u/Friendly-Meat802

So basically me and my buddies all took 1.5 edibles (15 mg THC) each before a bus trip. Probably a bad idea, but it felt like a good one at the time. These things hit in like 30 minutes, we were all gone.

I thought I was the only one until I look over and my friend is sweating bullets, like any time I brushed his leg it’s like wet, not damp, wet. Fast forward, we’re an hour into the bus ride, I’m fine but my thoughts are going crazy.

I could feel like 3 different breath and heart beat patterns. I had to start manually breathing because I couldn’t tell whether I was hyperventilating. I was also manually forcing saliva into my mouth because the cotton mouth was so bad.

Then, I started getting paranoid about my own thoughts, I was thinking that the weed puts you in a state of thought-acceptance and enhanced neuroplasticity, where every thought you make gets accepted as true and rewires your brain. That’s when it got bad.

I began to think that the reason people experience an ego death on drugs was because psychedelics put your mind in a state of unconditional acceptance, where false conclusions can feel monumental, and permanently damage your mind.

Following that, I started arriving to weird-ass,radical conclusions. I was imagining how mankind became to be so war-driven and almost reached the conclusion that the nature of man is warfare, I kept seeing this imagery of me just randomly punching people. I was imagining jumping out the window because the “meaning of life” is the acceptance of death. You get the point.

I believe these radical conclusions, and imaginations were proposed by the ego as a way to escape the stream of consciousness I was headed on as a defense mechanism.

Sorry if the story was a little ambiguous, I didn’t take notes or anything during, so my memory is likely a little inconsistent, let me know if you need me to elaborate.

In social settings where everyone is around the same skill level, it's like I lower my abilities so that I am the worst person there, no matter the situation. In social settings where my skill is superior to the average person, it's like I subconsciously lower my skill level so I am only a little better than the rest of the group. When I say social settings, I am referring to classroom experience, video games, sports, parties, any situation, employing any variety of skills.

In social situations, such as parties or hanging out with a big group of friends, I lose all charisma and humor. Sometimes, I even get in a cycle of making one bad joke or saying something awkward, then get hypercritical of everything I say and defensive when other people say things, even if not intended to bother me. This often creates a really bad experience for me, as I'm in a group that often makes jokes towards each other.

This problem shows up in school, too. In classes where I should be excelling, I'm just slightly better than the rest. In classes where I should be average, I gravitate towards the bottom. I do well in school, and I would consider myself academically inclined. However, I've noticed that I perform much worse in classes where I am part of the average population.

My ego is afraid of standing out. When I exist in the skill average of the population, it becomes afraid that I will fail to meet the average standards, creating a tense feeling whenever being singled out to perform. This tense feeling caused by the oversight of the ego on my natural abilities, it results in a lower-than-normal performance. When I exist as a higher than average member of a population, I fall into the slightly above average range of the population, and face tension when I attempt to display my natural skill level. I perform the best when there is no external spectators, nothing that permanently displays my natural level of skill in a situation. However, I have noticed that in situations where I feel comfortable, such as a small group of friends, family, or one-on-one situations, I tend to display real skill level, unless the ego begins to feel threatened.

How do I override this function? Is there any practical methods, or exercises I can do to rid of this natural behavior? I am aware of it yet it feels I can do nothing about it. I probably should meditate on this. And yes, I understand this likely comes from parental upbringing and genetics, but I'm sure there is ways to lessen the impact of the natural behaviors on my life. I want to be able to display my true skill without the fear of judgement or standing out.

As a part of Gen Z, it’s concerning to see the amount of young adults and teenagers opposed to education. It’s considered “weird” to be literate. If I told people my age that I read and write as a hobby, I would likely be made fun of and thought of as weird, or an outcast.

I told one of my friends the other day that I read to stay educated. He responded saying, “Why do you need to stay educated if AI knows everything and can tell you the answer in a second.” The reply was obviously a joke, but it had some truth to it. People don’t feel a need to stay educated more with the development of new technologies, that “think” and “know” for you.

So what does this mean for the future. We have a generation that thinks of education as weird and disregards its importance entirely. Artificial intelligence is here, and it thinks for us. Do people not realize if they can’t think for themselves, that the company that trains the AI, mold it to their ideology and identity, and will think for them?

What really opened my eyes was when I was in an argument with a friend. I told my friend that he obviously has no understanding of psychology and how political leaders and the news use specific wordings to manipulate their listeners. He claimed that kind of stuff has no control over him, he’s aware of these but they don’t affect him. Later, he said something along the lines of, “I can’t believe Trump is such a bad president now, he tricked us all into voting for him.” I’ll leave it at that.

Being uneducated causes the distaste for being educated. Ignorant people refuse to believe any viewpoint is true except for their own, so why would you ever have to read or try to understand anyone else’s ideas. The use of AI is already causing mass psychosis of believing hallucinations that they believe are true.

What people don’t understand is that the AI doesn’t think for itself, it’s a computer program that analyzes your prompt and outputs based on the users prompting context. Many fields have a variety of viewpoints that can contradict each other, but also have strong supporting evidence. If a user aligns even slightly towards one of these viewpoints, the AI will react and output information as if everything the user said was the whole truth. This reinforcement of previous ideas causes many people to generate an even stronger belief in those ideas. This cycle of AI reinforcing the users ideas is causing this mass psychosis.

So with the development of AI, the distaste and disregard for education, and the denial of basic truths. What does the future look like? How do we as a society work to counteract the effects, to motivate the youth to stay educated, and to cut out the bullshit?