L.ove S.ex D.reams - A short piece on psychedelic thoughts

Meaning.

What does it mean what does it all mean what does all this mean

What is the meaning of life?

What’s the point? Whats the purpose why are we here to do things and then leave?

Acid fills us with questions that are too big and we scurry around asking why why why. We’ve figured it out by now, have we not? Why this endless loop of wake up and think things and then go back to sleep. We’re like robots that haven’t been updated yet. Someone is still tinkering with us. We try to understand what we’re doing but we don’t know and they haven’t figured it out yet either. It all comes up slowly and without tunnel vision. There is no end goal.

But there has to be. People know, but it can’t be revealed.

History is a beautiful thing. Wow. Guns and planes and coloured television and automobiles and ayahuasca and tea and writing words formed from hieroglyphs. Hiroshima, cold war, vietman, keep the americans happy!

They know. They already know.

Psychedelics were first bought up in American culture through LIFE magazine where an issue mentioned a businessman with a terminal illness consulting (what they called mushroom tribes??) a shaman to receive a magic mushroom treatment.

A substance like that has to mean something. It can’t simply just be the brain releasing chemicals; the brain gets something out of it. If humans weren’t supposed to have a purpose then why are our brains so complicated? How can neurons and atoms possibly create something so complex on their own considering how long humans have been on this earth (which isn’t very long).

My mind just switched off for a sec. It’s like the acid wasn’t there and I was back to normal. Like a switch. Ego came back and I remembered where I am.

Did someone else do that?

I wonder about mirrors a lot.

Why do humans want everything to mean something so bad. We crave purpose. We want everything to mean so much more than just being and doing and enjoying.

I’m getting distracted again. I can’t think on a clear path like I was. I’m being pushed back to the normal. I think a lot about science. How amazing are the chances of my birth. Me being the winning sperm and egg out of thousands. Where do all those organisms go when they die? Isn’t there some rule in science where you can’t create nor destroy matter?

The conversation of reincarnation makes sense then. I often feel like I’ve been here before.

I was talking about the US government, that’s where I was. LSD became banned and the whole counterculture was crushed because it threatened American life and scared the older generations, but psychedelics have been around for ages and have been used in various religions (especially South America).

If god was real, why would he put such a powerful plant on this planet? Maybe the plants that psychedelics come from are seen as like the forbidden fruit from Adam and Eve. And when we eat them maybe people believe that is hell. What does it all mean? Maybe that’s our hell – not knowing but constantly asking, never getting any closer.

There is definitely something else out there. We know we’re responsible for a lot of the actions on earth right now but we also know that we’re weak and frail and stupid. Climate change is our punishment for being bad dogs. We try so hard to impress our owner but we just don’t know how to fetch or roll over. We try though, we do. We think we’re doing it right until it comes back to us.

People watch us through mirrors. I take mine off the wall at night because I don’t feel at ease to let down my guard when its looming over me, my view exposed. Culture has commonly thought that mirrors are portals, often to people on the other side.

What if heaven and hell is so much deeper than that? What if this is just one level?

This is a side, and the portal is the other side. People don’t die, they leave.

It’s thought that what’s through the mirror is evil, but isn’t our dimension evil enough.

It has to mean something, we wouldn’t come up with this shit for nothing. Why the fuck else would we make physics and drugs and buildings and science? What, are we just uselessly churning around stuff, spending our lives building these things to make us feel righteous? Is it just stuff? Does it mean nothing? What if it’s all wrong and we’re just building up our society on more and more usless shit and its all wrong and the mound of flesh and feces just keeps stacking and oozing over the sides and we try to bottle it up and it just keeps coming because we don’t change.

If god hated this planet so much why wouldn’t he just crush it? Maybe he wants us to feel in control when we finally bring this planet down. Maybe that’s worse than him curhsing us and us not being able to do anything about it. It’s knowing that if we’re in control, we die slowly knowing that we did this. We did all of this.

I feel calm again. It’s easier to not be a part of it now. To separate myself. Things don’t actually mean much. They’re just to look at, to make us feel useful for keeping them.

I keep leaving this on an open ending.

A Week Without Instagram

A Sunday night. I'm face-down on the bed, a bit of alcohol in me, feeling downright miserable. It wasn't a particular event or a person. I hadn't had an angry phone call from my boss, or failed a uni assessment, or even spilt a $7 coffee on myself. I was just... a blob. I just felt like I wasn't achieving anything. It was uni break and I had friends laughing over misty apricot skies in Singapore and the Himalayas and Dubai. The popular girl from my high school had just started a lash tech business and received a PR deal for a popular festival brand. A vague list of other model girls in my area were now getting real full-time jobs and going away with their partners.
I had spent the last 4 days at home watching Netflix. My self-esteem was just soaring, thanks guys.

