Close to Finding Meaning

This week I listened to Ezra Klein, of the New York Times, discuss psychedelics, parenthood, screen time, and life meaning with The New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino. Their conversation made me think about how our concept of fun changes as we grow older. Tolentino says:

“I was thinking on the train up here about that question, like why did I have kids? And I was thinking about my trepidation beforehand. And I feel like I bring back every conversation about children to a conversation about psychedelics, unfortunately. But the idea seemed scary and overwhelming in the same way that doing acid seemed scary and overwhelming before I did it for the first time.

It was like, oh, this is going to last for so long. There’s going to be part of it that’s so intense and so difficult. And I didn’t do it until I felt like I know that the person that I’m going to do it with, I’ll have fun with. I can trust that I’m doing it in kind of a safe and right environment, where I will get the thing that I want out of it.

But the thing that made me decide to do acid for the first time is not dissimilar to the thing that made me decide to have kids, which is, I think it’ll be fun. I think on the whole, I think it’ll be fun. I felt that there would be real, lasting, kind of destabilizing, kind of boundary-dissolving pleasure in it that would kind of scare me in the way that true pleasure kind of does.

And I really hadn’t thought about it that neatly until you said that we wanted to talk about this. I don’t think I understood that, really, the thing that drove me to this was probably the thing that drives me to a lot of things, which is pleasure-seeking.

Well, I should say, too, when I say fun — I mean, I think that’s why I corrected myself. What I think of as fun is, it’s much less enjoyment and more like pushing the limits of what — I don’t know — I can stand or I’m capable of. I have a kind of arduous idea of fun.

Like, something that I long to do constantly is go to Antarctica and completely lose my mind. That sounds like one of the most fun things I can imagine. And so, doing psychedelics, it is extremely challenging sometimes and not always fun, but that is a specific kind of pleasure that the definition of which is very close to finding meaning.”

Rather than the pure hedonism of adolescence, fun or pleasure becomes more about making meaning as we get older. In a way, that pure hedonism becomes less accessible as we age.

I think of the things that have brought me the most pleasure in the years since my frontal lobe fully developed - Peep and gardening and learning to understand the brain-body connection - and I can see how these were things that were challenging, that were hard to do, and felt overwhelming but ultimately made meaning in my life by pushing me beyond my perceived capabilities.

If you’re interested in listening to the whole interview, which I highly recommend, you can check it out here.