munchhausen

As a SWE in the EU who is eyeing the software industry in the US with considerable envy, I would not say we get by just fine, at all.

I don't see how you could afford all the things you mentioned on an average SWE salary in Europe. I have a very much above average SWE salary, and don't seem to be in any danger of getting a house and two cars anytime soon. I rent and don't have any cars, actually.

Healthcare is free, for the bare essentials. I pay a crazy amount per year for (private) healthcare, because the standard, mandatory insurance covers just about nothing of what I actually need. Consider that every month, I pay into the government healthcare system a lump sum which is approximately equivalent to the median salary in my country. This doesn't buy me any benefits - I get the same minimal coverage as everyone else. Socialism at its finest.

I'd be OK with it if the money actually went towards worthy causes. That is not the case, however - I am pretty sure most of the healthcare budget goes towards funding an antiquated, insanely oversized bureaucratic system. There's a whole social class of bureaucrats on the government payroll, who do pretty much nothing at all - you won't find them in the office after 3PM - who collect a meager but secure salary for their utter lack of effort and general uselessness.

More and more, I am jaded by the illusion of a "fairer" society in the EU, which often ends up being just a case of "everyone is guaranteed to get the same low-quality treatment".

There is a solution to many of the issues highlighted in the article, and that is to drop judgementalism and bias altogether, as individuals and as society.

That will get us to the point where your personality quirks, likes and dislikes, gender expression and sexual orientation, etc., have no impact on your career prospects, social integration prospects, and your ability to participate in society in general.

Retreating back into the privacy bubble is not an option. We need to go in the opposite direction, and put it all out there. When being completely naked, completely transparent becomes the new normal, compassion and empathy will well up in society to an extent never before experienced. We will all see that the emperor of social pretense and conformity never had any clothes, and this will be a watershed moment in how people relate to each other.

Might be for someone, but I never had that experience. All my experiences have been very very rapid, and there was certainly no sense of being somewhere for hours or even minutes.

Really I can't even speak of time in this context. It felt more like a series of moment instants, and usually, before I even located "myself" in the experience, it was over.

I'm going to be bold here and say that if someone speaks of experiencing time dilation or loops on DMT, it is more of a question of the rational, linear mind, trying to make sense of a timeless, or non-linear experience of time (which it is not able to comprehend), by imposing familiar, linear concepts on it post-facto.

So, someone might speak of a time loop after the trip, but while you're actually having a DMT breakthrough experience, there simply is no "observer" there to generate the thought "oh, I am stuck in a time loop here". Therefore, the feeling of anxiety or terror, which might normally be associated with such a finding, will not arise.

The difference to other psychedelics is the nature of the DMT trip - it is extremely "fast", short, and overwhelming. There simply is too little "idle" time in the trip (none, actually) for the rational mind to start developing paranoia or anxiety about what is happening.

It also helps that the whole thing is so otherworldly, the thinking mind is simply awed into silence. It takes a while before you could even begin to develop a conceptual interpretation of what is happening, and by then the whole thing is over and you are back to your sober self.

With other, long-acting psychedelics, there is plenty of time and opportunity for the mind to develop its own "spin" on the experience, and produce anxiety. Not so with DMT - it's like being shot out of a cannon and then coming back to earth just as fast.

It sounds terrifying and it is, when you're reflecting on it outside of the container of the trip. Somehow, while it's happening, you don't even have time to think about how terrifying it is, and as a result of that it ends up being OK. Tells you a lot about the nature of anxiety, really.

You must be attentive enough to your impulses to catch yourself wanting to do it before you actually do it.

It takes years to develop that level of attentiveness, but it's oh-so-worth-it. And not just because it lets you avoid the seasonal colds :)

The drugs are not supposed to get you there. They are supposed to show you the territory, lift you, temporarily, out of the slime and muck of the dark age of materialism.

The rest is up to you, whether it's the third path, fourth path, or the umpteenth path.

What??

Drug laws vary wildly in the regions you mentioned. Just about the only thing that they have in common is that drugs are illegal.

And it's not just a question of laws, either. Laws are one thing, and policing is another. There are countries which don't really enforce the law for personal use amounts.

The US has draconian laws, and punitive policing. There's your problem. It turns out that the worse you treat your criminals, the worse your crime problem gets.