I have to share this because it’s been on my mind for a long time. I have been a pot smoker for 17 years. I started when I was 15 years old. This is not a text to promote early age smoking... quite the opposite. Yet, it is to make a point about the little impact from adult life onward. I do have to be at peace with the lost possibilities, in a life where I didn’t start so early and had put more time to form habits for a solid mental structure, in a real educational environment.
When you are young, there’s lots going on in the mind. For me, there were questions about the nature of reality, about the contradictions that some adults, responsible for knowledge, have laid out and never picked up. Those have remained hazy, unanswered, botch away in the corner of my mind to only resurface, some day. During this period, before my 15 years old, when socializing was a problem. I couldn't relate to people because of the shallowness of there persona. We were only kids yet my mind was filled with glorious ideas from fictional awesomeness from other worlds like Dungeon&Dragon. I spent most of my teens reading fictions and Role playing on board game and soon after, computers. I was not yet smoking...
What does that mean for a young man trying to fit in, when intelligence and mindfulness was seemingly the main problem? Well first, it's more fucking questions! I also wanted to connect with the opposite sex, I want to open myself to the world yet, the world had something else in mind. Something that if I wanted a part of, I would have to level down a bit and be less thoughtful. Smoking pot allowed me to level down perfectly. I had became a light dumb ass (speaking from the world understanding of a random teen born and raised in the suburbs of Montreal) in a sub-environment of the public schooling system. I am not fully convinced pot was actively making me dumb, but more the "de-clutching" effect of the substance, I was suddenly okay with not making the world love me and everything seemed to unlock. It had a sort of release effect. The letting go of it all... yes, all at 15 years old.
Do you start painting the picture that ensued?
In school, it’s pretty easy to figure out that I was not performing super well because I had other interest and other unfulfilled questions by that same system that pretended to educate me. Even my parents gave up on those idiots. As long as I was healthy and showing sings of moving forward, my parents were happy about it and let me tough it out. Smoking weed was the catalyst to my before adulthood and during adult life. I had to put a pause to my “wants and desires” of the class setting of education, because I lost the tread in the morning glory haze; smoking weed got me what I needed at that time, being seen and heard.
Side note; I was always a kind guy, a good listener. So once I tapped in the ''cooler'' crowd of fake and lowest common denominator, creating reports in the moment and getting lots of acquaintances was not overly laborious. I had to come to term with the fact that high school was a drop the ocean of time and some very important “stuff” that would sooner or later need readjustment. The schooling system was not quite done with me. Now that I had an interesting label, a pot smoker categorization stimulating me to prove everyone wrong plus I still had few more year of indoctrination to get through; a new chapter started, it was on! Now, what the fuck did I want to do with my life now? Who cares, now it was time to play.
How the hell can you know that if I was thinking the WRONG way and VALUING the WRONG things! But a genuinely didn’t know that than. I was now 17-18 years old, an adult from QC legal slave owner standard (there's a reason why I say that, we can talk about that in the future). I had to accept somethings I didn't understand shit about (that is called FAITH is by the way) as I was mildly stupid from smoking pot too often and never really building the foundations a sustained focus, I could also to an extent, escape the responsibility in the name of having fun. I needed to live the dream of someone else, aka put the man I could be in a box for the next years to come and work away, to have fun! Have I mentioned I'm an idiot in remission?
Now, I may make myself sound like a failure and in some regards I was, particularly from the perspective of the outcome-based system schooling racquet, or to any one human that had success in the system and never questioned it. Or to anyone who look at the chance I had in life, I should have just coasted and ride the wave. On the other hand, I was also too smart for their system. All the trouble I ever brought forth was handled through talking myself out of it. There were no guidelines for non-violent talkers; I’d always negotiate myself a way out. One thing to note is I never was a violent guy, it really was a system and its entire component that was not fulfilling for me and I was reacting to it.
As mentioned above to balance out the bad, I was very thoughtful, methodical, a good athlete, witty and a handy worker. My biggest asset to this day is to be a great communicator that empathizes with others, genuinely. I’m also a really lucky guy in the universe, considering being alive is pretty lucky in itself, absurdly so.
