279: Intoxication

This is the Monday Medley, a newsletter that goes out, you guessed it, every Monday. I republish it here for sharing and referencing, but if you'd like to sign up you can do so right here:

Happy Monday!

One small announcement, I added a bunch of videos to DeFi Orientation focused on DeFi on Solana. With Ethereum gas fees the way they are, this is a much better starting point for anyone who wants to experiment, and it turns out there's a pretty strong and growing DeFi ecosystem on Solana already!

Alright, on to the Medley.

Not Drinking

It's been a bit over three months since I decided to stop drinking. A few things I've noticed in that period:

It's way easier than I thought.

Obviously I was kinda worried about sticking with this commitment. Forever is a long time! But something about just removing the option has made it so much easier than past attempts at moderation. This was my thesis going into it, so it's nice to see that confirmed.

The social pressure is minimal.

Granted, I have a pretty healthy friend group and I wasn't really going out to bars much before anyway, but I really haven't felt much social pressure against this. If anything, people think it's cool and are curious about it. And I still go to bars and stuff on occassion, I just order sparkling water.

Holy shit my heart rate

I'll just let these graphs speak for themselves. Here's what my average resting heart rate looked like the weeks before I stopped:

And here's what it looks like now:

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And my HRV chart tells a similar story:

I didn't start doing more cardio or even working out that much more. This is pretty much all attributable to cutting out alcohol. Wild!

Recreational Intoxication

It feels like we're seeing a shift in what's normal or considered socially acceptable for intoxicants.

Once upon a time not too long ago it was primarily tobacco and alcohol. Now there's a stigma against tobacco, and a growing one against alcohol.

But other things are popping up in their place. I don't know that I've spoken with anyone recently who still believes there's anything bad about mushrooms or LSD. It's fantastic how quickly we've shifted the broader consensus around that.

Pot, too, got remarkably normal remarkably fast. I feel like even 5-10 years ago you wouldn't talk about it that publicly, but not saying you smoke pot is like "yeah, so?"

Ketamine is another interesting one starting to gain more prevalence. Compared to alcohol it appears to be a significantly less harmful drug that can give similar intoxication effects. And the remarkable thing with ketamine is how quickly & rapidly it wears off. Though I don't think we know much about the long-term casual use of it.

It's exciting to live in a time where we're realizing how bad the popular drugs of the last generation (alcohol and sugar primarily) are for us, and aiming to replace them with new things. We'll probably get a lot wrong too, but I can't help but think that the access we have to better information about our bodies via devices like Oura is helping drive better decision making with how we choose to enter altered states.

I wonder how quickly mushrooms will follow weed in being nationally legal. I can't imagine they're far behind.

Anyway, have a great week!

Nat