to spirituality.
I feel like there's a strong argument to be made that the person working at Taco Bell and is satisfied with their life is better off than a random cube dweller slowly losing their soul in the name of material comforts.
Nowadays software development is so meeting heavy that nothing gets done but you're "working" all the time.
The best part frankly was that there was so little I actually needed to do. I filled out a few forms, I walked the whole site X times of Y period (usually once every 1-2 hours, but depended on the site). Beyond that I was largely just expected to be at my post, reasonably alert and professional looking. My time was my own to do homework, study, read, program, or whatever. I realize that a job without anything to do is a nightmare for some people, but I've never had a problem filling my own time.
Other pros:
* I knew my regular sites almost like my home. Sure during they day there were tons of people, but by the night/weekend when I took over, I was basically the only person in the building and it felt like it was mine.
* Eating lunch on the roof overlooking the city.
* Some of the chillest co-workers I've ever met, from the maintenance crew to the other guards.
* 12-hours shifts meant I was usually only working 3 days a week.
* On holidays me and the maintenance guy would have private movie showings in the building auditorium.
Cons:
* 99% boring, but when things get exciting they get real exciting. Only time I've had guns pointed in my direction, and they were cops.
* I think getting off work and going to bed a 7 a.m. for years has permanently kind of borked my sleep.
I'm reminded every day that my decision to never work with my hands again was a good one. Nobody respects people who provide for you, that's slave's work, mother's work(, teacher's work, nurse's work.) The ultimate CEO-guru would lie on a cushion all day, being washed and shaved by his VPs, periodically emitting syllables in an unknown language that would be interpreted by other VPs as commands to direct the people who actually do the work.
If the answer to all of those questions - especially the first - is yes, then I am happy. Of course I will push them to strive for more than that, but what they do with their lives when they leave the house is up to them, and at a bare minimum, I just want them to be happy with whatever they choose.
Billions across the world would be incredibly happy with their kids getting to do something like this.
If you aren’t happy with a content child, sounds like you had children for all of the wrong reasons & would be a horrible, potentially abusive parent.
I'm not here to psychoanalyze you, but food for thought.
We forget that a job where you get free food and a low wage for simple work is (historically speaking) extremely luxurious.
As we all know (and frequently discussed here on HN), a minimal wage job results in limited housing options, limited healthcare options, limited educational options, etc. As a parent, it is my responsibility to prepare my children to become self sufficient beyond the minimum wage job. For the sake of themselves and their children.
Millions of people will never rise above minmim wage jobs.
Why fix that for one person ,and not for all?
A Taco Bell worker probably has more free energy and intrest for tackling big problems like protesting against the oligarchs.
Just met a guy last month that spent 5 years working at a carwash at minimum wage. He saved up money the entire time. Got himself a van decked for mobile cleaning. He still works hard, but is making some serious money now.
Seen far more that just collect welfare checks, smoke pot and play videos or watch tv for 16 hours a day, while blaming "whomever" for their situation.
And, the comment that millions of people will never rise above minimum wage jobs is laughable. With the amount of free/low-cost education (community college, free on-line classes, military GI Bill), and the huge shortage of skilled trade workers [0], anyone in the US can do better than minimum wage. It just takes effort.
[0] https://resources.skillwork.com/why-is-there-a-shortage-of-s...
That's the whole point of the matter though, isn't it, that if you don't have ambition, then you voluntarily get yourself stuck in a rut of your making. "I'm content in that my life is shitty in X or Y way, but cannot do anything about it".
There was a time when I found comfort in thinking that I would grow up to be "comfortably middle class". My parents disabused me of that notion, and now that I am at that stage, I feel as though there is so much more I can learn and do, instead of clocking in and out day after day.
But hey, if you find happiness in working at a gas station or something, maybe you are more enlightened than I am.
Discounting the counter productive condescension required to be the one putting the other guy down, we should all be honest with a simple fact: any typical software dev (just talking about what I know) can succeed at a gas station job while the reverse is not true. This obviously does not afford the software dev the right to be a jerk to anybody (up or down the ladder).
Intelligence is only one of the many variables needed to succeed in certain occupations.
Although you have zero supporting evidence for this fatuous assertion, you're perfectly fine with passing it off as empirical data. If you actually took the time to speak to your average software dev particularly in America, you would find that it's more likely that they've worked customer facing retail when they were younger. These are pretty much the only types of jobs that are available during high school. I myself have worked at Walmart, Blockbuster video, Chick-fil-A, and as a landscaper during the summers. None of it was particularly taxing - although it was extremely tedious at times and often boring.
And while we're on the subject of anecdotal data I would say on the order of at least 60 to 70% of software devs that I've worked with in the past were actually in relatively good shape physically and usually were very conscientious about their diet and maintaining regular exercise.
We really need to be filtering people back to Reddit.
But I do think the world is a better place with more "CEOs" running independent taco joints, and less Tacobells.
Nothing wrong with working for someone, that wasn't my claim.
What is “shitty” in this context?
It is much easier to accomplish a universal perspective when you have much less 'self' to suppress. That's been the nature of monks of all variety for all of human history. I don't think it's a coincidence or disadvantage that cannabis enthusiasts have a less-selfish mentality.
Who know, maybe I’m not meeting my full potential but I really do enjoy life and cannabis helps.
I’ve struggle with anxiety and insomnia my whole life and medical cannabis allows me to “turn off” in a way that a lot less damaging than other medications I’ve taken.
Depends on one's definition of higher, I guess.
Sometimes "do nothing" is exactly what we need in this crazy, hectic, busy world. Sometimes it's good to be bored. But keep it in check. Also, I have no problem with adults partaking, but kids with their developing brains ~ that's another story in my mind.
