There’s a lot of news lately about recreational drugs getting legalized. My early 20’s had its fair share of partying, so I like to think I understand the motivations behind all this. I certainly approve of the criminal organizations who control the flows of drugs losing their power.

But consider on the other hand, how IQ is generally (albeit, not absolutely) a very decent predictor of success in life. I submit that every IQ point matters a lot. Sure, you can perhaps afford to lose a very few IQ points here and there, to have fun in ways that greatly expand your horizons, and open you up to seeing life in ways that can (under extremely careful use of restraint) actually spur (albeit, not sustain) vast spiritual growth. Granted you don’t seriously cut yourself with the double-edged sword, that is.

Please don’t fool yourself as to just how much care it takes to come out ahead, gambling with your IQ, and gambling with your future, as the possibilities of legal drugs enter your life. After being part of a debaucherous party scene for 2-3 years myself, I saw many examples of people who believed they could control themselves, and moderate their usage, but alas, over the longer term, they could not, and the monkey got the best of them. Far more people could not moderate themselves (than those very rare, exceptional people who could), despite all believing that they could, were you to ask them long before things got out of hand.

As to those (whom I knew personally) who only partied moderately (so-called) back then, how many of them can I think of who went on to become some true luminary in some field of human endeavour? A very, very few. Even such moderate partiers (in the sense that they were not uncommon), if we dare call them that, tended to not rise to much more than the achievement of a normal-looking life, with a stable job and family life. It proved plenty hard enough to achieve even that much.

Now that AI is profiling you on a daily basis (and you have nothing to hide, right?), and you enter into a hyper-intimate relationship (hopefully minus the physical presence) with any and every scalliwag of the widely-diverse world with any and every sort of agenda, both good and evil, do you think that you somehow won’t be needing each and every scrap of your wits to not fall prey to any of them? Have you contemplated how many of these scalliwags are out there, who not only work in highly concerted teams, but automate as much scalliwag-shenanigans as possible through AI? AI accelerated hardware can be had for very cheap these days. Any motivated scalliwag can easily afford it.

It is arrogance to think that not a single one of these scalliwags will ever outwit you, proving you wrong that your privacy is the sour grapes that you didn’t want anyway.