Six Nights I Remember Well

Why was I such a weird kid? Can someone give me a diagnosis please!

I have this thing where I get older but just never wiser,

Midnights become my afternoons.

Taylor Swift, Anti-Hero

This post is going to be pretty different than my other posts. Don’t worry, it’s not going to be super common.

I’ve really enjoyed reading some of Brangus’ posts about his experience growing up with ODD¹. I find something highly relatable in them. Now, I didn’t have ODD (I think) or any such disorder that can unify a narrative about why my formative years were so erratic. I certainly received a great amount of love from my parents — although I did wish that I was treated more seriously when I was younger. But what does one say to a kid that is equal parts rebellious and smart, especially when he knows he’s smart?

I recall once when I was about five, my mum told me explicitly “Do not touch the iron, it’s extremely hot.” Naturally, as soon as she left the room, I touched the iron. I spent the next 3 hours crying and holding a frozen bag of peas on my hand. This probably says a lot about the relationship between me and my parents for most of my childhood.

This post is mostly about some nights that stick out in my memory, and I think summarize a lot of my childhood. I could probably come up with six more nights that are about equally as interesting, and maybe another six after that. Beyond that, I think I’d really have to dig.

Nights I Remember

September 2017

Lorde was coming to the UK on her Melodrama tour. I really like Lorde’s music, as do my friends, so we thought: we have to go and see her. We especially loved Melodrama, being dramatic, self-important 15 year olds². We also thought that this would be a great time to do something we’d been thinking of trying for a while, which was taking a well-known entactogen³. We smoked before the concert⁴, and had a fantastic time listening to the music.

When we got back to my friends’ after the concert, we put the entactogen into our drinks, drank, and waited. Thirty minutes later, we felt it and an hour later, we really felt it. Lights and colors seemed brighter. Textures seemed more interesting. To use a cliche, it was as though the world had been in black-and-white and was now in full-throttle Technicolor.

However, this paled in comparison to the main effect — overwhelmingly the most interesting part of the experience — which was the sheer amount of empathy that I felt for my friends, and for the world — which felt as though it had been infused with love. It seemed impossible that any of us could feel sad. I don’t think I’d ever felt that much happiness or empathy in my life. It seemed to me that it shouldn’t be possible to actually feel that good due simply to chemical effects — but it was!

When later I reflected on the experience, there were two predominating thoughts: everyone needs to try this — it would solve the world’s problems; and my consciousness really is just neurochemistry.

December 2018

I had decided to finally try to quit nicotine. It was clearly a massive hit to my finances, and incredibly impractical to try and fit in to my school routine. When my family decided we’d go to Iceland for three days to see the northern lights and experience Reykjavik, I thought that now was my chance. No one in Iceland would sell cigarettes to a 16-year-old, surely.

Quite irrationally, due to a teenage masochistic impulse, I decided that before quitting cold-turkey, I would increase the nicotine content in the vape I was using. I realized that this would probably make the experience of quitting slightly more miserable, but thought it would also make it more interesting. I was wrong, it did not make it slightly more miserable. I also brought two books with me to read, Sartre’s La Nausée and Camus’ L’étranger. A word of advice: if you’re ever trying to quit nicotine do not choose that moment to read books by French existentialists. They mention cigarettes every other page.

I was, naturally, miserable the entire time we were there. But there was nothing I could do about it. Until the second night that was, when I hatched a plan. I waited for the rest of my family to go to sleep, grabbed my coat and left the room we were staying in. I decided to see what I couldn’t drum up myself on the streets of Reykjavik. I couldn’t buy anything, since I was too young, but maybe someone would take pity on me. Eventually I found a club, outside of which people were smoking. I went up to a nice-looking 19-something year old, and asked her for two cigarettes. She gave them to me without much fuss. I smoked one, felt relief, and returned to the room to continue reading Camus.

I didn’t quit nicotine.

November 2021

By this point I was in my second year of university. The first term of second year is known for being particularly brutal for mathematicians at my university, and me and a friend were terrible at time-management—the one skill that could have saved us. We had managed to keep our heads above water for most of our classes, but we had a problem sheet for Markov Chains that we hadn’t started, which was due the next day.

We decided to lock in — with 3 litres of vegan coffee and two bottles of wine — and finish the problem sheet in one evening. The whole night, we listened to two songs from an Argentinian Pirate Rock band on repeat on an incredibly loud speaker⁵, initially we were listening ironically. By about 4am the irony had mostly faded — the songs were kind of a vibe.

As we worked our way towards the end of the sheet, and the sun was peeking into the meeting room we’d been using, we shifted from coffee to wine. This may seem as though it would strictly decrease the quality of the work we produced. This is true, but it also massively increased my tolerance for doing pages of rote computations — which is normally incredibly low. This helped us push through to the end of the sheet.

We handed the sheet in that morning. Our supervisor was quite happy with it.

January 2022

Me and my friends were planning to do the same well-known entactogen again. We’d had much more experience with it by this point⁶. I decided that I would eschew my normal rules of taking moderately less due to my concerns about how it might affect me. Instead of taking my usual slightly wimpy three-quarters-dose, I decided to take a full-dose — not much of a difference, I know.