A few years ago, I used the word "Schmuck", and someone asked me if I was Jewish (I'm not). I didn't realize that "Schmuck" was also a Yiddish word until then. I looked it up, and I didn't realize that some Yiddish speaking people consider it to be obscene profanity! So now I use a little more sparingly.
I've come up with some really great stuff while moderately stoned, and while I don't consume it on a daily anymore, I can't understate the importance of having some way of recording those thoughts as soon as you come up with them be it a notepad, notepad.exe or even a voice recorder if logging things on paper or text isn't your thing because it tends to mess with your short term memory enough to forget whatever interesting point of view you've arrived on within a minute or so. I think I learned this from comedians actually, George Carlin used to work like this. I bet there's plenty of writers on South Park and may other comedy shows who do, too.
Obviously taking it on a wake-and-bake basis throughout the day is going to give you problems though. Don't use it like that unless you're trying to manage serious illness like to keep your chemotherapy meds down or arthritis or whatever. Hell I don't even drink caffeine on a daily anymore because I find WAY more utility out of it once every couple of weeks or so. Oh yeah and if I'm going to agree with anything in this article it's that extracts are kinda too turbo, but I've also tried them in small amounts in drinks (Around 5-10mg) and that was pretty amazing compared to smoking in terms of lack of side effects from inhaling crap.
That said since it does have a thought-scattering thing going for it that if you don't bother to try and focus on getting those scattered thoughts on to something which records them, it's kind of a waste of time if we're talking about using it for purely utilitarian reasons.
Unfortunately I smoked my first joint at 13, I'm pretty certain it damaged my short term memory. I think had it been legal I wouldn't have got hold of it until much older plus it would have lost some of its cool factor.
It was mostly hash in my day, I actually never liked weed , it was all super skunk loaded with thc that caused paranoia.
Alcohol, cocaine and mdma are rough drugs too but there's something about weed/hash that makes me think it's overall mental effects might be worse. It's odd that it's written off as harmless quite often. (Btw I think all drugs should be legal, but I also now think they are all horrible and have nothing to do with them , well apart from beer and wine!)
Sure, “surprise, doing drugs at 13 is bad,” but I don’t know a lot of teenage drinkers who stopped at drinking (vs further in) in the same bad spot as the teenage smokers I knew (who stopped at smoking).
The difference of smoking at 13 vs 30 is likely different, but idk if I really buy starting in adulthood and trending towards habitual is meaningfully immune from its bad impacts I’ve seen peers deal who stuck with it.
But yes, Randy Marsh was absolutely right. I've had periods of my life where I've abused it and I regret every one of those days.
I think I am starting to wake up to this. I do find enjoyment in it, and there is such a sunk cost fallacy I keep factoring in too.
I mean do I take occasional breaks, but probably not enough. It had definitely helped me lower my inhibitions enough to introspectively identity some issues that were deeply hidden under the surface of my everyday life. However, it's killed my motivation and in some ways it's starting to negatively affect other areas of my life. Regardless of my dependence, I am thankful to not feel clinically addicted or anything.
I will say, it wasn't my first choice of treatment. I tried the mental/medical health professional route. I'm still on that train, and it's been 8 years. Nothing has really improved, so I am not sure what else to do and where else to go. I adopted cannabis around the age of 29 with very limited experience prior. The kind I use is not like the variety in this article either. I use 1:1 THC:CBD hemp because high thc products are illegal in my area. So maybe the damage isn't "as bad."
If all the medical/mental health treatments I tried work as well as the medical research and doctors claim then I probably wouldn't have ever began to use cannabis in the first place. But like I said, what else am I to do? It's exhausting and stressful trying to force yourself to be a way your body naturally fights against.
It's apparent that I cannot function well without some sort of chemical assistance. I guess the only difference is where I get it from (doctor vs. plant), the side-effects, and the societal views that accompany said chemicals.
I've been trying to do some soul searching to find out what I truly want, but I've chalked it up to, "I'll know it when I see it." And till then, I must keep searching.
After all, there's a passive danger in many things we do or neglect to do.
Exercising a "little discipline" doesn't really work for addictive substances. In my experience, high-functioning people with tons of impulse control often don't appreciate that others around them have more limited capacity for that. Despite drinking a lot in grad school, I just stopped after my daughter was born. Not out of any problem functioning, I was a social drinker and was just too busy with a job and baby. But it would be foolish of me to assume that everyone can just exercise "a little discipline" and go from 5+ drinks a night to nothing just like that.
In this episode Randy didn’t have Substance abuse disorder. He took the kids for a drive after drinking. He was caught and the court ordered him to undergo treatment despite there not being any proof that he was an alcoholic.
This mentality that anyone that does something dumb or illegal while drunk has a problem does no service for either those that actually have substance abuse disorder, nor for criminal justice. You should be responsible for your own actions, and if you are sick you need treatment. But ordering people to undergo treatment after a crime despite no evidence of a disorder is just plain bad. mkay.
I've known people that were fine smoking a cigarette every 3rd day. I'm not one and that would put me on a path of relapse in a hurry.
I'll agree that avoiding addiction takes discipline, but once addicted, it depends to what, and who you are whether you need to focus on recurring abstinence or if more moderation is the ticket.
Hah, that's easily done without smoking pot
He said: "OK, motivation."
completely agree with the op in general though. def not good of for kids who should be working on establishing themselves.
The whitey that people experience, usually first time users or infrequent users, is a release of glutathione, and obviously its messing with the endocannabinoid system.
Its also got a very potent memory wiping effect, which makes it useful for criminals doing stuff to you, like raping you in your sleep if you have been spiked with prescription sleeping pills and/or off the shelf anti histamines sold to aid sleep.
Its a very nasty combination of drugs, when that sort of stuff has been done to you in your sleep, and criminals never tell you what they plan to do to you!