Yet again, the luck of the dice rolled in my favor. At the end of my high school, instead of continuing in business and sales studies, where who knows would I have ended up.. my father started a technical rope-access business in a niche market of wireless servicing and… he hired me full time. I am still working with this company to this day, years after my family retired. Within these 13 years of work, with all the beautiful memories and picturesque scenery I was fortunate enough to come across I feel very grateful. A decade of work and travel, a wife and a child, life seem to have some luck in store for me...
While working with my family, I was able to take some head start in my financial life – as a good little citizen, I ALWAYS paid my taxes. The Law ought to be respected by everyone, or it shouldn’t be made a law. I was ignorant back then, not anymore. I still pay my taxes because, they have guns and I don’t. I wish the system was otherwise but it’s not. More on this another time… back to our topic.
Years passed and I graduated high school by credit accumulation, I was then one year behind my initial classes. I was dating a future PhD that thought I was getting a little childish with my pot smoking at 19 years old. We broke up shortly after. Something pretty strange happened during my early 20s. To me, it correlates strongly with the lack of mental structure from frequent pot smoking in early age and the very toxic schooling system. Regardless, I had become a believer and a lazy thinker. There were important pieces still missing to my puzzle. I was still not seeing the mechanics. Some pieces may have been lost forever; I can only hope to find some scrapes on the route of re-education. One thing is sure, I lost time that I will never get back. Let that sink in for yourself, or your children.
Now, swallowing the pill and moving forward, it’s clear to me that pot has an ongoing beneficial use, both within my head and my body. It reduces the stress of uselessness in a system that was not built to make me independent, self-reliant or to answer any of the substantial questions I may have. I would have to seek my own answers and educate myself. In this citizenry function, I was a data input, a tax-payer, and an account number populating a well-oiled commercial fiction. That was and still is, the legal reality-fiction we live in, the only one that have force of law and I had to come to term with it.
On a more philosophical level, it eases the stress from this journey called life, one that is all important and pointless, simultaneously. People semi-close to me past away recently and it had me think seriously. It had me thinking partly about the impermanence the human experience and other ideas. One of which was in the Absurdist school of thought as per Albert Camus contributions. It is empowering in many ways, adds to that a good hybrid strain, there is suddenly more room to dig deeper in other human paradox as the stress simply evaporates. And finally on a body level, it also helps with my athletic soreness and hurts of years of physical labor from rope access work, and from sports. At 32, I still have a good cardio and I can still preform very well athletically. It would certainly not be a surprise if in the future I have to eat it instead, as I inhaled smoke for many years; I have also laced tobacco and pot, in my earlier years. Like they say, there are not biological bypasses.
Back to our horses, what was I believing into that could have been so bad? Well, mainly and only bullshit. So here is the part of the story where I will lay out my own observation of the belief I held and how it was very unproductive. This is not completely out of the field of schooling and its possible consequences on the mass, but in this case, me. A really sad part of our indoctrination system, is its tendency to push toward the outsourcing of knowledge to a qualified professional aka, not you. In some specialized case, that is not always a bad thing. But for fuck sake, we are talking about basic life mapping and existing knowledge of reality. Down the road someone with no inherent ability has something come crashing in the form of learned helplessness. In this world you cannot do anything by yourself, you cannot know anything and you certainly can't invent anything new. In short, its terrible for a young mind.
I roamed the better part of my early 20s thinking stupid fairy tales. I essentially I thought I was such a unique snowflake, in a mysterious way. There life happened to me, revolving around me, its karmic unfolding and the mysterious reason I was so lucky to this day was because I must have deserved it, somehow. In the face of a "luck - no luck" contraction, I still had that little angel was sitting on my shoulder, protecting me from whatever the fuck that didn’t happened to me. You know, when you look back and assume that in the incoherence of some aspect of life, you manage to pull out cohesion and predictability, I came to think I was special in the wrong ways.
Slowly but surely, driving a sketchy road I made it back to the only effective road that carried the Humanity so far; the highway of reason and empiricism. To be continued.