This was great. I had an amazing time — to start with. However, later I decided to take slightly more, an extra half-dose. As I was waiting for this to take effect, I began feeling tired. I then managed to forget that I had taken this extra half-dose, and went outside to smoke (this was how we usually got to sleep when taking this entactogen). This was an extremely bad decision.

As I was smoking, the half-dose began to kick in. I started feeling paranoid (as was now frequent when I smoked), and the combination of both chemicals increased my anxiety massively. I sat down inside and began to depersonalize and hallucinate badly. I can quite clearly recall seeing insects covering the walls. That was scary enough, but the depersonalization was far scarier.

Depersonalization is the evil-twin of ego-death. Where ego-death⁷ sublimates the self into the greater whole, removing the feeling that the self is necessary, depersonalization feels like you have lost your self. You do want a self, but it’s missing. You’re observing your your body moving, observing your brain thinking. You move your mouth and sounds come out, but there’s something missing. A me-ness that the world used to have which it has no longer. I was terrified that I had broken something. That my self would never come back. I can’t emphasize enough the terror of that feeling. I could not live like this, I thought.

The next morning, when I woke up, my self had returned. There were virtually no lasting consequences, except heightened generalized anxiety (which I have now also mostly worked through). This was also the point at which my psychonautic experimentation virtually stopped completely.

February 2022

I had just come out of isolation from Covid-19. To celebrate, me and a friend-at-the-time⁸ decided to make drinks together and hang out. I was in a different long-term relationship at the time which was suffering quite badly, mostly due to long-distance. I also had another thing going on at the time which there isn’t really a great name for — let’s call it a more-than-platonic-less-than-romantic relationship. And a purely casual thing which was actually going very well indeed. But safe to say, it was getting pretty complicated even by my standards. Everyone knew about everyone else, and I mostly knew about everyone else’s everyone else.

I had spoken to the more-than-platonic-less-than-romantic relationship partner, telling them that I thought it was likely that I would end up getting together with the friend-at-the-time, since they were also close friends, and I didn’t want to make things weird. They indicated that this was fine⁹. I didn’t tell my girlfriend-at-the-time until later, or the casual person, because their approval was already implicit.

That night, me and the friend-at-the time did end up getting together which was pretty great. I found (and still find) her to be an amazing and interesting person who takes ideas seriously and is intellectually engaging in a way very complementary to myself. However, I also ended up telling her that I could see a committed relationship between us existing at some point. This sent me spiraling — it was technically outside of the bounds of my main relationship. I stayed up all night agonizing over what I should do to rectify this, how I was going to have to tell my girlfriend-at-the-time that I broke this technicality. Ultimately, the friend-at-the-time said she didn’t take what I had said too seriously as a commitment, and my girlfriend-at-the-time didn’t mind that much either.

The more-than-platonic-less-than-romantic partner, however, ended up not loving that this happened — I felt and feel like this was very reasonable. She didn’t blame me for it, but just realized she felt differently about it than she had thought. In a sense, I wish I’d been clearer when speaking to her about it, though also the friend-at-the-time (my current girlfriend) is amazing, and I am glad we’re now dating, so maybe I wouldn’t change history even if I could.

I kept a good relationship with everyone involved, but the degree to which I felt bad for this minor rule-break and upsetting someone showed me that I was probably not cut out for these sorts of relationship dynamics. So I don’t do them anymore.

September 2025

For my job, I often need to rewrite code. Sometimes, I decide very last minute that it is worth it to rewrite a lot of code. The last time I truly stayed up all-night (for reasons other than trying radical things to reset my sleep-schedule), this was the reason why.

There were about a thousand lines of code that had been written by me a year prior. This code had served its purpose relatively well, but it was clearly causing issues for the people who had to use it. I wrote it pretty quickly and uncarefully to begin with. I then did a big refactor into abstractions that made more sense to me — which weren’t all that great objectively. Then tried to rework it again afterwards to make it clearer what the abstractions were. In retrospect, it should’ve been obvious that the correct solution was to rip it all up and redo the whole thing. This didn’t take too long! I just hadn’t thought about that option too much.

So, late into the night I worked on it in my office. By the morning, it was hacky, there were a few bugs, but it worked. The code had to be used again, and this time I was ready. I gave a quick, chaotic presentation of the way that it currently works — using abstractions that are more standard, and it was better received than the previous version of the code. The next night I decided it would be nice to create something else too — what’s one more night? — so I tried to work on that. That did not go so well, and I mostly just ended up sleeping in an office chair.

1. Oppositional Defiant Disorder

2. It is also quite a good album.

3. Particularly apt we felt, it’s not hard to see why if you’re familiar with the Melodrama album and the rest of Lorde’s music.

4. Making me incredibly paranoid for about 50% of the concert. I don’t know if that was more the smoking or just my dislike of large crowds. Probably both.

5. Pirateship and Netflix and Yarr by Rumahoy

6. Though note, not that much more experience. We always waited 2 or 3 months between doing it. This was on my advice, having read about the effects on the brain’s serotonin system.

7. I’m slightly generalizing here outside of my experience. I’ve only ever really experienced ego-death-lite having never done any real hallucinogenics.

8. Now my long-term (monogamous, for reasons that will become clear) girlfriend.

9. I later learnt that I didn’t really make myself clear enough when asking this. She thought I was asking a question that was more “in-principle,” instead of “I think this is going to actually happen tonight.” I feel pretty bad about this misunderstanding.