Dont make it easy for them, the legal system wont help you!
Afghanistan?
More than I can say for the food I eat.
I was never the type of smoker which was "active". I would smoke socially and began to hate that I could never remember people's names or conversations. It made me fairly quiet and anti-social compared to without.
Now I really can't enjoy marijuana, even when buying low THC high CBD bud and vaping it, it's still very easy for me to overshoot and get into a state I hate. Marijuana turns me into a complete idiot and creates a sort of cerebral haze I can't stand.
I really dislike the lack of education surrounding marijuana. People, especially young people, seem to disregard the impact of excessive consumption. You can argue with me all day it's safer than alcohol or tobacco, and I agree if we're talking equivalent amounts, but I'm not saying you should drink daily or multiple times a day for years.
Everybody is different, my experience isn't necessarily everyone else's. For those that do fall into the trap of spending too much money, time, and failing to understand how weed might be holding them back, better education, regulation, and support should net society a bunch of happy well informed people living their best lives.
I can only enjoy THC as a sleep aid for the reasons you’ve highlighted above. For me, it feels like mj is underclocking my brain. I am aware of it and I hate being slow. It’s a terrible feeling. I enjoy alcohol much more even though mj is safer overall.
The real danger of marijuana is that for a small portion of the population it can induce schizophrenia, but it only affects a very small segment of the population since I believe you have to be in your early 20s or younger and be genetically prone to it
Fast forward a few decades. I now have chronic insomnia due to things like on-call and anxiety. My brain will not shut down enough for sleep. I had tried Ambien, melatonin, blah, blah. Nothing really worked. I went to a party, they had green brownies. I was on the verge of a migraine, so I had a couple. Out on the couch in half an hour. I woke up without the migraine.
So now I use THC/CBD to deal with migraines and insomnia. I can get a good night's sleep if I take a nice, measured dose gummy just before bed. I wake up slightly before my alarm, alert and refreshed. This is a big change from before. If I feel a migraine coming on I put stuff on hold, take a big dose of CBD and some THC and sleep it off. I wake up without the post-migraine stupids that Imitrex causes.
Used responsibly, in moderation, it can have a life-changing benefit - just like other drugs. If it's abused... well, alcohol abuse will kill you too.
And yeah, the schizophrenia risk would make me think twice about it if that ran in my family. Though I'm now at an age where that wouldn't matter (schizophrenia almost always manifest by your 30s which I cleared a while back).
That's funny. I like it because it underclocks my brain. It's not as needed these days now that I have meds for ADHD, but before I was diagnosed my brain felt like I was constantly thinking too fast. While I enjoy that I make connections quickly and that I retrain and recall information quickly, it's a depressing burden when it's out of control. So before the meds weed was the only thing that kept me feeling calm, focused and in control
I’m still in favor of legalization, but cannabis needs some of the regulations we apply to tobacco. Producers shouldn’t be able to make packaging that looks like a bag of skittles or a candy bar. There needs to be warnings on the packaging, informed consent when purchasing it, possibly even hotlines or pamphlets given out to help young people avoid addiction.
I don't know of any place that allows selling to minors or even allowing them in the store. What good is changing wrappers when kids don't shop in those places?
Cannabis has stronger laws compared to tobacco already. Plenty of medical and church related pamphlets exist. What do you think is missing?
The truth is you grew up and turned into your parents.. it happens to many who have kids.
Yes and no.
Yes. Kids sometimes find parents/adult things and think it’s candy and eat it. Parents should be careful blah blah blah. Parents make mistakes. Kids are crafty at rifling though cabinets. Making something look like candy increases the odds kids eat it by mistake.
But also by making things taste good (esp addictive or habit forming things) you’ll increase the ease at building the habit. Ask Juul how that’s going. That’s the whole idea behind menthol cigarettes and mango vapes. Make the habit easier. Even for adults.
Cannabis has stronger laws around distribution and dosing… tobacco has way stronger packaging and advertising laws. You can’t make nicotine candies, you can’t use shiny flashy colors, you can’t make fun ads etc. You can do that with cannabis.
> The truth is you grew up and turned into your parents
Sometimes you grow up and find out adults knew a few things about the world.
You can think cannabis and drugs should be legal without thinking it shouldn’t have basic regulation to protect people from themselves and from the product. We have plenty of other laws for other products to prevent bad advertisement or to include warning labels.
For what it’s worth, I personally think we should require things like edibles to be low dosage and packaged with warnings but I think we should still allow candies and fun packaging. But I’m a sucker for a cool package and maybe that’s the point…
Of course, everyone drinking moonshine is also going to lead to more alcoholics than people just having a glass of wine socially.
I use to be able to smoke once a month and not even think about it the next day. Any modern strain I wake up the next day thinking "I should smoke more weed!". Just crazy.
Some of the more pleasant times are when I mix up ABV (already vaped weed) into edibles. Those I can get weak enough and with only the more stony compounds remaining where it can be pleasant, but it still turns me into a drooling idiot with absolutely horrific munchies.
It's like telling an alcoholic to try switching from vodka to tequila, because vodka makes you angry and depressed but tequila makes you a fun drunk. THC is THC, and any difference is psychosomatic.
If you think all weed produces the same effects then you first need to understand it's not all about thc.
First lesson Terpes: https://www.amazon.ca/Primary-Terpenes-Cannabis-Marijuana-In...
Next lessons: thc vs thca vs cbd
> The research shows that genetically it is impossible to prove whether a cannabis plant is an Indica or Sativa. There is no difference in the genes.
> The overall chemical profile, like the genetics, shows no apparent difference between the labels.
