How do you even make 20,000 amendments to an 18 page document? Did they change every word individually?
It's complex, and subjective, and maybe a bit sad, but here's my best shot at describing my decision.
Cannabis enhances most forms of passive entertainment and makes menial tasks less dull, which is great, but that also makes it habit forming. It tends to affect you in one of two ways, depending on your body chemistry and the strain you're using. You're either going to be comfortably immobile, or pleasantly flighty, in either case it becomes difficult to focus on complex tasks or plan ahead and makes your problems feel distant.
This combination of effects, in my experience, creates a feedback loop. The habit of smoking to enjoy tasks you wouldn't otherwise combined with a decrease in drive to perform complex tasks that are both harder to do and less likely to be thought of when stoned and a distance from your troubles, results in more time spent blissfully drifting through life.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. I had clearly enjoyed it for years. But it became difficult to do much of anything. I was stuck in this loop that I didn't even see. I lost friends during COVID (not to the disease, they're still alive just not my friends) and I allowed my life to shrink so much... My circle of friends, my chosen activities and the locations I physically inhabited all became limited and static during and after. It was a slow process, and I can't blame it all on cannabis, but smoking weed dulled the pain as I slowly became less and less of myself. When I smoke weed I am less apt to focus on my ills and if I can't focus on them, I can't change them.
Being stoned left me more apt to just chill out and let my life continue rolling along the same dissatisfying course. Imagine a snowball rolling downhill, but instead of picking up snow as it goes, it leaves it behind. Shrinking and shrinking, until it stops. Momentum no longer able to carry it along.
This diminishing of myself was leaving me more and more depressed. Months would pass where I only left my apartment to walk my dog or buy groceries. I lost interest in the activities I enjoyed. I lost interest in my partner. I lost interest in my self, because why would I be interested in someone who was nothing and did nothing. I was on the edge of losing myself, to myself. I spent more time imagining my own death than imagining a life I wanted to live.
I took a hard look at how I spent my days, and saw that one thing took the place of all of those others that I used to love. I was spending my days stoned and alone and unhappy. Don't get me wrong, I don't think an addiction to weed pushed anything out of my life - I wasn't seeking weed at anything's expense and I never started until after working hours so I kept a semblance of a life - it just filled the holes all those people, places, activities and things I lost left behind and made it much harder to recognize the decline of my well-being.
So I cut down, and started calling my family more. Then I did some research. I looked at the physiological effects of cannabis - the way THC interacts with your endogenous cannabinoid receptors, which are in every part of your body from your brain and your eyes to your gut and your gonads, and it floods them with a molecule thousands of times more potent than they would otherwise have. It disrupts the neurological feedback system that your brain uses to reinforce synaptic routes. It overrides your guidance system, not through dopamine release causing seeking behavior like most drugs, but by effectively telling you to just relax by making everything you do feel equally as rewarding as anything else.
I was starting to feel better after just cutting down and reaching out, so I looked at what I got from THC and what I wanted from my life, and I decided to leave it behind entirely.
I've smoked so much weed in the years since legalization. I was a regular smoker before, too, but my consumption habits spiked after - especially during the COVID years. As in heavy, chronic, daily use.
I started cutting down drastically late last year, and I'm quitting for good now. Cannabis hasn't had a positive effect on my mental health.
Chronic and heavy use have definitions, for anyone who doesn't know. Regularly consuming cannabis twice or more per week is considered Chronic use. Heavy use is anything more than two times per week or ten times per month. Almost all of my friends are heavy, chronic users.
The version of Neuralink we can afford will be ad supported.
And the rest overestimate how much they know.
Anarchism is when disc golf.
The flat earth really brings it together 😙👌
Trying to get out on a technicality.
I was on that Jury, we were instructed repeatedly on avoiding bias when looking at the proceedings - keep our perceptions of their guilt out of it, only consider what is in evidence, don't let your emotional response sway you.
I wound up taken off the jury before the verdict (me, two other jurors, and the jury officer tested positive for COVID at the start of the final week of the trial) but everyone else got that same spiel and likely more when it came time for deliberation. It's rich to say "the jury just didn't understand what they were supposed to do!" as a defense here. We did. That's why the Bilodeaus were only found guilty on one count of murder and three counts of manslaughter - prosecution started off seeking second degree murder for all four counts. They both received light sentences for causing the deaths of two innocent men because the rule of law demanded it.
"Cyberpunks" weren't warning us about the internet - they were warning us about the corporations who will control it, and through it, us. We are trying explicitly not to communicate on that medium by using Lemmy (that medium encompasses Reddit, X, the various properties of Meta and Alphabet)
Science fiction mentioning a technology, even centering around it, doesn't mean it's saying the technology is universally bad. The author highlights the dangers, but the tech itself is almost always portrayed as neutral. It's the people who use it to nefarious ends that science fiction is warning us about.
Like the people who would seek to profit off of the Torment Nexus.
That's how my parent served it, and they were wrong.
I came to the comments for an explanation because I completely missed the age labels, so thank you.
Forty years... forty... years... I wonder if there was something *new *that our liberal democracy started forty years ago, where the focus shifted towards expanding economic growth at all costs.
New and different but still liberal. Neo maybe.