The Grasshopper #1: Rewiring
Recipes for change. Each issue will feature three perspectives on a topic, a motivational piece, a practical piece, and a different piece.
The Ant and the Grasshopper: Aesop gives a stern lecture
For those who are not familiar with Aesop’s Tales, they are a set of fables written by an ancient Greek that illustrate basic life lessons. In The Ant and the Grasshopper, it is a beautiful summer day, but the ant isn’t relaxing, he is working to store food away for the winter. The grasshopper, on the other hand, is blissfully basking in the sun on a tall piece of grass and and giving the ant a hard time about working on such a nice summer’s day.
You can see where this is going. The grasshopper will live for today until the winter comes and he finds himself dying from having saved no food and built no protection. The ant will sit in his cozy anthill with his store of food, ready to greet another spring.
It's the ultimate ‘I told you so’ story. But nobody likes those kinds of stories, not me anyway. So, foolish as he is, I have always identified with the grasshopper, a dapper fellow capable of great leaps and monumental indifference to the practical aspects of life. A ‘live for today for tomorrow you may die’ approach.
Until recently.
My career as a grasshopper consisted of making change whenever boredom set in. I wrote how-to books until it got boring. I played original music until I was no longer feeling the passion. I took on software marketing jobs because they presented an interesting challenge with constantly changing technology. The money was good too.
But I stuck to early revenue positive growth companies that were more limber and less stringent in how they did things. Grasshopper companies. But when they started to reach a more mature state, typically followed by an acquisition, I moved on.
But, as I found myself older, my inner ant showed his influence. I started wanting to get further in with things, including my writing. For this to happen I needed to build a base of readers and revenue to support my desire to write about things that interested me.
I started writing for Medium.com around three years ago after contributing the occasional piece, but not even checking them to see if anyone had read them. They initiated their Partner Program which meant that writers could get paid from a pool of subscriber money, based on total read time from paid Medium members.
This caught my interest and I started publishing a lot more articles, watching my stats, experimenting with topics, voice, and other variables in a quest to turn that platform into a source of income based on writing what interested me.
I became a sort of hybrid of the ant and the grasshopper. The ant in me started writing on a daily schedule and publishing on the same daily schedule. He started to identify the kind of writing readers responded to and my followers started to grow, along with read time and revenue. It became a semi-viable side hustle, a term I have come to hate as it implies some sort of thing you do strictly for a buck.
You know, a get-rich quick gimmick. My inner ant preferred a get-rich slow approach.
Three years and six hundred articles later I found some subject niches that readers respond to, including politics, current events, and climate, all pretty topical and serious stuff. And the money improved, but for that grasshopper self, it wasn’t enough.
I want my cake and eat it too.
But my reputation on Medium is now tied to those ‘serious’ stories and they are important work to me. But grasshopper me wants to play a little more, to look into the mirror of creativity to see the world from a different angle.
And that, of course, is why I am here. To take my readers on a great leap from one tall grass seed head to another, across a great golden field, just to see what we can see. And to enjoy every minute of the glorious flight.
Compromise is Not a Dirty Word
Uncompromising can also mean inflexible.
Change is a core theme of this newsletter because the only reliable thing in this lifetime is that everything changes constantly. But there is a meme in the creative world that says we must adhere to our vision in the face of temptation. For me, this is an extremely limiting way of getting through the world.
When my first novel started to gain momentum something strange started happening. My characters started doing stuff on their own. They responded to events that progressively got stranger and stranger and, as the writer, I got to the point where I really did not know where it was going. But it was fascinating and I decided to go along for the ride.
But I am analytical, in part because of my background in digital marketing, where we studied the effects of our actions to constantly tweak them to be more successful. They say data doesn’t lie, which is not entirely true because data can reveal things that do not fit your original thesis. So even in data analysis, you have to go with the flow sometimes.
So, I decided to do a little research about my novel’s mind of its own to find out how often it happens to my favorite writers. So, I looked for process interviews from authors like Michael Ondaatje, Haruki Murakami, Ruth Ozeki, and others. How many of the events and characters in their novels were planned and how many just followed the story wherever it wanted to go.