Whether the Indica/Sativa marketing labels correlate with that chemical profile or not is besides the point. We know that different batches of the same strain can have different concentrations and ratios of all the of the relevant compounds because most legalized states require testing every batch. I don't know of any high quality research that studies how the subjective experience correlates with different doses and ratios but given that at least one of the most common compounds in cannabis is FDA approved to treat epilepsy (Epidiolex) and all the anecdotal evidence, it's really not a stretch to see how different strains produce different highs in different people.
Crucially, I used relatively small amounts of pure sativa. I wasn’t stuck on the couch while I used it. Still, this to me suggests self control is more important than abstinence.
And to your point, yes life is not just about success, it's about so much more like friends and family.
That's why I hate weed. It turned my friends who were creative, thoughtful and caring, into people who just wanted to smoke and do nothing when they had time off.
I’m not saying people should smoke or vape. But I do want to say that with care and self control it can be a habit that doesn’t cause serious problems. Though ultimately I feel much better having quit.
In fact some of the biggest names in tech and other industries are definately using drugs, its very possible to be a high achiever and be on drugs. in fact, it seems to be, that we really don't even call it addiction until it ruins your live, otherwise its just called "recreational". strange to me.
most people cannot do cocaine every day without trouble. Coffee? every day is fine
different drugs have different danger
/r/nootropics, common thread is as follows:
OP: "Help, I have bad anxiety every day, what should I take for it?"
re: "Do you drink coffee?"
OP: "Yes, about 4 cups a day."
re: "Stop drinking coffee and come back in a week and tell us how you are doing."
1 week later.
OP: "My anxiety is gone!!"
Caffeine has negative side effects. For some people those side effects are really bad.
Also caffeine messes up sleep cycles. After seeing sleep study results, I won't touch the stuff after 10am or so, if even that late.
Alcohol is even worse in this regard, it will just ruin your sleep cycles at night.
Edit: Let me emphasis this for anyone reading:
YOU WILL NOT GET DEEP SLEEP IF YOU HAVE A NIGHTCAP.
Yes, you will get drowsy, drink enough and you will pass out. The restorative quality of the sleep you get that night will NOT be good. I've seen first hand the sleep study results from this. The effect is so obvious that even the questionable sleep quality results that wrist based wearables give you can easily and consistently show this effect.
It's an important distinction to make in this discussion, which largely boils down to "off label use", whether we're talking about drinking simply too much coffee or people with developing brains getting too much thc.
Caffeine has negative side effects. It is an addictive psychoactive drug. Its effects are mild, but, to repeat, it is an addictive psychoactive drug.
Even moderate use can cause sever anxiety in some people. L-theanine is a great counter to this. Green tea naturally has L-theanine in it and that is likely why people who drink green tea do not report anxiety (at least in significant numbers) while coffee drinkers do.
FWIW Matcha has even more L-theanine that green tea.
From personal experience, it caused my medications to stop working.
Now that I did not know. Given that l-theanine is a natural constituent of green tea (though I don't know offhand in what amount) I figure there would be more mention of this! A casual search doesn't reveal much, and even examine.com (https://examine.com/supplements/theanine/research/#pharmacol...) doesn't have anything listed. Ugh.
Then again almost no one mentions that 5-HTP can cause horrible things to happen to your heart. :/
I just quit cold turkey three days ago and suffered through two days of horrible headaches. I don't want to ever get hooked again.
I think the most universal things everyone should be doing are: get more exercise, and get more sleep.
I wonder how people will look back on coffee hundreds of years from now. "Almost everyone used to constantly drink an addictive stimulant. Shops on every block sold it. People stated that they couldn't function (or even talk) in the morning until they had consumed the stimulant. At work, people needed to take constant stimulant breaks. If someone went a day without it, they often suffered debilitating headaches." It sounds like dystopian science fiction.
(To be clear, I'm not opposed to coffee. It's just one of those things that seems strange if you think about it from a distant perspective.)
https://livesandlegaciesblog.org/2017/05/24/coffee-a-revolut... https://blog.publicgoods.com/a-brief-history-of-coffee-in-am...
Check on the section on WW2, "An average of 20 pounds of coffee were consumed a year per adult. ... This amount was cut in half to 10 pounds a year, as one pound of coffee was allotted to each person over 15 years old every five weeks."
I hate what caffeine does to me, but I like the taste of black coffee.
I meant most people can do cocaine once, or at an infrequent irregular frequency without getting addicted to it and becoming dependent.
FWIW most means > 50%
Of course they're using quids, if they were injectors of pure cocaine the situation would be less rosy. But you didn't specify the route and concentration.
This isn't a gotcha, it's a habit of daily use by millions, all of whom are basically fine.
For cocaine and most "hard drugs" probably neither is true. For coffee it seems both are true. For alcohol 1 is true and 2 is tricky.
Follow-on question: have you had similar success in your relationships and personal life in the last 4 years?
I was a great student stoned, and a decent heads-down coworker. I became a detached boyfriend and family member and even more detached friend. I made my world smaller, so I could "focus" on work. My time on creative/non-passive hobbies fell to zero. I didn't lose friends but I didn't keep up with them.
I genuinely hope your experience has not been so asymmetrical.
My creative passions exploded. Personal design projects (3D printing, circuit board design, robotics, programming) all were off the charts high, as I reduced the number of hours I worked at my regular job to under 30 hours a week. It was the most productive hobby time of my life.
I think it makes a huge difference that I smoked relatively small amounts of pure sativa, and nothing else.
Biggest issue I think was how it affected my sleep. I would stay up late getting stoned and designing robots, going to sleep around 4 or 5am. I’d wake up at 12 or 1. Made it hard to visit my Dad for lunch since he lives a ways away. Now without weed I go to bed at midnight and wake up at 8. I like that! Much easier to make plans with my Dad and my new partner (who is GREAT).
