Life Gives You a Menu. Psychedelics Make You Ask Who Wrote It.
Welcome to the Psychedelic Blog. I write about the impact of Psychedelics on Grieving, Relationships, Culture & Death.
This Week: Psychedelics don’t give you a new life to choose from. They make you question who designed the options you thought were yours.
“We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.” — René Girard
Most of us go through life believing we are making free choices. Which career to pursue, who to date, where to live, how to live, what success should look like, how to make our lives meaningful.
But if you zoom out, life starts to look less like freedom & more like a menu. A limited set of culturally approved options placed in front of you from the beginning. Doctor, lawyer, founder, parent, world traveler, artist, wellness seeker, minimalist, high performer.
We argue over which item to order. Rarely do we ask who wrote the menu in the first place.
This is one of the most impactful effects Psychedelics can have on a person. Not mystical visions or cosmic downloads, but a moment of distance from the scripts that normally feel invisible. You start noticing something strange: how many of your desires were inherited.
The job you wanted because it impressed people. The relationship timeline that felt inevitable. The lifestyle that looked suspiciously similar to everyone else’s.
Sociologists have long pointed out that desire is socially mediated. Even agency is scaffolded. We learn what to want by watching what others seem to value.
But Psychedelics interrupt that imitation loop. The menu stops feeling inevitable. And once you see that the menu exists, a new question appears…one that can be surprisingly destabilizing: who decided these were the options?
The Menu of Modern Life
Career
From childhood we are handed a small set of respectable identities:
Doctor
Lawyer
Accountant
Founder
Consultant
Creative
Even rebellion has a lane now:
Entrepreneur
Creator
Nomad
Disruptor
Most of us aren’t choosing from infinite possibilities. We’re choosing from roles we’ve seen rewarded. Even when someone is “following their path,” it’s often a road well-traveled. For every trailblazer, there are countless more following the trail.
There’s a popular story of the person who does Ayahuasca once, quits their job, and moves to Bali to lead meditation circles. While I certainly don’t recommend that, there is something a mystical experience does to a person. I am not talking about microdosing Psilocybin here, but a full-on merger with cosmic consciousness. It can be difficult to return to the office after such an event. Lord knows it was for me. You begin to notice how many people sleepwalk through life.
But you also realize how many are grinding through an unenviable career to provide for their families. And there’s something beautiful about that. So just because the “career menu” is exposed for what it is to you doesn’t mean it’s a bad option for others.
Relationships
The script is just as clear:
Date
Move in
Marry
Buy a house
Have children
Or its modern variant:
Date casually
Prioritize independence
Travel endlessly
Delay commitment
Even our attempts to escape traditional structures follow predictable counter-scripts. We didn’t go off-menu; we just replaced it with a different one. We are the proverbial pendulum in a grandfather clock, swaying back & forth within a predetermined range.
There is no sanitizing the fact that some people do break up after working with Psychedelics. The illusion of the relationship is revealed. But countless others fall deeper in love. They connect in ways that would otherwise be impossible. They realize that the menu they chose from was perfect. And even if given an entirely different list of options, they wouldn’t change a thing.
Geography
Cities themselves function like identity containers:
New York for ambition
Los Angeles for reinvention
Austin for founders
Bali for spiritual entrepreneurs
Where we move often says as much about who we think we should become as it does about where we want to live. The fact that almost no one packs up their things and moves to Gabon tells you that most decisions are confined to a pre-set checklist.
Psychedelics influence where we want to live in a specific way: they shift what we value in our environments. Many people find themselves wanting to be around others who live more consciously, socialize differently & organize their lives around experiences rather than default cultural habits.
My relocation to Mexico was heavily influenced by a desire to be around interesting people living off the grid & doing unconventional things with their lives. I remember going to parties in Los Angeles where alcohol wasn’t even present — just Cannabis, Psilocybin & MDMA. The same was true in Austin. Over time, these value shifts shape movement patterns, and certain places begin to function as informal hotspots for Psychonauts.
Lifestyle
For years, this was the standard lifestyle script:
Golf on the weekends
Fantasy football drafts
Backyard BBQs
Scrolling the Netflix Top 10
Predictable routines arranged around work, consumption & passive entertainment. Then a new wave appeared:
Minimalism
Biohacking
Digital nomadism
High-performance optimization
Each promises freedom…a break from the old suburban template. But look closer & many of these are simply new aesthetic menus layered on top of the old ones:
Instead of golf, it’s cold plunges.
Instead of fantasy football, it’s tracking sleep scores & HRV.
Instead of Netflix, it’s productivity podcasts & morning routines.
Different symbols, same structure. A lifestyle still organized around trends, identities & cultural scripts…just updated for a generation that wants to feel more intentional about the choices they inherit.
Psychedelics don’t hand you a better lifestyle script…they show you that you’ve been living inside scripts at all. A lot of the modern trends around minimalism, biohacking & high-performance living are still rooted in optimization, signaling discipline & trying to engineer a more impressive version of yourself.
