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.
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It isn’t necessary to travel to the Amazon rainforest to be liberated from the madness of this capitalist civilization. It isn’t even necessary to take psychedelics. All it takes is rigorous self-examination and inner work, and a burning desire to perceive life as it really is. Devoutly and sincerely question all your beliefs about reality, right down to your most basic assumptions about the nature of fundamental aspects of your experience, like existence, self, other, perception, thought, and awareness. Find those gaping emotional wounds and maladaptive coping mechanisms within yourself, and with uncompromising self-honesty bring them into consciousness to be healed.
The article is well worth the read
Capitalism or more accurately Neoliberalism is only successful due to competitive free markets, which encourages the ruthless pursuit of wealth extraction and resource acquisition.
It is not possible to succeed in “capitalism” without harming others, as you are required to extract the labor or value from those who are disadvantaged in order to enrich oneself. So in other words you convince the working class through persuasion to give you more than you give them.
This by definition is mental illness. Mental illness being thoughts or behaviors that harms oneself or others.
The fact that this isn’t widely accepted will be what we look back on as barbarism, much like we look back at history and wonder how those of the past could live such ways.
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.
