Microdosing (for underachievers)

Originally published in Human Shift Magazine, a bi-annual book where culture, sport and spirituality meet.

You might take acid and go to work. In fact, you might take acid specifically because you are going to work.

In Silicon Valley, because coffee only goes so far, the search for greater focus and productivity has led to a reboot of psychedelics: microdosing. To microdose is to take a small enough quantity of a drug to elicit no adverse side effects (i.e., no hugging of office plants), yet high enough to experience subtle physiological benefits. A typical microdoser takes about one-tenth of a full psychedelic dose. This is not the presentation of psychedelics as in the 1960s; no one is climbing aboard painted school buses at LinkedIn HQ. Timothy Leary’s famous call to “Turn on, tune in, drop out” has been adapted to fit within the constraints of family and even corporate life. Hell, you might make a lot more money on drugs. Tim Ferriss, the Silicon Valley investor and author of The 4-Hour Workweek, has said, “The billionaires I know, almost without exception, use hallucinogenics on a regular basis.”