But who's to blame here? It's not anyones fault for living a good life, is it? After all, I know that when I have a new achievement or cool outfit or travel somewhere new, I'll definitely be having my community of friends and followers knowing about it. Why is it so different when someone else is doing good for themselves? With our society becoming increasingly accustomed to social media, its becoming harder for us to realise we're looking through someone else's rose-coloured glasses. I decided I wanted to live life without filters for a bit, and deleted Instagram.


When deciding to take time apart from my good friend Instagram, I didn't leave a "I'm on a mental health break, call me if you need me", I went cold-turkey. Within the first hour of deleting the app, I found myself aimlessly scrolling back and forth through the home screen of my phone trying to find ... oh, that's right... Instagram. It wasn't even a purposeful need to utilise the app. It was unconscious. I've often found that I like to use Instagram when I'm thinking, perhaps to avoid just sitting there, like scrolling a photo platform really makes thinking more concise and worthwhile.

The official first day of the cleanse, Monday, already showed some sort of improvement. I had left the house; I'd bought some christmas gifts and grabbed lunch with my cousin. Two birds one stone. Once I got home I started sewing again. Sewing! Something I had been putting off for months. I wrote an article. I was regaining some sense of self. Originally deleting Instagram was just a spur of the moment action so I wasn't feeling worse about myself, but it was doing more than that, so I kept going. I decided I'd give myself a full week without the app. All the way to Sunday night at 9pm, I would be semi-offline. I still had my other two favourites Facebook and Snapchat, but I knew Instagram was my biggest weakness.

By Wednesday I personally found the magic of no Instagram wearing off. Like the Internet junkie I was, withdrawals were now taking place. I felt that I was starting to spend more time on Facebook and Snapchat and even Depop to make up for the void in my mind and home screen. I was feeling a little bit bored with being disconnected, even though it was doing so much for me. This appeared like a step in the wrong direction; was I really that dependant on an app? This helped me realise the positive perspective of Instagram in a sense that it was a useful resource for inspiration. I often got style cues, cute little quotes and holiday ideas from the platform. The shift off of the platform just left me a little bit drained of stimulus, but all things must be taken in moderation. Perhaps the key to this was balancing. Like Pavlov, perhaps I needed to work at this from the angle of training myself to have some self-control and use the app in mild doses, not overdosing.

The weekend came along and I had moved past the cravings to normalise my life without Instagram. No, I had not turned into some productive monster eating up ideas and chugging out work and I wasn't "cured" of anything, but I did feel different in a way. I felt purposeful, and truthful to myself and what I wanted to do. I didn't have to kid myself, and it didn't matter what other people were doing differently. By Sunday night I didn't even feel the need to have it back. In fact, I even waited until midday Monday to re-download the app, and well, life didn't feel any different. My energy was still there.


Screen Time Summary

My screen time before the experiment is slightly embarrassing now that I look back on it. To be completely fair, I have been on holidays which has given me too much time to endulge. I was averaging 6hrs of screentime a day. I ended the experiment averaging 4.5 hours. It's been almost a month since my experiment now, and I've still managed to keep my time down from its original average. 


Outsider Opinion
Like I said, I removed the app from my phone without telling anyone - and I decided that this circumstance would extend to even my closest friends who I talk to almost everyday. Although I wasn't always evidently online on the platform, most of them I tagged in memes pretty frequently and vice versa. I told my 3 closest friends, and this was the response.
Friend 1: Found it weird I hadn't replied to their memes, but just thought I was busy.
Friend 2: Did not notice at all.
Friend 3: I found out this friend finished a mental health break from Instagram halfway through my experiment. She agreed with me that deleting the app definitely made a difference to mood and self esteem. Didn't notice I was offline.


It's kind of funny, isn't it? We're inhibiting our own growth and productivity to awe at other people's perceived productivity over the internet. Although at the same time it can be a queue for inspiration and our creative movements. From the subject of comparing the lives on Instagram, I've come to the conclusion that the less we know about a person, the more likely we are to take the fabricated story of their life on Instagram and other social media platforms more literally. All of us have our glorious fairy-tale experiences, but we also all have those shitty days where we don't leave the bed and live off of 2-minute noodles. Everything is in moderation, even social media.