Welcome to The Daily Upset with Author Jonathan David.

Today’s episode starts where many episodes of The Daily Upset start: somewhere between coffee, comedy, frustration with the internet, arguments about human behavior, and absolutely no guarantee that I am going to stay on the original subject.

Eventually, however, we arrive at the subject: albino penis envy mushrooms.

Psychedelics, “Plant Medicine,” and Honesty

I have been around alcohol, marijuana, mushrooms, LSD, and other hallucinogens at different points in my life. One thing that has always bothered me is the romantic language people sometimes build around psychedelic drugs.

Call something “plant medicine,” attach the word “spiritual” to it, find a shaman, and suddenly taking a psychoactive substance is presented as something entirely different.

I don’t necessarily see it that way.

I have watched people convince themselves that habitual psychedelic use is transforming them while, from the outside, they do not necessarily appear happier, kinder, more rational, or more functional.

Sometimes the story people tell themselves about a drug becomes more important than what the drug is actually doing in their lives.

That gets to one of the larger themes of this episode: honesty.

If you’re getting high because you enjoy getting high, why not simply admit that?

Why construct an elaborate spiritual justification around it?

My Experiences With LSD

My own experiences with hallucinogens certainly have not been an endless series of beautiful spiritual awakenings.

Quite the opposite.

I remember taking acid when I was younger. The first experience was fascinating partly because I had absolutely no idea what was coming.

Another experience became what I can only describe as hours trapped inside a bleeding brain from hell.

When it finally ended, the greatest sensation was not enlightenment.

It was relief.

I was simply grateful to feel normal again.

Yet after enough time passed, I would somehow forget exactly how unpleasant the experience had been.

That’s one of the comparisons I make in this episode: an overwhelmingly unpleasant experience can temporarily change your perspective, but that does not automatically mean the thing that caused the experience was medicine.

Why Do We Go Back?

My experiences with mushrooms have followed a similarly strange pattern.

I have repeatedly found myself wondering why I took them in the first place, waiting for the experience to end and promising myself I would not do it again.

Then enough time passes.

Memory softens the experience.

And somehow mushrooms appear again.

That psychological cycle interests me almost as much as the psychedelic experience itself. Human memory does not preserve every emotional experience with perfect accuracy. Time can change the way we remember discomfort, fear, pleasure, and risk.

The Albino Penis Envy Experience

That brings me to the experience at the center of this episode: albino penis envy mushrooms.

This particular experience was different enough that I continued thinking about it long afterward.

At the time, I was dealing with persistent symptoms that I personally associated with my experience following the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccination. After the mushroom experience, I eventually noticed a dramatic improvement in how I felt.

What interests me for purposes of this story is what I experienced psychologically.

Something felt different afterward.

Subjectively, it felt as though my brain had been reset or rewired.

The experience itself also wasn’t quite like the stereotypical psychedelic trips I had experienced before. It was not simply visual distortions, strange colors, or everything turning into bubbles.

It was stranger than that.

Explaining exactly what happened requires its own discussion.

That’s coming in Part 2.

The Bigger Subject Is the Human Mind

The mushrooms are only part of this episode.

The larger subject is the human mind and the way people develop beliefs, identities, habits, and automatic reactions.

Why are people so easily manipulated by words?

Why do we divide ourselves into teams and then become furious when somebody violates the vocabulary or assumptions of our particular team?

Why can political identities, cultural identities, gender arguments, corporate rules, social-media moderation, religion, and social expectations become ideas people defend almost automatically?

I keep returning to the same idea: conditioning.

People frequently believe they are independently choosing their reactions when they may also be responding to patterns reinforced for years by family, culture, politics, advertising, social media, institutions, and the people around them.

Then somebody challenges one of those patterns and the emotional response can arrive before the reasoning does.

That fascinates me.

Why The Daily Upset Is Provocative

This is also why The Daily Upset is deliberately provocative.

The show uses satire, profanity, exaggeration, uncomfortable jokes, social commentary, personal stories, and arguments that sometimes contradict one another.

I am interested in what happens when you push on an assumption hard enough that somebody has to stop and ask:

Why do I believe this?

Sometimes I am making an argument.

Sometimes I am making a joke.

Sometimes I am thinking out loud.

Sometimes I am deliberately pushing a button to examine the reaction.

And sometimes I simply need another espresso.

That’s The Daily Upset.

Coming in Part 2

This episode wanders through social media, censorship, money, relationships, politics, race, religion, physics, consciousness, addiction, psychedelics, sobriety, human behavior, and my dog waiting impatiently for her walk before eventually returning to the albino penis envy mushroom experience that started the entire discussion.

In Part 2, I’ll continue the story and get deeper into what actually happened during that experience and why it remained memorable long after the trip itself ended.

Until then, have a nice day—unless you have other plans.