Say No to Microdosing!

This is the real drug abuse.

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Whenever my girlfriend and I walk around our local neighborhood, we would pass by this guy with bleach blonde hair, wearing a scarlet silk bathrobe and sipping on a Tim Horton’s coffee, and he always seems to be on some sort of important business call. My girlfriend used to volunteer at a mental health hospital and she would see him from time to time as an outpatient in the psychosis treatment center, suspecting that he has mild schizophrenia. On Saturday night, we walked by him again and he was still on that very same and very important business call, and I looked at her and wondered aloud if the doctors just taped on a screenprint of a call with Jeff Bezos onto a dead iPhone and handed it to him. These are the types of thoughts I have when I do ‘shrooms.

At some level, I imagine that a person would have to be a good hang to get invited to do ‘shrooms. I myself have been summoned to partake in such festivities a dozen or so times in my life, although a lot of those instances were a spontaneous decision to go with the flow as soon as someone whips out a bag of gold tops unprompted. As the saying goes: When life gives you drugs… do ‘em. Obviously, everyone involved in a magical trip is doing their best to make it an enjoyable experience, but the baseline level of grace and wonder to make that experience enjoyable is the same thing that makes a person fun to talk to at a party, or just wherever in general. As I have aged into semi-responsibility, my same ragtag crew of psilocybin enthusiasts are now encouraging me to microdose instead of ingesting an entire bag at once. Allegedly, microdosing will help me concentrate later in the day at my job.

What has happened to American society? This is why China is winning.

It’s a strange and slippery desire to do ‘shrooms and crank out spreadsheets and prep a PowerPoint presentation for a Monday morning meeting. This is the real drug abuse: Taking lovely substances and using them to maximize shareholder value. If anything, microdosing mushrooms is better suited to be a substitute for antidepressants.

Hallucinogenic trips are bewildering things in a bunch of ways, existential in the sense that I thought people were supposed to wander into a forest and scarf down their body weight in ‘shooms until they see God’s taint. On psychedelics, you learn that you don’t know anything, that true freedom is understanding how we’re all drifting in a sea of profound ignorance. That we live in a repressed terror over our imminent nonexistence, and this great absence shapes every event in our entire existence, and we can only discuss it through the discreet incidents that make up our daily lives, leaving us to distract each other through a black hole that can never really be reckoned with. Time is the only true equalizer and everything is a social construct. Instead, people are doing ‘shrooms to be slightly better at pivot tables.

The queasy spectacle of what is happening to magic mushrooms is another display of something too good and pure to survive in this capitalist hellscape now degraded into another commodity subject to enshittification. This wonderful drug was not put on this good green earth to help “founders” and dropship assholes excel at their standing desks at WeWork. Alan Watts once said about psychedelics, “If you get the message, hang up the phone.” These idiots will never get the message because they’ll never do enough ‘shrooms to see sounds—if they did, they’d also see that they sound like fucking dorks.

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