[dontparticipate]

> Tech can't stand "bad thoughts". > it's like they've all taken obscene quantities of some new stimulant and can't even connect with reality anymore

It's hallucinogens. That's the drug of choice in tech. What that leads to, other than the obvious hallucinations, is an obsession with set and setting. Bad vibes will literally give you a bad trip and ruin your high. I've seen this with wealthy shroom heads over and over again. Their entire life becomes centered around making sure the set and setting are always perfect, which means any little bit of someone trying to talk some sense in to them, they get ignored.

Once you start to think through the kinds of behaviors that shroom addicts would start to engage in, especially if they had the wealth and resources to facilitate their addiction, you'll see it everywhere. It's not the typical "ruin your life" kind of addiction, but it's having an impact on what kind of ideas are allowed among the SV venture types.

[__MatrixMan__]

I couldn't speak for silicon valley, but the personality changes you're describing as being associated with shrooms... those are not typical.

I have a few friends in psychedelic assisted therapy and the effects I've noticed in them are the same effects I've noticed with regular psychedelic use outside of therapy: you don't identify the bad vibes and shy away from them, you end up making decisions that are uncomfortable in the sort term to improve things in the long term. Myself, I started going to college.

Maybe it works differently among wealthy people.

If you're in a cult of positivity, adding psychedelics to the mix is more likely to make you acutely away of the inauthenticity of the situation.

[dontparticipate]

Psychedelic assisted therapy is so good an powerful precisely because it exploits the best case scenario of set and setting with the way the drug has an impact on your mind. I'm far from against psychedelic and have done the therapy myself.

However, if you're in a positivity cult, and don't realize you're in a cult, and don't have someone guiding you to consider you might be in a cult, the shrooms are just as likely to make the cult seem like the most profound and important experience in your entire life.

If you are a lead in a company, you suddenly have a profound spiritual experience based around your ability to hire and fire people and tell them what to do and can use the drug to convince yourself that the ideas you are coming up with are the most profound thoughts a person has ever had. You won't even realize you're shutting out good ideas, because you have a messianic belief in AI or crypto or whatever the thing is, and you take the shrooms to reinforce that belief and you create an environment around yourself and put people around you that reinforce that belief.

It's a very different experience than going to therapy to work through your fear or depression.

[JumpCrisscross]

> It's hallucinogens. That's the drug of choice in tech

To the degree Silicon Valley has a drug right now, it’s ketamine. (Before that, it was weed.)

[kasey_junk]

HGH and low dosage testosterone regimes seem popular as well.

[clusterhacks]

Seriously? That just seems ridiculous. Is this an aging thing, where folks are worried about low testosterone or something?