After certain Psychedelic experiences, the fixation on routines & upgrades can start to feel beside the point. People shift from performing intentionality to actually questioning whether the life they’ve built feels meaningful. Some walk away from entire social scenes, weekend patterns, or habits that once defined them. Others keep the same structures but relate to them with less psychological dependence. Either way, the biggest change isn’t swapping one aesthetic for another — it’s developing an awareness that the menu itself was never as fixed as it seemed.
Success
We like to think success is personal. But the scoreboard is surprisingly standardized.
I know one person who makes roughly $500k a year. By every conventional metric, they’re winning. But their life looks like this:
Zoom meetings all day.
Conferences in cities they’d never visit otherwise.
Airport lounges.
Shitty hotels.
Wears a lanyard (my worst nightmare).
They miss their kid’s soccer games because of quarterly meetings. Their partner slowly becomes more like a roommate. Their calendar is booked three weeks out.
They are considered successful.
I know another person making about $80k:
They live well below their means.
They control their schedule.
They meditate in the mornings.
They cook dinner most nights.
They designed their life instead of inheriting one.
Which one is successful?
The answer depends entirely on which scoreboard you’re using. And most people never realize they’re playing a game whose scoring system they didn’t choose.
Psychedelics do not automatically make people walk away from ambition or high-paying careers, but they often change how success is measured. The external scoreboard of titles, income & prestige can start to feel strangely arbitrary once you see how much of it was inherited rather than consciously chosen. Some people realize they were chasing status scripts that never actually matched what they wanted. Others return to the same goals with more intention because the pursuit now feels like a decision instead of momentum.
Time, relationships, inner peace & the ability to be present begin to compete with traditional markers of achievement. For many, there is also a destabilizing phase where motivation drops & the old metrics stop working before new ones form. The biggest shift is not that success disappears. It is that the scoring system becomes plural & winning starts to mean something different.
Meaning
Even meaning has categories now:
Therapy
Spirituality
Psychedelics
Breathwork
Meditation retreats
Each offers a framework for understanding your life. But frameworks can quietly become scripts too. Look no further than Ketamine skyrocketing in popularity - did people suddenly believe a dissociative was the key to solving their problems? Hardly. It was added to the menu by the state, culture & companies. And people complied. They ordered it off the menu when it became available & popular.
Psychedelics shift how people relate to meaning itself. Instead of outsourcing purpose to therapists, retreats, or neatly packaged spiritual systems, some come away with a more direct sense of connection or insight that feels harder to institutionalize. Certainty softens. People become more comfortable holding multiple explanations for their lives instead of locking into a single narrative about healing.
At the same time, Psychedelics can make you notice how quickly humans turn even inner work into identities, trends & protocols to follow. The impulse to consume meaning does not disappear, it just evolves. In many cases Psychedelics end up back on the menu as well, complete with hierarchies, branding & social signaling. The deeper shift is not adopting a new framework…it is learning to live with less conceptual certainty about what any framework can ultimately provide.
It’s very important to point out: some people genuinely enjoy living inside the menu. The world needs insurance salesmen. The mistake of the LinkedIn gurupreneur, other than being insufferable, is assuming everyone secretly wants what they want.
“I escaped the rat race and you can too!”
But some people love the rat race. They like having a boss. They enjoy the structure. Vying for the next promotion. The (utterly banal) water-cooler talk at the office. They value the stability of a direct deposit twice a month.
There’s nothing wrong with that.
I won’t make the same mistake they do. I don’t pretend to know what makes other people happy. I just know that most of us never even pause to ask the question: did I choose this…or was it simply on the menu?
In Sunday’s Insider: after a difficult Psychedelic journey in Mexico, I became convinced my life had been written before I lived it. I go deeper into the experience, the clarity that followed & why the past can suddenly feel inevitable. Upgrade to read the full piece.
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Unwind intentionally.
What a great read. I’m new to your page, but this deeply resonated.
I have come to the psychedelic doorstep carrying years of trauma from a toxic marriage, and processing grief over the death of that relationship. What I did not expect psychedelics to do was help dissolve the shame and guilt structures I had been living inside for so long. And honestly, it wasn’t until that began to happen that I could engage in deeper, more honest self-inquiry, outside the dogma, outside the conditioning, outside the inherited script.
Your perspective on societal defectors still being in a 'prewritten lane' was spot on and honestly made me laugh, because the human experience is tribal. We are wired for belonging. That tension is real.
This might be one of my favorite pieces of yours so far. The reflection on how many of our desires may be inherited, and how rarely we pause to ask whether we truly chose our lives or simply picked from what was already on the menu, is deeply thought-provoking. The menu metaphor really lands.
I really admire the way you structure your essays; there’s a narrative rhythm that quietly pulls the reader in.