Rugrats and Acid-Buffs: Predictions for the Psychedelic Renaissance

Ever played the game “Drunk or Child?” Simple rules: a friend tells an embarrassing story and you have to guess whether they were drunk or a kid when it happened. Well, if we had better memories of infancy, I bet we could play “Tripping or Baby.” 

On a recent Team Human podcast with guest, Duncan Trussell, Douglas Rushkoff and Trussell agreed that you never really come down from acid. That argument receives support from the phantasmagoric trails on objects and the undulating, breathing walls I see when I engage in open-eye meditation.

What’s happening here? To start, when you’re tripping, everything seems significant. While “hanging out with Lucy,” a friend of mine once wrote down “HELP EVERYTHING is in metaphor!” He had really just run out of space to do the whole thing in caps but, given he lacked the language to communicate this, I still spent a time-dilated mortal age staring at it, wondering what the hidden metaphor was in his choice of upper-case emphasis.

How does that relate?

When we’re babies, we gradually learn, in a process called habituation, to ignore signals from our sensory organs that don’t help us navigate the world effectively. As the linked paper describes, you often won’t notice a ticking clock unless you are actively looking for it. It isn’t important, so your brain just filters out the stimulus. 

As I point out in this TikTok essay about the Tarot, when you’re a baby, it’s sensory overload. You haven’t yet learned to distinguish between important information, like “mom’s smile” and the unimportant stuff that will fade to the background as you grow. The background is still picked up by your subconscious—for example a chaotically messy room will make you feel flustered, scattered, and anxious—but we eventually learn to stop giving it conscious attention.

In short, the process of graduating from baby to toddler involves an automatic process of gradually refining which inputs matter and which can be safely ignored.

I suspect trails and breathing are the same thing. Perhaps “trails” are a feature of the frame-rate of our ocular processing and “breathing” is the effect that our pulse has on our vision, for example. After all, those little dancing dots you sometimes see in a blue sky are actually white blood cells passing across your retina, why not conjecture that your pulse itself causes distortion in your visual field that you learn to ignore because solid, stationary objects are easier to navigate through?

So now that I’ve noticed these weird sensory phenomena during a trip where my body wasn’t ignoring any information provided to it—because everything was significant—I continue to see them when I calm myself down enough to pay attention. A little like having greater emotional acuity and sensitivity through developing a better vocabulary of emotion-related words. 

You never really come down from LSD because you’ve seen the world the way a baby does at an age when you’re old enough to remember the experience.

What Other After-Effects of Tripping Persist?

The infants and acid-heads I’ve encountered share some qualities in common. They are trusting, playfully curious and rapt by a felt sense of Thich Nhat Hanh’s “interbeing”. Hanging out in the filter bubbles I do (with fans of the aforementioned Douglas Rushkoff and Duncan Trussell), you get the sense there is a movement toward civilization adopting these values more generally. 

My reason for writing in the first place is to hand out little cups of water to the marathoners jogging down the road toward realizing that reality.

“Trust No One?” No Chance.

This reversal of X-Files dogma may not seem likely. Trust for your physical neighbors is at an all-time low, fueled in part by politically divisive social media algorithms and, before that, mainstream media stories of wolves in sheep’s clothing. Of pedophiles, serial killers, and mass shooters whose neighbors say in sensationalist, fear-mongering interviews, “He seemed so normal…”

But, at the same time, we are developing a child-like trust of strangers on the internet whom we feel share our values. 

Even me. 

I’ll admit to having cited Reddit comments to fortify my position in arguments in meatspace. 

The measure of an idea’s merit is often less “objective, verifiable truth” and more “display of decorum for the venue, an individual’s perceived ideological alignment with the speaker, and desire to believe something that feels good because it already aligns with the individual’s worldview.” 

Conspiracies spread because we don’t fact-check one another but if senses of playful curiosity and interbeing continue to become more prevalent, that implicit trust of strangers can actually be repurposed toward greater inclusivity.

Even Harmful Curiosity Can Be Playful

An uptick in playful curiosity is also evidenced by the proliferation of magical thinking demonstrated by the tin-foil hat community. 

Talking to the employees certain pizza places that don’t actually have basements, it’s hard to positively recontextualize the tangible danger of the belief that satanic pedophiles rule the world, sure. But the often playful, collaborative fan-fiction that is written about reality in smoke-filled imageboards is evidence that people are increasingly open to exploring the world from the perspective that anything might be possible. 

When playful curiosity is applied to the decisions you make while moving through life, you are more likely to push yourself toward challenges, rebound from mistakes and learn, learn, learn. When it’s adopted more generally by society, novel ideas will emerge for combatting the systemic problems that underlie almost every issue progressives care about. 

Applying the lens of personal responsibility is unimaginative in a society obsessed with hero-worship and villain scape-goating. We need curiosity to expose the real foundational issues.

Let’s take a few random examples.

Both “ACAB” and the response “it’s only a few bad apples” ignore the systemic issues with training and recruitment that engender a culture of police violence. 

“Use a metal straw” is insulting, misleading advice to someone who cares about pollution when corporations’ incentives to pollute and produce single-use packaging outweigh their squishy moral concerns.

Even ideas I’m completely and totally aligned with like “make the billionaires pay their fair share of taxes,” serve to Other the rich, assigning individual responsibility to them for inequality when a fairer, more accurate explanation is that a growth-based economy fraught with compulsory (by nature of the requirements of competition and responsibility to shareholders) regulatory capture and corruptive distribution of power. That’s essentially the mechanism that currently fuels the Pareto 80/20 Principle—an apparent law of nature that seems to inevitably produce individuals with outsized wallets.

What solutions could we uncover by being curious enough to zoom out from the gears and cogs and tweak the settings on the extractive, exploitative, degrading machine churning out depressed and anxious consumers instead of happy and spiritually fulfilled agents of self-determination?

Believe in Interbeing

The felt sense of interbeing—that we are all Nodes in Indra’s Net—that my own echochamber comrades experience is the one childlike quality that can’t be painted in a negative light, and if it continues to grow, the other two are likely to flip their framing and yield the positive, hopeful outcomes described above.

Sam Harris says in his work on secular meditation, Waking Up, that a youthful trip on the psychedelic drug MDMA was his first introduction to unconditional love for all beings. Paraphrasing, he says that he realized he loved his trip-mate profoundly and had the hunch that if any other person walked through the door, he’d feel the same way about them.

Psychedelic voyagers experience this overwhelming love because the boundaries between so-called individuals are revealed as illusions by the experience of tripping. When everything is significant, it becomes clear that your trip-mates are important, subjective wholes. It becomes inescapable that their perspective is just as valid and worthwhile as your own. 

It becomes obvious that they act as the cause to your effect, which turns around and becomes their cause in a phenomenon WestWorld describes as a kind of interdependent, algorithmic “loop.”

Long Term Effects

What changes to society would there be if we felt that Interbeing viscerally—if we each recognized that our existence is literally without meaning in the absence of Others who can help us create it collaboratively? What kind of economic system might we lean toward building if we recognized that value is created socially, not by the owners of capital? 

Playful curiosity will help us discover the answers, and an expanded sense of trust will ensure that they thrive. 
You may never “come down” from acid, but the rest of the world might just come up.