5 Reasons All Young Men Should Quit Weed
1) Weed Kills Social Skills When High
I’ve never met someone who’s better socially when they are on weed. Social engagement on weed tends to be very cerebral.
The vibe we want to go for in attraction, business, working the room, meeting new people, is less cerebral and more energetic. It’s less based on ideating and more based on feeling.
Sometimes attraction works just via a beaming of energy that occurs via eye contact. The fact that it’s so much harder to make eye contact on weed is a major red flag that being high is not the wavelength you want to be on when socializing.
2) Weed Kills Social Skills Even When Sober
What’s even more insidious is that weed kills your social skills not just when you’re high, but also when sober. All of socializing is a vibe. The way you feel in your own mind and body is going to bleed out into the social interaction.
If you feel super positive, funny, and charismatic, that is going to infect whoever you are talking to. What you feel, they will feel.
Now, cannabis is an addictive drug that completely highjacks your dopamine reward system. The more you smoke, the more it becomes the case that you become dependent on weed to make you feel good inside your own body.
As Andrew Huberman says, “addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure.” For a stoner, only weed can bring you pleasure.
And so when you’re not high, you aren’t feeling good. And if you aren’t feeling good, you aren’t going to bring that infectiously positive vibe into socializing that’s going to attract people to you.
The more sober you are, and the more pain and discomfort you allow yourself to feel by avoiding cheap dopamine fixes like cannabis, the more you will feel happy and upbeat as you go about your day, meeting people, chatting them up, etc.
This vibe will attract people to you as compared to the burnt out, dopamine-deprived vibe of someone who goes through their day on a weed hangover.
3) Weed Destroys Good Sleep
So much of Jaw Hacking is about improving sleep. We are literally breaking and cutting our facial bones in order to augment our airways so we can sleep better. Well, weed prevents optimal sleep cycles. Some people can’t fall asleep if they are high. They toss and turn for hours as their thoughts race.
Yeah, there is a certain pleasure to having your thoughts race, as you ideate, create plans, etc. But is it worth sacrificing a key hour or two of sleep in the early part of the night? I heard it said recently that the two ours of sleep from 9-11pm or 10-midnight are weighted more heavily than making up those same two hours the next morning by sleeping in.
Sure, there might be some pleasure involved in getting stoned, but is it worth sacrificing the pleasure involved in sleeping well and waking up feeling great the next day?
4) Weed Prevents You From Finding Your Purpose
So many young people are aimless. They are dying to dig into some life project, some goal they can crank down on everyday. If you just assigned them a vocation, and told them this was their life’s mission, they could produce so much, they have so much potential to work hard everyday to achieve.
Does anything feel better than having a clear goal and working everyday toward achieving it? And does anything feel worse than knowing you have so much potential inside of yourself, and yet not knowing what to plug it into?
Before you can have work ethic, you need something to work on. You need to choose a career, a vocation, a project. And this is where I have struggled myself, and where I have seen other people struggling.
It’s the paradox of choice. There are so many options for what we could do with our lives, and so we end up paralyzed, not choosing anything at all.
A key step toward figuring out what to do with your life is quitting weed entirely. I know it’s counterintuitive for some of you, because we feel like some of our best expansive thinking, some of our best “vision-questing” occurs when we are stoned. We get all these great plans and ideas.
But then we never act on them. Why?
Because the plans we come up with when we are stoned are arising from a mental environment that’s flooded with cheap dopamine. Of course, these stoned life-planning sessions always end with a commitment to start the hard work tomorrow.
But then what happens? You wake up in a weed hangover, with your brain feeling totally depleted of its happy chemical balance. And you look back at the previous day’s ruminations and you wonder if it was all a delusion.
Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t, but one thing’s for sure - right now, in your weed hangover, you aren’t feeling ready to take action on it.
This is the cycle so many aimless pot smoking young people fall into. They smoke weed to feel motivated, then while hopped up on extreme amounts of unearned dopamine, they make plans.
Then they come down, and feel too burnt out to do anything about it, and the cycle continues. To get back to that same feeling of excitement for the future, they have to smoke again.
The way a young person finds his life’s work is by establishing a baseline of sobriety. Figuring out your life’s work is like trying to solve a mystery. And to solve that mystery you need evidence. Key evidence is, “what do I enjoy doing sober?”
Because no real man plans on being a stoner for his whole life. No man seeks a livelihood that he plans on doing high everyday. So why do we get stoned to decide what we enjoy and what we want to do with our time?
Get off all cheap dopamine and set a new baseline for your happy chemicals. Then build from there. What makes me feel good? What types of activities make me feel like I don’t need to smoke weed to feel good?
When you can start filling in these blanks, now you are getting closer to finding an activity you can do on a daily basis that brings you that hard-earned dopamine pleasure, that not only feels good as a reward, but that also motivates you to do more of that same activity so you can feel more reward again later.
That’s dopamine - an infinite reservoir of motivation/reward chemical.
What a lot of young men might find is that working with their hands is a sustainable way to be sober. There is something about building and fixing things using tools and materials that is natural for humans and gets our dopamine reward system firing on all cylinders.
These types of jobs can also be extraordinarily high paying, especially here in the US since very few young people are going into the trades these days because they have no prestige.
I am a tax preparer so I see what hundred of people earn in their jobs, and I have electricians, pipe fitters, iron workers, and carpenters earning between $100-150K USD every year, especially those in unions.
I personally find working with my hands to be very satisfying, but my body is a little too sensitive to be able to do it for a living. But I did work professionally as an electrician and a BMW mechanic for some time.
Now I find client interfacing to be a sustainable source of dopamine. Interfacing with other humans forces you to be on point and it can be quite a thrill to sit and interview 5 people a day, to connect and bond with them.
I also find creating content and getting feedback on YouTube to be a sustainable source of hard-earned dopamine for me.
You need to figure out what gets your gears turning.
5) Weed Prevents You From Enjoying the Daily Grind
As Andrew Huberman says, happiness is progressively expanding the things and activities that are able to bring you pleasure.
A man’s life needs to revolve around a daily work schedule that is arduous and yet delivers him great pleasure through our built in dopamine reward system.
Building your life’s work requires establishing a healthy, sustainable dopamine reward schedule. You have to be able to harvest the biochemical rewards of making progress on your work on a daily basis.
Dopamine is released in response to pain. This is one of neuroscientist Andrew Huberman’s core ideas - dopamine is produced naturally in response to pain.
Cold plunging for 3 minutes increases dopamine 250% for two hours after. People think it’s cold water that produces dopamine. It’s not - it’s the pain of being in the cold water.
Doing an hour of hard work writing a paper, doing a problem set, creating a YouTube video or framing a house, is painful in some sense.
But our Creator, who wants us to work hard, planned for that. In response to our hard work, he blesses us with dopamine, which gives us pleasure and at the same time motivates us to put in more work so we can feel more pleasure.
Dopamine is not so much a reward chemical as it is a motivation chemical.
When we smoke weed, we throw this system out of whack. When we touch the dopamine extremes of being high, the little doses of dopamine we get from putting in work on our goals becomes insufficient.
