I saw a fascinating tweet by BloomTech CEO Austen Allred the other day that stirred up a lot of thoughts here.
“Of the Silicon Valley founders I know who went on some of the psychedelic self-discovery trips, almost 100% quit their jobs as CEO within a year,” Allred said, adding, “Could be random anecdotes, but be careful with that stuff.”
Allred tweeted this in response to writer Ashlee Vance sharing that he’d been told by a venture capitalist, “We’ve lost several really good founders to ayahuasca. They came back and just didn’t care about much anymore.”
There’s some very useful information in those words. They reveal a lot about the insane mess our species finds itself in in today’s world, and provide insight into how we might find our way out.
I think that the ‘mental illness’ epidemic in the broader population is a consequence of it becoming apparent that we’ve built our values and culture on a sham and we’ve gone so far down the road with it that it’s impossible to find our way back. People dont believe the story any more but haven’t yet found another one which is more convincing. I think its a sort of mass nihilism.