We're Here for Like 5 Minutes

The Psychedelic Blog is an independent media brand covering drugs, altered states & the culture surrounding them.

This week: Why remembering we're only here for like 5 minutes changed how I think about life.

Recently, during an MDMA experience, a woman said, “We’re here for like 5 minutes.” It’s one of the simplest things anyone has ever said to me, but I haven't stopped thinking about it since.

We exist for an absurdly brief window.

The universe is roughly 13.8 billion years old. Anatomically modern humans have been here for about 300,000 years. You get 80 or so years if you’re lucky. We spend so much of it arguing on social media, defending our identity, worrying about what strangers think or pretending certainty about things nobody actually understands.

The Shift

At some point that realization stopped feeling depressing & started feeling liberating.

Over the past few years, something in me has changed. I don’t care about winning arguments. I only fuck with the status games I actually care about. I no longer feel the need to perform intelligence or uniqueness for other people. I have zero desire to have the perfect opinion on the most recent political controversy.

The shit I care about now is simple: swimming in the ocean, a good book, CrossFit, practices that raise awareness & catalyze presence (meditation, breathwork, psilocybin), engaging conversations, writing something that makes one person think or feel differently & spending time with people who make life feel lighter instead of heavier.

Ordinary > Extraordinary

Ironically, the older I get, the less I want an extraordinary life.

I want an ordinary Tuesday punctuated by the occasional extraordinary experience. Most days should be simple:

• Train.
• Read.
• Write.
• Talk with friends & family.
• Listen to Billy Joel during meal prep.
• Watch the sunset over the ocean.

Every now & then, travel somewhere unforgettable or have an experience that reminds you how strange & beautiful it is to be alive. Periodically do something challenging to reset the brain’s baseline…otherwise luxury & comfort become the standard. This is a major problem in the modern world.

Most people instantly associate Psychedelic experiences with the mystical. And that's part of it, for sure, but one of their biggest gifts is how they deepen your appreciation for ordinary experiences. The mundane. The banal. The strange. The American Beauty style magic all around us all the time.

Experiences are wonderful, but a life built entirely around chasing experiences isn’t.

Legacy

People talk a lot about legacy. I’ve never found it to be a particularly compelling motivator because it depends almost entirely on what other people think of you after you’re gone. You’ll never know the verdict anyway. And that verdict can change with the times.

The question that interests me more is much simpler: since we’re here for like 5 minutes, what actually matters?

I think it's the people you love, the conversations you remember years later, the work that feels meaningful, the moments that remind you how strange it is to exist at all & the days you were actually present for instead of rushing through them on the way to somewhere else.

If I have a legacy when it’s all said & done, it’ll be pretty simple:

• Left people a little better than I found them.
• Tipped generously.
• Looked workers in the eye & thanked them.
• Stayed curious.
• Trained hard.
• Loved deeply.
• Laughed a lot.
• Didn’t waste too much of my very brief time worrying about things that never really mattered.

We’re here for like 5 minutes. That isn’t depressing, it’s liberating.

No one remembers every news cycle, no one wins every argument & no one experiences everything. Yet we spend an astonishing amount of our brief existence acting as though every notification deserves our attention, every controversy requires our opinion & every moment needs to be documented instead of lived.

The older I get, the less interested I am in accumulating impressive experiences & the more interested I am in building a life I don’t feel the need to escape from. A life with people I love, work that feels meaningful, a healthy body, genuine curiosity, moments of adventure & enough simple days to appreciate all of it.

Maybe that’s what the woman meant. We’re here for like 5 minutes…that’s not nearly enough time to spend performing for strangers, chasing every status game or worrying about things that won’t matter a year from now.

But it’s more than enough time to build a quality life in all the ways that actually count.