Blog/2024-09-23/Internet Exaggeration

Why does everyone on the Internet exaggerate so much? If you were to listen to Twitter you'd expect that:

• One time using fentanyl would instantly addict you for life
• One time using LSD would break your mind open forever
• A single dose of shrooms is going to make you lose your sense of self

These are all objectively untrue. I know this because I have experienced all of these things: fentanyl in a hospital, LSD a few times at music festivals, and various doses of psilocybin ranging from the mild (0.5 g of dry mushrooms) to normal (2.5 g) to extraordinary (3.5 g) and while it is a mind-blowing experience it is not the one-shot people describe it as.

I suppose this must be societally adaptive, since you have to dissuade the people who would be addicted from trying it out, and they may not have the skill to resist things. The whole thing reminds me of something when I was a child.

In order to get us to keep our hands inside the bus or van, our teachers would tell us this story about how a whole class of kids who had their heads stuck out the window were decapitated by a passing bus that came too close. Fine, I get it. You do whatever you need to get the kids to keep their limbs and heads inside. That's perfectly reasonable.

But there was a class of kids who would credulously and eagerly repeat this story to others. And they would get very excited about this fact.

Most of these drug storytellers seem to be of that fashion: having no experience but repeating something they know of someone else somewhere else. Fiction transforming through retelling into relayed fact.

But the excitement was a different thing. The most recent experience I have that is similar is the hysteria around COVID-19. Terrible disease. Spread all over the world. And killed 7 million people or so. Pretty bad. But there were a group of people who were excited about the whole thing. We were in terrible times. Interesting shakeups were about to occur! Stuff's happening!

And I think there's a little of that here too. Living here in the US, I kind of get it. Half the people here make more than $65,000 a year. An astronomical sum. Life is, in general, pretty good.

Perhaps striving is in our inner nature. And when things are too comfortable, we manufacture strife in order to explain things. And the exaggeration is part of it.