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Notes -
I have a lot of thoughts on the use of weed and other substances to manipulate mood, that have spiraled out into an effortpost I'm drafting now, but I want to interrogate this line of thinking separately.
What percentage of curious and open-minded 20 year olds do you think would look forward to their 30 year old selves and be terrified of their current form and asked for help to steer them off that path? If you think through your friends, do you notice correlations between substance use/abuse and regret?
When I look at my closest friends, the ones I can assess best over that time, the number where our 20 year old selves would have said "Wow, you fucked up bad" are pretty high. There are moments where I might put myself among them in some ways, though not in others (after all, I'm with the same woman and have the same best friend and I'm living up the street from the same house listening to the same college radio station on a Sunday night before we eat the same traditional family New Year's meal, it's tough to be too harsh).
Hell it hasn't even been ten years yet, and if I took half the 1Ls from my law school class and showed them what they were doing now, they'd jump off a bridge! And it spirals out from there: The people who have gotten fat who would have sworn they'd still be hot at 30, the people who have married the wrong person, the people who failed to marry the right person (occasionally spectacularly so!), the people who have failed professionally, the people who have succeeded professionally but in ways that their 20 year old selves would find hopelessly crass and boring, the people who still haven't found God, and the atheist 20 year olds who at 30 have found God.
They come in a million varieties, and some of those used drugs and some didn't, but I honestly fail to see much correlation in my own set. I'm curious if you feel yours is different.
I don't mean to accuse you of anything or psychoanalyze you, but part of me feels like you and I are Billy the Kid in Young Guns II. We used to shoot the shit at all night dorm-room bull sessions, philosophizing and theorizing. Some of our friends have moved on, they have lives and jobs or families, but we're still living intellectually rough by the gun out on the range. The world is ending and we shall finish the game.
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