Maybe the next four years are going to be the most successful four years of your career. Good luck!
I still struggle with motivational problems (ADHDish issues), but I think I've been lucky. I have friends that will probably never achieve anything meaningful in life and that is despite having had access to the best education available (private schools), parents that were MORE than okay, welp being privileged you know... Now some of them cannot stand normalcy (i.e.: working).
There is a world of difference between starting weed when you're 25 and smoking a little bit VS getting HIGH almost everyday from 13-15 onwards.
When we were young we convinced ourselves that weed was not dangerous at all...fools.
I'm about to be a dad, I'll make sure my kids know what's up.
That may be true for the majority of users, but the increase in people having significant negative reactions to high-dose THC is a real phenomenon.
This new era of extremely potent THC concentrates and other high-dose products has opened the door to some people using far more THC than previous generations could easily consume. Many of these high-dose users are discovering that the old narrative that weed isn’t “physically addictive” isn’t actually true and prolonged high-dose usage can produce significant physical and mental withdrawal effects. It won’t kill you like extreme alcohol withdrawal can, but the deep impulse to redose and inability to quit easily catches a lot of these high-dose users unprepared after they’ve been told that weed is harmless for so long.
Psychosis among high-dose users is also on the rise, though harder to pinpoint because the connection is very hard to make and quantify in studies. Again, this isn’t something people were taught to watch out for so you see some of these users believing that marijuana is a treatment for their psychosis rather than a cause and they spiral further and further until quitting.
The old street knowledge about marijuana’s biggest downside being laziness doesn’t really apply to people engaging in the more extreme doses and uses heavily processed and concentrated products.
For example: "The Immoral Design of Diablo Immortal" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o17lBUZgjTs
Also isn't the "video games rotting people's brain" complaint always laughed at in circles like HN? Is that really the parallel you want to make? Plus people generally only say that in relation to kids. I'm not advocating for kids (or anyone) to use pot. I am saying the personal productivity angle is a weak line of argument and is usually masking some other objection to pot since the same argument is not used in other discussions in which it is equally applicable.
Weed bros get real touchy when anybody suggests something bad about it. Inb4 "alcohol is worse". I'm still for legalization but people need to stop getting so defensive.
1. Putting people in prison for using it causes more harm than the actual usage of it does.
2. The threat of state force being used to strip people of their freedoms is not an effective deterrent. The war on drugs is an objective failure.
3. The war on drugs was nonsensical to begin with. You are legally free to drink bleach. You can legally drink yourself to death on alcohol. You can legally consume enough caffeine to give yourself a heart attack and die on the spot. You can legally smoke 100 packs of highly addictive and harmful cigarettes a day. But you can't legally consume cannabis, which remains a schedule 1 drug?
Legalisation is of utmost importance not because cannabis is good and we ought to encourage consumption, but because the alternative (criminalisation) is irrational, morally reprehensible, and a costly waste of taxpayer resources.
There is no good that comes from criminalisation, only more harm, more waste, and more people being stripped of basic human rights for no justifiable reason.
Again, it's not about wanting to encourage the sale of it, it's that the alternative (criminalisation) causes more harm than good.
To your point, I'm all for having a surgeon general's warning on cannabis products, restricting the sale to age 25+ (when the prefrontal cortex is much closer to finishing development), and other measures that may reduce harm, rather than increasing it.
Your framing of the situation is just remarkably wrong considering the entire legal history of marijuana in the US.
Circa 2005, a non-trivial percent of students sat in the back of lecture halls playing WoW during classes.
Games have gotten terrifyingly more addictive since then, though you don't hear so much about games ruining lives anymore in the news. Maybe it just isn't newsworthy anymore?
My experiences of marijuna is that it can loosen the societal conditioning on "productivity", and reveal the lack of purpose and meaning in one's life. It's liberating to realize the a lot of the conditioning don't matter as much as it seems.
It's at this point, that it's tempting to continue and just have fun. Here though, is the space in which one can discover one's purpose from within, with societal and external expectations muted. It's paradoxically that here, connecting with that purpose, brings life and joy outside of the mental states that marijuana can bring. When one makes conscious contact with that inner, unconditioned purpose, marijuna is something that is fun that one can occasionally enjoy, but not as a substitute for purposefully living.
Didn't China do almost exactly that?
But yeah, we should educate people so they notice if this happen due to view games, or Facebook too.
Definitely not the exact same kind of threat, since video games don't make you dumber like pot, but there is a real risk that a person substitutes accomplishing things in real life in favor of accomplishing things in a video game.
Your comment is kind of whataboutism. You're not really refuting what he's saying, just bringing up a separate topic
Using weed is a recreation activity. Most recreation activities will have a negative impact on your life if they are not done in moderation. I don't think that is necessarily a problem and the fact that this generally isn't discussed in other contexts might indicate that people are subconsciously using this an excuse when their true objections to weed originate somewhere else.
Weed may be unique in allowing such a constant level of intoxication with relatively mild side-effects. I think that's how it gets people. Such addiction is not that uncommon and I've watched legalization in Canada with a mix of appreciation (I still do believe it should be legally available) and apprehension (I think we're about to see a small but significant % of an entire generation end up in the same place I've been for the last ~10 years.)
Cannabinoid Hyperemesis Syndrome
Weed has non-acute negative effects on cognition for 7 hours to 3 weeks after use, dropping off most significantly after 72 hours of abstinence.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abst...
The real issue I'm having with it is that I'm using pretty much every night. I come from the gym, take a shower, and grab the vape pen and sit on the couch. It just makes me so lazy.
I stopped cooking and just eat pizza and ice cream nearly every night. Thankfully my weight hasn't taken a hit. But it creates this cycle of not cooking, so I don't buy groceries, so I can't cook, so I just order in.
