eleweek

Psychedelics are usually known for many things: making people see cool fractal patterns, shaping 60s music culture, healing trauma. Neuroscientists use them to study the brain, ravers love to dance on them, shamans take them to communicate with spirits (or so they say). But psychedelics also help against one of...

Over the last two years I ran 20+ meetups, most with 40-90 people. I also attended a few dozen more. A typical meetup starts with a talk, followed by socialising: people mixing and mingling in loose circles. People really like the idea of talks — it’s great to have a...

I’ve gone through two big eras in my use of psychedelics. In the first, I tried two dozen different psychedelics without much direction. It was like holding a magnet up to an old CRT TV and watching the image glitch and warp. Lots of substances, but not that much substance....

There is a six-question test for ADHD that takes a minute to complete. If you score highly on it, you are likely to have ADHD and have a strong reason to talk to a psychiatrist about getting medication. It’s a low-effort way to surface a real problem for yourself —...

Every time I write about meditation, I am somewhat uncomfortable. Then these posts do well (e.g. Do Nothing meditation and Control is a Drug), and I get a bit more uncomfortable. Meditation isn’t an all-purpose feel-good technique. Originally it was invented by ascetic religious people to reach an unusual mental...

There are tribes in Australia that don’t use “left” and “right” in their speech, relying instead on cardinal directions — their equivalents of north/south/east/west. Members of these tribes are always aware of the direction they are facing. Instead of “shift left a bit,” someone might say “slide your cup north,”...

In the novella “The Suitcase” by nonconformist soviet writer Sergei Dovlatov I came across a dialogue that contains one of the most important writing hacks I know. The dialogue is between the mother of Dovlatov’s friend and Dovlatov himself. “You know, I've long wanted to write about Kolya. Something like...