Just spent my tax return on a nice sack of stinky hydroponic nuggetry. :D
I love having lots of nug around because it allows me to chief like I want to. I never have enough money to consume the amount of nug I would like to consume (I choose not to grow my own for legality purposes, I draw the line at misdemeanor-level shenanigans these days). Budgeting out bud is probably the only thing in life that makes me feel like a damn slave or something, like WTF, its a plant and it should be worth pennies. But due to legal status, it worth half the price of gold (seriously, just about exactly half).
That shines interesting light on the psychology underlying economics, though: gold is a valuable material that has -literally- countless applications (electronics, catalysis, advanced materials, etc etc etc), and all weed does is get you high... there's clearly several orders of magnitude difference in the usefulness of gold versus cannabis. And yet human beings consider cannabis to be half the value of gold. :D Why? Because we're not fucking automatons driven only by the prospect of producing usable goods and services. At the end of the day, its not worth much if you can't lay back and relax. I think getting high in some way is important to many, if not most people; not just on cannabis, but psychoactive compounds and experiences in general, the specific drug or activity (e.g. meditation, yoga, "holotropic" woo woo etc) is actually not that important. If human beings don't have those unusual experiences to serve as juxtaposition to the daily grind, what the hell is life? What the hell are we?
Haha, anyways I'm just high on this really nice Trainwreck sativa and ranting. :D But I do think the persistent framework of interdependent tropes and memes that we term "western society" really has some peculiarly obvious omissions. Like any form of culture, which is ultimately a form of programming uploaded to the human biocomputer, it has blindspots that are taken for granted because they're built into the actual architecture of the program, and are not obvious in the same way as lower order executive processes. You could call them something like "meta processes", to signify that they are of higher order and serve to control the functionality of other, lower order processes that result in observable outcomes.
An interesting facet of human psychology is that its in some sense self-correcting. One can, and frequently does, analyze the usefulness and accuracy of their cultural programming when confronted with a disparate mode. Then, through contemplative functions like cognitive dissonance, the disparate mode is somehow incorporated into the functionality of the existing framework. This in itself is noteworthy. However, even more noteworthy is the fact that one can, with mindfulness, direct the incorporation of the disparate mode into existing processes in a way that actually
improves the overall functionality of the system.
If we could built computers that did that, I think we'd have to hang a banner that said "WE WELCOME OUR ROBOT OVERLORDS".