I don't really know the best way to kick the habit or to reduce it. It seems like different things work for different people. Maybe it would help to pick one week to go no-cannabis and see if you can do it. Good luck with whatever strategy you decide to go with....
Sometimes that means quitting for one week, feeling good and going back. But it has helped me quit for good and so much happier in life.
I spent my whole 20s severely addicted to it without even realizing, and when I had to stop I felt like I was going crazy. Couldn't sleep, couldn't think, couldn't eat. It's really better to nip it in the bud.
That italic "if" reeks of a certain sort of sensitivity.
As someone who was in that exact situation previously in life - discovering new cooking techniques and finding small local grocers and ethnic food stores around me was eye opening. Local farms (or farmers markets if you're in a city) will have fresh, high quality nutritious products that you can work into ordinarily boring meals. Hell, even a BLT with locally butchered bacon, fresh lettuce and heirloom tomatoes is miles above anything you could get delivered or find at a chain store.
After that look into meal prep (doing bulk prep for multiple meals which saves loads of time), more ambitious recipes that require planning, and upgrading your kitchen tools and skills. Weed isn't that bad in the big picture, but going through life eating sub-par delivery food is no way to live.
I am starting to realize it's not laziness that's holding me back. It's full-blown burnout, stress, and anxiety. I have realized that I am actively avoiding doing anything to make my life better. Upon further inspection, I was doing this before I touched cannabis (about 1.5 years ago). If anything, cannabis just dulls my feelings down enough that I can keep my head above water while going to my dead-end and toxic job that I've been at for almost 6 years.
I know what I need to do and I cannot bring myself to do it. I am still trying to figure out why. Again, this existed prior to my cannabis usage too.
I don't feel "dopey and less intelligent" when I smoke weed at all times of the day. It actually has very little impact on me. But it does help me deal with my chronic anxiety issues.
I take breaks regularly. Sometimes I get into a place where I can't operate in my day to day life because of intrusive thoughts. When I smoke I'm able to break out of cycles of repetitive thought and make real progress in my life. I achieve so much more and get so much more out of life. I'm able to engage with the people in my life better and improve my relationships.
You speak with false authority on a matter you cannot possibly understand, because you do not share the life experience of myself or people like me. It's irresponsible and you should desist. If you have relevant experiences, share them and explain that this is your conclusion. If you don't have relevant experiences, don't include yourself in the conversation. Don't speak in generalizations about other people's lives.
Also agree that the op shouldn’t speak in generalizations around this.
if weed makes someone feel fulfilled, then they can farm a lot more feelings of fulfillment by using it than the old fashioned way of actually accomplishing things. I think trying to shame people away from it is silly. People who use it will very quickly realize it isnt bad, and then they dismiss everything they heard about it.
There is a monkey paw warning in that it wears off. It wears off in short and long terms; it is less effective the more you use it over time. So be aware that the spectrum for its effects is along the lines of "kind of cool for a little bit" to "everything you love slowly being ripped from your hands". the latter extreme probably being pretty rare and more applicable to heroin.
Otherwise you could make the same 'danger' argument about video games, porn, social media, reading books, painting, co-dependent relationships, etc. Anything that people use to dump their attention / time into rather than deal with anything uncomfortable in their life. The vessels people use are a matter of preference, and tangential to the underlying problem.
There is always an issue with trying to use 1 tool to fix every problem. obsession. Weed usage requires nuance and an understanding of what it is you are trying to accomplish with it. same as any other drug, same as any other tool.
Honestly, if someone wants to do nothing with their life than smoke weed.. who cares? I certainly dont. They might be one of the last people I offer any sort of charity to, but that's about me not them.
Other ubiquitous drugs like caffeine or alcohol are easier for me to balance because their drawbacks (dependence, hangovers, weight gain) are more obvious.
But cannabis doesn't have those to nearly the same extent, so it's easy to rationalize frequent use: on an average night without anything planned, it always sounds enjoyable without any downsides. But then frequent use eventually adds up and starts to cause small issues, like being a little lazier and having a slightly worse memory.
>And you just won't get as much out of your life as you could get, won't achieve as much relationship success, professional success, or personal fulfillment.
This applies to being 100 pounds overweight too.
Hell, it can be argued if you cut out beer and switch to cannabis your health will improve.
However, I've gotten stoned almost every night for the past ~15 years and I think it's been pretty positive. I actually get a low-level pleasant and productive anxiety to create shit. Like don't get me wrong I can get stoned and play a game or watch TV, but usually it just makes me want to go harder on something I'm working on and makes the work more fun. For certain types of work (writing product stuff, making music, css polish) I find it correlates with small creative bursts or insights. My current rule of thumb... only vape [0] in situations where I don't have to deal with strangers or kids (only at night these days). Like food, alcohol, coffee, being alone, or being social, moderation is key.
My point is just that it depends on the person and setting. It's not necessarily good or bad, more like a power tool for your mind. No panacea.
If you want to be a daily user, or already are, do try to still feel the need to do something when there's nothing to do and consume it responsibly. You probably will be fine health-wise but remember that doing-nothing-is-ok is not ok especially when it's become routine.
Is it a bad sign that I heard that in David Gilmour's and Richard Wright's voices?
That said, sometimes a little dab is enough to throw things off — fun story: I was practicing the Filipino Martial Arts and my teacher had a hit off a blunt some fellows practicing kinda-wushu in the same park were passing around. His ability to count out our drills went to hell, but in generally all other ways he was fine. It was very humorous at the time.
This feels sad to me, and sounds like another angle on the same issue raised above.
You should be able to enjoy/engage with culture while sober; I'd describe needing to be high to connect with art as a dependency and a problem.
