Productivity and the Amputation of the Psychedelic Soul
Forward Escape by Android Jones
Silicon Valley folk have helped popularize a narrative that psychedelics, particularly when microdosed, can wildly enhance productivity. This claim appears true. The research backs it up. Not only does a microdose of psilocybin boost focus, it unlocks creativity, relinking previously dormant neural networks inside the brain. Microdosing seems to enhance cognitive function, activating both convergent and divergent thinking.
Neuroscientific terms like “divergent thinking” and “dormant neural networks” are techies’ not-so-secret kink. We get off on justifying our nibbles of the God Molecule as biohacking, performance-enhancing Science.
Next, add the “California sober” movement into the mix, where at a dinner party in San Francisco today, it’s far cooler to microdose LSD than drink an IPA, because beer will disrupt your ketosis cycle—obviously.
The same rationale applies to a tech exec who, instead of ‘crushing it’ on coffee and Adderall, now microdoses psilocybin, since it’s gentler on the nervous system, and far likelier to produce a 90+ Sleep Score on their Oura Ring, which tracks all their vitals, and Dr. Andrew Huberman recommended it.
Even legacy media institutions promote similar concepts about psychedelics—namely that they are for us to swallow like a pill, maybe with some therapy, and in return, we might get some symptom mitigation. These articles tend to showcase the risks, which must be clearly stated, but they offer little mention of the existential risk we face in maintaining the current status quo of mental health, climate, TikTok, literally everything.
Generally, I am one to celebrate all ‘Psychedelic Renaissance’ developments. In this case, there’s no such thing as bad press. I’d rather a person microdose fungi than snort D-Amphetamine and drink tequila, as I used to. Also, despite only having anecdotal evidence to support this, it’s likely that microdosing will prove an extremely effective method of preventing addiction relapse. The movement to legitimize psychedelics as data-driven, research-backed healing agents is surely the fastest avenue towards holistic cultural acceptance. We must first play the game if we want any hope of changing it.
But without a broader perspective on what psychedelics are, we are at risk of merely commoditizing them, which in turn will only perpetuate the same old broken, toxic, mechanistic paradigm.
We have been bred within a neo-liberal superstructure that tends to view all tools through a lens of productivity enhancement. Our consciousness is inextricably impacted by these economic and cultural features, all that imply that it’s your dharmic responsibility to make yourself a better worker bee—otherwise, you won’t possess intrinsic value.
In such a transactional world, it’s very hard, perhaps impossible, for us to resist looking at psychedelics as productivity tools. These compounds are now legitimized by Science as medicines that can give us a variety of quick fixes, from efficacy to mood.
But what if it’s the other way around?
What if these ancient plants and fungi are using us?
A Universal Birthright
For there is a wholly underreported perspective about psychedelics. It’s a song that our ancestors knew by heart and passed down for generations, as depicted in shamanic mushroom cave art found in every continent except Antarctica. It’s the same hymn about the psychedelic soma found in 120 of the Rig Vega’s 1,000 verses, the world’s oldest religious text. It’s the mysterious kykeon swallowed during Ancient Greece’s Eleusinian Mysteries, which Aristotle and Plato swore to be more profound than any other rite—the leading theories of which suggest they consumed either ergot (LSD), mushrooms, or a combination.
It’s a dance of connection and belonging stamped out by the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, then further silenced by colonizers who ravaged indigenous traditions.
In addition to helping harmonize inner conflict, and, yes, boost productivity—psychedelics awaken humans to the interconnectedness of all things.
Instead of feeling like a random, useless, and hopeless slice of chaos, a person begins to understand that they are inextricably linked to their fellow humans, the natural world, even the cosmos.
The ‘Ecodelic’ Insight
Since the dawn of the Axial Age, a war has been waged: Man vs. Nature. “Man” placed himself at the center of the universe, and anointed Reason at the center of man.
How terribly unhealthy that’s turned out to be.
One of the core gifts of psychedelic encounters is a far more balanced perspective on our hierarchy within the natural order. We do not sit atop the food chain in the way we once thought we did.
In Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noösphere, Richard Doyle, professor of English at Penn State University, writes:
“I have reviewed thousands of reports about psychedelic experience … and suggest that a signature of these varied and incessantly ineffable experiences has been what I call the ‘ecodelic’ insight: the sudden and absolute conviction that the psychonaut [journeyer] is involved in a densely interconnected ecosystem for which contemporary tactics of human identity are insufficient.”