I discovered that all of these highly creative and original writers did not plot, did not do character studies, and did not try to push the story in one direction. In fact, and this was surprising, all of them started with little more than an image or a scene. They were all ‘pantsers’, writers who write from the seat of their pants, as opposed to ‘plotters’ who carefully plan their plots, characters and beginnings and ending.
Most plotters write procedural novels like crime, thrillers, and mysteries that require a defined structure to work. I don’t happen to be drawn to these kinds of writing with their game-like approach. I am interested in the mysterious and the unexpected because, in my experience, those are the most interesting things in life.
I’m a pantser through and through in my fiction. This discovery opened up a different world as a writer from the formalized structures required by most non-fiction, which had been my primary type of writing. It required a big switch in my mindset when I started writing fiction and, until I made that switch, after my research to understand this difference, I had been unable to let the story tell itself.
This ability to go with the flow means you must compromise your beliefs about how things are supposed to be. That means that to be truly creative you have to drop assumptions and go with the flow when it is happening. It’s a great feeling when it’s working.
Contemplating Psychedelics at 64: A sample of my writing
This piece originally appeared on Medium.com in 2019.
Trigger warning: At the time of this writing, and for the foreseeable future, psilocybin and LSD are illegal in the US. This is a personal story and should not be taken as advice.
It’s a mild, rainy, and lushly green day here in my northeastern city. I’ve been musing about friendship, writing, and psychedelics. I realize that’s an odd thing, but the mind flits from subject to subject and we either follow it or try to rein it in with meditation or some concentrated activity, like writing. That may be why I’m writing this piece this morning.
I don’t keep a journal. It may work for others but I already write so much that storing my thoughts in one just seems superfluous. Between my work and writing for myself, including the novel I’m working on, it’s not unusual for me to write thousands of words daily. For the last few months I’ve been experimenting with writing frequently here on Medium, and that has upped the daily word count considerably. I think it is improving my writing.
I live a flat life and I’m starting to feel a need to break with that. At 64, I’m older than most Medium contributors, but I work in tech and lead a different work life than most of my peers. The flatness comes from a daily regimen that is predictable, and that predictability is wearing me out. At the same time I don’t experience a lot of the angst I see people writing about. I’d like to believe that my meditation practice, and experience, have made me less susceptible to creating drama out of day to day things. But maybe I need a little drama.
Ever since I read Michael Pollan’s book How To Change Your Mind, about the current wave of psychedelic research and experimentation, something has been nagging at me. Pollan theorizes that while most people experience psychedelics during adolescence (today adolescence can extend into your twenties, a demographic shift that some ascribe to overexposure to screens and overprotective parents), older people would probably benefit more from the experience. The reasoning is that when we’re developing we tend to seek out peak experiences and we have more of them. We’re learning from this experimentation in many areas of our life, including sex, intimacy, work, goals, relationships, etc. Tripping was one peak experience among many.
Fast forward to my age and that flat life. Pollan thinks the rewiring of the brain that seems to occur with a psychedelic experience would be more life-changing for a person my age who has settled into life and, dare I say, become complacent (horrors!). This makes sense to me on a logical level. But what about on an experiential level? I’m about to find out.
The last time I tripped was 40 years ago. I was 24 and did mushrooms with an ex-girlfriend because we had them stashed away in the kitchen of the home we shared. When we went our separate ways we decided to seal the deal by taking them. Either that or we were just bored. It was a mild experience, totally unlike the bombastic LSD experiences I had as a teenager, including witnessing a deadly motorcycle accident and having to give the police a report while stoned as hell (true story). But I digress.
After those teenage years I lost interest in drugs, mostly because they started to feel repetitive and boring. I was not self-destructive, mostly because I did not have a traumatic childhood. Those friends of mine who did, often went down a road of self-destruction. Most of them are dead, homeless, or have disappeared. That’s why I think it is really important that any discussion of psychedelics include a warning to those with damage. Don’t try these things without professional help. They open up doors you may not want opened.