Had a really large 3 day psychosis (including blabbering on Facebook for all to see), and ended up being locked into "involuntary mental health" ward in hospital for 2 weeks, 6 months of recovery with a nurse and 6 years of putting my life back together. Started smoking when I was 18 and had the breakdown just after 21st birthday.
I feel like weed did help me get me out of my shell at the start, but looking back now, I was in a bad place and what I needed was a bigger perspective on life. Being high and browsing the internet / playing games with friends helped that perspective, but it could've came gently.
Now I've got a degree, a good job, a wife and kid :) - not many people I knew from the era still talk to me though, me going nuts was the last impression they got.
It started after a period of habitual smoking and got progressively worse anytime I smoked. Mental health ward twice (once in a country where I didn't speak the language, but that's another story). Haven't had any problems since I cleaned up my lifestyle and fully ditched weed many years ago. These days I'm also happily married with kids (three), a house and a decent career.
You can form a bad relationship with literally anything. Social media, television, video games.
The smartest and most passionate developer I have ever known smoked weed literally every day.
There are many musicians who use marijuana regularly. They perform, practice, and achieve at a level I can only IMAGINE.
What you are really talking about here is something nefarious: Self medication. Personally, I self medicate because I have a very busy mind and I need something to slow my brain down at the end of the day.
Other people self medicate due to depression. This IS bad. It is a way to escape reality because you are unhappy.
Anecdote: I smoked weed in high school pretty frequently. Then, I left for college, was super busy, didn't have any money, so I didn't smoke weed for almost a decade.
Eventually I moved to a state that has legal weed, and I bought a joint, and I smoked it. And I found something: It wasn't just youthful rebellion, I enjoy being a little stoned! So now I do it occasionally.
I know it's an imperfect solution to myriad problems, but it helps me greatly,but I very much realize I am self medicating.
When I quit smoking weed it takes me about a year to get back to full 'normal'. But I'm also miserable. I can't sleep, I wake in the night in the middle of thoughts that are making me anxious or whatever. I eat too much, I have less energy. I simply become better at hiding my issues.
It is a pretty safe, minor, and not intense anxiety medication that I hear has a bit of a funky/fun edge to it.
I was gonna start on it next month to try it out.
I had a friend get a permanent twitch from it, too, but of the people that I know that take it (that I know of), those are the only bad side effects I've really heard of.
On top of that it can still be very physically addictive and hard to wean off of.
I do thank you greatly, I had been pretty excited to try it. I hope it works out for you, I just seem to catch nasty side effects.
May it work for you and your days be peaceful!
I'm taking this a bit out of context but this is the biggest benefit for me.
While sativa can make my mind rush with ideas, it also helps slow things down, especially if I'm learning something. It gives me the patience to do things at the right pace rather than try to rush to get results. This holds for things as varied as learning kubernetes (e.g. going back and forth between documents to make sure everything makes sense rather than only going forward even where there are bits that I don't fully grasp) or making sure I have the proper form during weight lifting (e.g. using lower weights when I notice a discomfort somewhere – I'm much more sensitive to these things while stoned – instead of powering through a too-high load and injuring myself, thus setting my progress back).
THC users like to downplay them.
This study implies that it's not really true: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1516648113#sec-5
>THC users like to downplay them.
What would you have us do then? There are minimum legal ages for using legal cannabis as well as alcohol and tobacco.
That doesn't stop teens from trying it out, nor has it ever done so.
Archaeologists have documented the use of mind altering substances by humans going back at least 8-10,000 years, and it's very likely that such usage goes back much, much farther (e.g., our distant ancestors getting drunk from eating fermenting fruit millions of years ago).
The issue isn't whether or not people should use mind alterng substances, we have done so and we will continue to do so.
The advice I gave to those in the younger generation of my family is that "we've been using mind altering substances pretty much forever. And most people handle it just fine. But if using such substances interferes with your goals and/or functioning as a person in society, there's likely a problem."
Which is why I believe all "drugs" should be legal, with purity and dosages regulated.
From an economic standpoint, it makes a lot of sense. We could spend a fraction of what we spend on "interdiction," "enforcement," incarceration and lost economic output (the result of incarceration and bias against those who have been incarcerated) on treatment programs for the tiny proportion of us for whom using mind altering substances keep us from functioning normally in society.
That makes much more sense to me. Trying to stop folks from doing stuff we've been doing since before we were us (humans), is a fool's errand.
Let's help those who have issues and leave everyone else the hell alone.
I also think we better get used to the consequences of an increasingly psychotic teen population.
I heard you say absolutely nothing of any semantic value, and certainly nothing that added to the conversation.
There is something to be said for turning off the part of the brain that worries about being productive all the time.
Claiming a few 4 hour blocks over the course of a week as your own time to "zone out" and do whatever activity you like is not a bad thing. For some people cannabis helps them get in that zone.
My problem with sleeping was trying to turn off my geek brain long enough to get to sleep and stay 5that way. Weed helps with that.
I also slightly doubt casual cocaine won't catch up with you eventually, might take years. Stimulants are generally work friendly anyway, see coffee/adderall.
Not for as long of a duration. Apples to oranges.
Saying that there are successful daily cannabis users and therefore chronic cannabis use doesn't have negative effects on one's brain, is similar to saying that you're holding a snowball and therefore global warming doesn't exist.
Yeah, exactly. Either way it proves nothing about a person or their life.
Interepting it that way just always casts judgement on the user.
That's not how that works. The existence of both successes and failures in weed users does not prevent a comparison of the rates of successes and failures between weed users and non-weed-users.
Making the above comparison and noting that successes per capita are lower in weed users of an otherwise identical demographic doesn't cast judgement on anyone.
