Have You Tried It?

At age 12-13, I was mostly what society calls a “good kid”.

I was actively disinterested in drugs and alcohol.

I’d occasionally hang around kids who offered me drinks or weed, but there was zero social pressure.

Even when I hung out in rougher scenes, people generally respected me for saying I thought those things weren’t good for you.

But then something happened:

A pamphlet was spread in our school. It warned of the dangers of drugs.

I specifically remember it saying that marihuana makes people hallucinate. That they would see things that weren’t really in the room. Illusionary figures.

It also warned teachers and parents that you could recognize a weed smoker by the fact that he slept in class and had droopy eyes.

This caused a rupture in my worldview because:

1) I slept in class most of the time, I also had droopy eyes because I had trouble sleeping outside of class.

2) I did know a bunch of pot smokers. I had been around them. None of them had ever reported seeing things that weren’t there.

I could only think of 2 explanations for this:

A) All the adults spreading this info were conspiring and lying.

B) They just don’t know what they were talking about.

So the next time somebody offered me weed, I said “yes”. I tried it. And I found out none of it was true.

(Inverse props to whomever planned that sensibilization campaign lol.)

As a result, over the next 5-10 years I tried every drug under the sun. Including the most obscure or creative trips. Like taking sleep medication and forcing yourself to stay awake. Or consuming such a high dose of certain household spices (which I won’t disclose for safety reasons) that you actually do start hallucinating.

My conclusion about most drugs (luckily not all) was that they are shitty experiences which I do not recommend. (Though admittedly, I also discovered that some were net-positive experience at certain dosages. Which I would recommend if it weren’t risky from a legal perspective.)

In other words: The adults were right about warning us to avoid drug use. They were also right about how drugs can really mess up your life. What they weren’t right about was how and why. Because they hadn’t tried it.

All it would’ve taken to stop me from acting like a junkie was an ex-junkie writing the pamphlet instead of…honestly I don’t know who made that stuff. Some bureaucrat in an office? No clue.

Again, don’t follow my footsteps, most drugs do suck. But the reason I’m sharing this is that it revealed something to me which was highly liberating and, in my opinion, highly important:

A lot of what we think the world is like is just what we’ve been told it’s like.

A lot of what we perceive to be limits of our world are just illusionary boundaries which we believe in because of naysayers.

So I started using the annoying catch phrase “Have you tried it?”

Both with others and with myself.

They were mostly ego-driven pursuits. Like adding notes to my vocal range that couldn’t be there according to classical teachers.

If I’m honest with myself, the energy in general driving it wasn’t very clean. There was some element of trying to prove that society was wrong and I could do anything I wanted. A sense of pride.

But this audacity to ask “Have you tried it?” and then go try it did reveal to me that we live in a very different world than we pretend to.

A world full of possibilities that shouldn’t be there.

I found myself carrying an “unfree hugs” sign (a parody on the “free hugs” trope, no idea if this reference is dated or not) and within 5 minutes having someone pay me 5 euros for a hug.

I found myself using the pickup line: “Are you going home? Can I come with you?” and it working right away.

I found myself telling a hostel: “I would like to stay here for free, can we do that instead of payment?” and the hostel saying yes.

Over and over again, I found out that the things that shouldn’t work often just work because nobody had tried it.

And that a lot of dogma in a lot of industries are just bubbles waiting to burst.

People read things and books or studies and those keep citing each other ad infinitum. Advice goes viral and is given like expertise.

These are the anti-weed pamphlets of our generation.

And “have you tried it?” is the antidote.

Especially when paired with its best friend “have you tried the opposite?”

Anyway, I guess where I’m going with all of this today is:

You don’t have to be as unwise or arguably unethical in your exploriments as I was.

But I invite you to play around with that energy at least to some degree.

(In fact, I invite myself to play around with some of that energy to some degree, too!)

Because you’ll be surprised how often, in between the Chesterton’s fences and what-not, you are also surrounded by wisdom and warnings passed down by people who never tried it.

Whether they’re people or just voices in your brain, what are the naysayer’s saying to you right now?