It only sounds silly to our modern sensibilities, which I am increasingly considering regressive on the specific question of "what is a life well-lived".
To a pre-modern society that considers e.g. dreams to be vehicles of important meaning, religiousity to be a good thing in measure, idle time to be a gift and introspection to be one of the major points of existence, it doesn't sound silly at all. It sounds wise.
I'm a scientist by training and an engineer by trade, but as an empiricist, I am forced to admit that my life has gotten better by making room for the irrational, superstitious, obliquely-associative, self-contradictory omginternets to exist. Make of that what you will ;)
Like exercise can make you feel fantastic, these experiences ground you in the reality of existence.
Social media selection bias at play. The real world results are very mixed, but usually don’t result in life changing benefits that you read about in selected stories.
There’s also an unhelpful bias toward purely positive stories on the internet. I had a friend get addicted (yes, addicted) to psychedelics who could not stop acquiring and dosing them on a weekly basis for years. It was a huge problem, but strangely when I mention this story people will rush to argue it, deny it, insist I’m lying, or try to downplay it with the old “psychological addiction isn’t physical addiction” gimmick.
My experiences seemed to benefit more from watching David Attenborough and feeling a connection to life.
I’d interpret the dad of a family of mountain lions as an analogue of my dad, etc. Seeing events as taking place in a dissociated context. All that introspection is what I found useful about Ketamine.
Yeah, sounds silly. But it made me a happier person. To my understanding and experience, these function more to temporarily remove neurological filters than really add much new (same with LSD, etc). Maybe that benefit is “subjective,” but what’s the difference to me, years later?