A 100$/day habit for a wealthy person is nothing and, unlike cocaine, that addiction will not ramp up into a 1000$/day habit. But for the not-rich that 100$/day is devastating.
At least for the vast majority of casual users, this isn't anything remotely close to a $100/day habit. Common sense should inform us of that, even if we aren't intimately familiar with how much pot actually costs.
$5-10 a day is closer to the reality for most users.
In the past this might hold true but no longer.
That's pretty extreme, even for heavy smokers, but far from impossible.
And yeah, definitely not a sustainable or healthy habit...I'm ok now, but my career took a permanent hit. Oh well.
I realize I'm being pretty pedantic here, you're right that spend $100/day requires massive usage plus buying moderately expensive weed. But it's not, technically, impossible.
Who the duck is smoking that much in one day???? I don't know a single one of my massively addicted stoner friends who do even a third of that in a day...
But overwhelming personal observation indicates that in the vast majority of cases -- it blunts your game (and if you pick up the habit in your teenage years, and don't manage to put it behind you -- it can derail your chances at completing your education, or maintaining successful relationships entirely).
Again, not from the toxicity - but simply from what it does.
Only when her finance had a psychotic breakdown and tried to kill everyone from it did she finally get off of it. Was 2 months before he didn't sound like an anime villain who was going to take over the world.
She keeps commenting at much more energy and less depressed she is, how she isn't always irritated at everything. She had no idea it was affecting her like that. For us we have our sweet loving and caring daughter back.
https://www.brightquest.com/cannabis-induced-psychosis/psych....
Bottom line, he can never touch weed again. They can't be around people that do. They've lost most of their friends. Friends didn't agree about them giving up weed. They are starting to make new friends.
They are doing far better now.
You can give someone a hamburger and some people will abuse it til they are obese. It's a personality thing.
To me, the most alarming trend I see among people nowadays is cell phones - people are checking notifications all day like its crack.
As a general rule, I don't disagree, although there could be other important variables in place here as well.
An alternative outcome is that one spends their time thinking about intelligent and important things (that few other people think about), except they may not have an easy route to monetization (professional success) for various reasons that are not the fault of drugs, and in some cases arguably due to a lack of more widespread drug usage, or simple diversity in thinking and discussion.
It’s like anything else; confusing and obtuse then you learn to live with it
No one learns to code before writing bad code. Some of my best and simplest ideas came to me while high af simply because other routine daily thoughts were out of the way
Kindly stop peddling tropes from a place of ignorance and actually figure it out subjectively for yourself. Other peoples tolerances are not the same as yours. Like everything else it’s gradients, ranges, and distributions
Edit: my only non-typical stoner trope is I did not smoke until I was 27. I had life experience behind me. A non-trivial detail. I am 43 now
So, like being addicted to an Internet connected, social media infested smartphone?
PS Love your work on AutoTempest; the top ten lists I found with some clicking (maybe a partner thing) were really enjoyable.
And thanks, I definitely got lucky kind of accidentally finding a viable business niche with searchtempest and then autotempest, and building on that. It's a fun way to earn a living for sure.
I have given up smoking for long periods at several points in my life. Sometimes I filled the time productively, sometimes I filled it with TV, video games, the internet, etc. The modern world afford people many ways to be happy doing nothing, weed just happens to be one of several that are very good at the job.
But having said that, I know a lot of people who have lives I consider dull but never use cannabis. So it might be nothing to do with the drug at all. After all, I was still able to quit easily. It wasn't like a heroin addiction or something.
Anecdotally, I've known people who were prescribed pharmaceutical anti-anxiety meds and done far worse with that feeling of weightlessness and removal of stakes, like you're just wandering around in the Matrix until something bad happens like a car accident. I mean yes that happens on weed (again, anecdotally) but we have no controlled studies about it, and it absolutely should be studied.
So yes, valid point, but it's the tip of a much deeper iceberg.
Thanks for sharing your wisdom.
I could not have relationships or work at all without medicinal cannabis, and there is really no difference between it and recreational cannabis in terms of efficacy, as long as the strain matches somewhat closely.
Chicken vs. the Egg.
Perhaps many are drawn to cannabis due to the inability to achieve such goals due to whatever individual or societal issues/reasons one may have.
Yeah there's the general state of the world, economic precarity among families, the effects of social media, the education system and society in general deprioritizing developing resilience and coping skills as part of children's upbringings, etc. I'm sure they all contribute, but I have a hard time believing the weed is helping.
In most cultural practices that revolve around psychoactive substances it's typical to embed them in sort of a ritual context. Alcohol is pretty obvious, but even things like tea ceremonies or ritual practices around use of hallucinogens match. The modern "clinical" approach of just focusing on consuming the substance without any social or cultural thing around it is probably the wrong way to go about things. We do this with alcohol, for example, where we have some socially understood norms about healthy and unhealthy ways of using it, in particular not drinking alone as a habit.
I like bourbon and gin, but I don't drink both everyday.
As they say, "everything in moderation."
Like, why deal with life (which involves risk and rejection, and ick, work) when you can just blast trippy movies through your head all day? (Fun though these movies can be, for a while).
I don't. It's just an observation. That doesn't mean I care.
What I don't care about is [sic] "other people do or don’t want to deal with your version of life?"
Huh what facts were in your post?
What facts did you state during this debate? You just asserted your opinion that cannabis causes people to stop caring and only watch movies.
Can't exactly tell whether it was better before or now.
The danger is simply that you will like it, you'll end up using it every day, all different times of the day, and it won't really hurt your health as much as it will make you live your life in a somewhat dopey, detached, less-intelligent way. As time goes on it won't feel "fun" it'll just feel "normal". And you just won't get as much out of your life as you could get, won't achieve as much relationship success, professional success, or personal fulfillment.