The Psychology of Drugs
By: An Ordinary Guy
Tags: Philosophy, Drugs, Psychology

The reality of this world is that it is dull, somewhat boring, and ultimately void of purpose. Which is why it seems to be ingrained into human beings’ minds that they must have some purpose in this world, A reason why they exist, and ultimately why they must die. Maybe this is because we’re just too scared to face the music. Many people use religion or a lack thereof as what I perceive to be a “cop out”, in their search for some meaning behind all this, why we’re conscious and presumably nothing else is. But we’re getting off topic.

Many people indulge in alcohol and drugs and smoking as a way to “take the edge off”. To allow them to enjoy the present as much as they perceive their peers to be enjoying it, or because it lets them feel free from the shackles of a purpose that they feel they have to fulfill in their everyday lives. A cheat code if you will. A cheat code to happiness, another way to avoid facing reality.

Now, many people could make the argument that it’s because of the suppliers of these substances that they undertake in it, and if they did not supply them then they wouldn’t indulge in them either. Now, I say suppliers because back in ancient times when companies didn’t exist, people were still looking for a way out of the perceived to be repetitive way of life that they had. The most common example of this being the indulgence of entheogenic substances by priests and shamans as far back as 4000 BC, to induce states of dissociative trance. A further example, fly agaric, has been at the center of religious rituals in Central Asia for at least 4000 years. And our knowledge of this only extends so far back because that’s around the time Hippocrates started actually recording history, in written form. Humans have been around for around 300,000 years, so it’s impossible to know when exactly we started indulging, which at least in that time was for gaining a competitive advantage. Thus, it is very clear, the scope to which humans have used “drugs” in their history for their various intended purposes.

I recently watched a show called Westworld, another brilliant watch. In it, there’s a lot of talk about consciousness, creating it, destroying it, and what it truly means to be free. I believe that people need to start accepting reality for what it is, so that we can finally begin, as a collective, to make true breakthroughs, in science, philosophy, what have you. We need to stop being afraid, just think what our ancestors would think of us now. In my opinion, they’d be disgusted at our cowardice, and our “content ness” with the way things are.

Anyway, going back to the point about purpose, I feel that people also cling to the notion that there must be a purpose to their lives because they crave to conserve that uniqueness that is the thing that makes all humans special in their own way. And nowadays, anything and everything can and has been put into classes and “types”, even more so with the growth of the film industry, they have to come up with new character models in order to keep people interested, thus taking away more and more of what people may have thought made them ‘special’. Thus, leading more and more people to believe in conspiracy theories and what not, as well as take drugs and other substances as they get closer and closer to the realisation of how dull the world really is.