Fast forward to the present and Pollan’s book. Recently, the city of Denver voted to essentially decriminalize psilocybin. Oakland soon followed. Pollan has an op-ed in the New York Times that sounds a cautionary note but he can’t bring himself to be totally negative because his own experiences, detailed in his book, were so positive.
I coincidentally ran into a friend with access to psilocybin, around the time I was reading the book, and I acquired some dried shrooms. I am going to take some with another friend. We’re just waiting for the right place and time, as the setting is very important.
Microdosing was interesting
After I wrote this I decided to try a microdose of the dust in the little bag of dried mushrooms. I don’t have a scale accurate enough to measure a fraction of a gram, so I guesstimated, ate a little, and went off to meet a friend for dinner and a drink. I thought I might be feeling a little different but realized it could easily be my imagination or a placebo effect. The stuff is supposed to suppress your appetite in larger doses but it had no such effect and my dinner was delicious. We had a big jazz festival going on all week here and I had a pass so I went to see a concert by a Scandinavian jazz guitarist in a big old church.
This proved to be the test. I found myself admiring the elaborate stonework and stained glass while the music washed over me. No hallucinations, just a sense of heightened awareness and a dropping off of analysis. I was a professional musician for twenty years so I don’t really have an open mind for music anymore- I’m typically thinking about how they are doing things. That tendency to analyse had stopped and I felt the pure enjoyment that I had lost over the years. There was definitely something going on but it was very subtle and relaxing. And it made me want to go deeper.
But first a little housekeeping
My major motivation in pursuing this idea is change. Yes, changing my life. Why not? In the past, reinvention was almost too standard with me. If something interested me I’d do a deep dive. It resulted in a fairly successful music career and a pile of non-fiction books, all published by national publishers, with some getting translated into various languages. I went into marketing, specifically tech marketing, and eventually rose to senior management in some fast growing software and tech companies. A far cry from my teenage stoner days! And I finally wrote the novel I’d been trying to complete for years (too many self-imposed distractions?), with a second one making progress. But back to the housekeeping.
I am a drinker, what they call a functional drinker. It started young and being in late night clubs after gigs reinforced the habit. And I enjoyed it for a long time. But I had the nagging feeling, which turned into a certainty, that this thing was a weight around my neck that was holding me back. And it reached the point where it was taking priority, which I did not and do not like at all. And friends were quite aware of this. It has to go but letting go of an addiction is no minor thing, especially one so ingrained in a life for so long. Which brings me to psychedelics.
Rewiring that part of the brain that limits openness to new experience
Without going into the neuroscience (and if you know me, you know I did), there is evidence, backed by research, that psilocybin may affect a part of the brain that insulates us from new experiences by creating reasonable resistance to things that might be dangerous, likely as an evolutionary safeguard. The drug appears to temporarily block those resistance mechanisms, leaving you open to the intense experience it provides.
This is obviously not without risk. But prior to the early seventies, when societal fear lumped these drugs into the same category as physically dangerous drugs like heroin, making them illegal, there had been over a thousand peer-reviewed studies of them and one conclusive finding was that they are not physically harmful.
Recently, and this was a driver behind Pollan’s book, science tentatively began doing research again. The goal has been to investigate their value in treating illnesses like depression and PTSD, and to help those with fatal diseases cope with end of life. The research has been promising and the FDA has been surprisingly supportive. This could result in useful treatments coming on the market relatively quickly, since safety was proven by the large number of early research projects. But, until that happens, we have to go to the underground. I say ‘have to’ because of my age. Waiting ten years for a legal prescription isn’t very appealing at this point.
But before I take them, I want to clean my system up by quitting alcohol for the foreseeable future. I need the clarity that provides and I don’t want to muddy the waters, as I did in the past. That’s my current project.
That’s my first issue of The Grasshopper. I hope you found some redeeming value in it! Please feel free to share- It’s free. See you in about two weeks. My next topic is Renunciation.