This is just my experience and yours might be different, but I wanted to share nevertheless. During my freshman year of college, I began experimenting a fair amount with lsd and ketamine. I connected with these drugs in particular because they made me feel like I really had things figured out during the experience. Not just my personal stuff but the nature of reality of well. This feeling of clarity was so strong that I would usually trip around once a month to reset things. During this time, I didn't feel like I was overdoing it but in retrospect I probably was. Anyway, what I want to mention about the dark side isn't about frequency of use, but how life without psychedelics can feel anhedonic. I can no longer use psychedelics at all due to having psychosis, but to this day it's been impossible for me to capture the magic I felt during lsd and ketamine trips while sober. Since I felt so strongly like I had everything figured out during these experiences, and they really made me appreciate the little things, it caused sober life to become all the more dull. I know others have had an easier time integrating their insights into sober life but for me it's quite difficult without chemical aid. My point is that if you become too attached to the experinces like I did for a few years, sometimes it can be hard to recreate the same feelings without the substances. This has been my experience, maybe yours is different.
Hi I can relate to your story a lot. Same thing. Psychedelics and ketamine/MXE made me feel like I had become enlightened and gained some grand knowledge.
Later I would quit psychedelics due to health reasons also (ketamine bladder damage)
Even before I quit though I realized as I got older that they didn’t enlighten people or make them loving. Those were things within myself that could be tapped into without psychedelics. The interest in the nature of reality lead to a lot of training and career in science and the emotional aspect of the drugs was something I learned to tap into by doinng a sport I was very passionate about but also very dangerous and puts you in the most remote places on earth a human can get to.
That sense of danger and accomplishment left me with the same realizations about what is truly important in life like family and love…similar to how near death experiences and psychedelics did.
i posted a thread years ago to the effect of “can psychedelics make bad ppl good. Like if Hitler had dropped acid or Molly would he have done what he did”. The answer was no. I came to find ppl that did psychs that were still extremely evil cruel ppl. The drugs didn’t teach ppl to love.
There is no other class of drugs that has ever deceived me as badly as psychs. With all other drugs I quickly realized that it was wrong and bad for me. Psychedelics tricked me the most into thinking they were a positive force in my life.
In the end I learned nothing more about the nature of reality than my studies taught me…in fact when you see the uneducated use psychs they tend to become even more deluded) and nothing more about love than actually real love and being loved taught me. The drugs were simply just another meaningless escape like heroin or whatever and they destroyed me.
To address your point about your life being full of Anhedonia, I don’t quite have that issue because I have something else too lock forward too. That thing is what I referred to above about getting out in dangerous remote natural environments to do a very dangerous activity. It’s simply a passion maybe but the feeling of having accomplished something very difficult that people I go with often fail at while I succeed is the essence of competitive sport. You can do it in non athletic pursuits like doing art. Always looking forward to that next adventure while at the same time being scared of it.
Lastly finding true love does make life more tolerable.
But the feeling of loss of something that feels amazing which is drugs , including especially empathogens and dopaminergic psychs like lsd are working on the pleasure centers that the hard drugs work on, albeit by mimicking rather than releasing dopamine.
Many things are lost during life though. And life without any addictive drugs will be a fond memory. One day being physically able to do any travel or physical activity will.your love may die literally or figuratively and you have to move on to the next phase of life and the memories of your trips and anything worth a damn you think it taught you will have to be enough for you. Don’t you think you get enough of what it’s about if you’ve tripped enough? Continuing to re use them throughout the entire course of one’s life from young to old, for some ppl, will simply be a phase in life they’ve accepted they have to live with if they want to continue living.