In other words, the ecodelic insight is the moment a person realizes she is one node in an infinitely cosmic structure, one which has too long been confused and contorted by the West’s fetishization of the Individual. Yet, despite it being a hallmark of the psychedelic experience, this ecodelic insight is somehow drastically underreported in our digital age.
We hear more about the easy targets, the techies who use psychedelics to 10x their code output. It’s also true that some founders fly private jets down to the Sacred Valley in Peru, participate in one entheogenic ceremony, and become convinced they are the Messiah destined to revolutionize both web3—and monogamy, apparently—only further fueling their narcissism.
The algorithms certainly reward productivity thinkbois and New Age cock-shamans. But I can assure you, these are merely the edge cases that make a disproportionate amount of noise, metallic rattles bouncing within a hollow chamber. A much more frequent, old-fashioned heart-warmer that’s less likely to go viral:
Psychedelics—ayahuasca in particular—can and have caused entrepreneurs to pivot their focus to something more sustainable, change how wealthy people invest their money, inspire vegetarian eating, reduce consumption of intoxicants, and radically awaken climate awareness.
Some of the world’s most impactful climate activists found this calling during a psychedelic experience. There, they discovered that they are not separate from nature, but part of it, unavoidably participating in a symbiotic ecology of sunlight, plants, fungi, and animals.
In the midst of our 21st-century meta-crises, it might feel like we have taken several steps backward, but human culture is always evolving. Evolution looks more like an upward ascending spiral rather than a linear “up-and-to-the-right” graph found in pitch decks.
The meaning crisis we face today revolves around a divorced sense of identity and belonging. I often wax about how consumerism has replaced ritual, rites of passage, and community—robbing us of our purpose and home within the cosmos.
For a Manhattanite software engineer who has never met his neighbors, the Austin fitness bro who has never conversed with someone disabled, or the New England frat bro-turned-techie who never once stopped self-indulging (yours truly), the ecodelic insight can correct one’s existential predicament like no other.
An Agenda Greater Than Our Own
In his earlier books, Michael Pollan helped popularize the notion that we do not cultivate plants; rather, plants cultivate us. Tobacco originated in Central America and coffee was indigenous to Ethiopia before they took human consciousness by storm, colonizing the globe.
“It is only human arrogance, and the fact that the lives of plants unfold in what amounts to a much slower dimension of time, that keep us from appreciating their intelligence and consequent success. Plants dominate every terrestrial environment, composing ninety-nine per cent of the biomass on earth. By comparison, humans and all the other animals are, in the words of one plant neurobiologist, ‘just traces.’” —The Intelligent Plant by Michael Pollan
Make no mistake: plants and fungi influence human consciousness. Wars were fought over opium in China, the coffee drank in Paris’s cafes played a vital role in fueling the French Revolution, and LSD catalyzed the 1960s antiwar movement.
Today ayahuasca has been called Millennial LSD, which neatly symbolizes my cohort’s yearning to return to the soil, revivify the sacred, and reconnect with forgotten lineages.
Fungi are finding their rightful place in the zeitgeist as well. These mycelial beings are 2 billion years old, nearly half the age of Earth. We now have archeological evidence that suggests psilocybin mushrooms are 50 million years old.
What of us hairless apes? Estimates for Homo sapiens range from 70,000- to 200,000 years old.
From a cosmological lens, we are animals who were handed consciousness, like, yesterday—a power we are still learning to wield, behaving more like angsty teenagers than adult stewards of thought and opportunity. Hopefully, our Bar Mitzvah will be in a holy land instead of an air-conditioned yurt in Sedona.
So, if we may revisit the question: what do these plants and fungi want of us?
I see two possibilities. One dark, one bright.
Dark:
1) Conspiratorially, plants and fungi want us to spread them to every corner of the world. In so doing, they wish for us to annihilate ourselves, the entire human race, which will ultimately yield for them (the impeccable composters that they are) a few million years from now, the richest and most potent soil imaginable. Thus will the Great Plant & Fungi Kingdom rule the planet after we bumbling monkeys have made our graceless exit.
Bright:
2) Like patient parents, plants and fungi want us to take psychedelics so as to motivate us to restore the environment, re-connect with nature and the natural, and steal moments from our claustrophobic weeks to trip and dance and get lost in forests aplenty.
But trying to discern which possibility is more likely wouldn’t be productive.
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