Sting Me Baby One More Time

Halfway down the rabbit hole of a recent psychedelic experience, I  encountered the fable of the Scorpion and the Frog. What I always thought was a simple morality tale suddenly took on new meaning as a powerful metaphor for my own contradictions and possibility of self-integration. Through this mystical experience, I have come to see […]

Continue Reading

The forgetting game

On daily walks, I often put on a Lex Fridman podcast or Sam Harris’s Making Sense. Both of these are long-form interviews, taking deep dives into the nature of human experience. But my guilty pleasure is a YouTube channel called Coming Home. These are stories from a wide range of people who recount their near-death […]

Continue Reading

Becoming unwound

The following is a stream of consciousness dictation during a recent psychedelic experience with friends. To protect their identities, I’ll call them Nick and Jacob. The paragraph formatting and punctuation (such as capitalizing ‘It’) were added for contextual clarity. I didn’t correct the changes in grammatical person.Stick with it and enjoy the ride. This is […]

Continue Reading

Radiohead

In 1960, counter-culture icon Timothy Leary went to Mexico and took psychedelic mushrooms, inspiring him to launch the Harvard Psilocybin Project. He and other psychologists believed these mind-altering substances offered access to higher states of consciousness, and a personal connection to the divine. Leary was profoundly changed by his psychedelic experiences and famously exhorted disaffected […]

Continue Reading

The nearness of you

Facebook friends. Instagram followers. Discord groups. We are building systems that help us optimize for separation. While claiming to further connectivity, these algorithms and their frameworks teach us to quantify our personal value by audience engagement versus through actual human affinity. They keep us hooked by gamifying social interaction, rewarding performative likability in place of […]

Continue Reading