One of defining facets of millennial youth and pre-Facebook culture was drug use. Drug use has always been bound to the exosphere of culture, reflecting and reifying mainstream culture's values, even in a rebellion. This is a thread to discuss it as it relates to zoomers and millennials. I will recount my own understanding of the oral history of modern drug culture. Feel free to correct it.
Now, offline (and most millennials were still offline around 1999-2001), culture was heavily shaped by music. MTV was the defining culture-orienting force then, and it would remain so for nearly a decade after. Although Wigger culture was still in ascendancy - primarily driven by Eminem - rock and metal were still thriving. This era's defining rock/metal ran from Nirvana, Faith No More, Metallica, Tool, and all the way to Slipknot, Radiohead, and Greenday. This was the music of suburbia. You know who the Tool kids were, who the slipknot kids were, who the Greenday kids were. Music was a social signifier and stratifier of suburban social groups. Yet this music, down to the core, was rooted in a seething hatred of the conditions of suburban life. Anyone with an IQ above room temperature wanted out.
In this context, one can understand the role of drug culture, and it’s attraction. Where Gen X was experiencing it’s own self-cultural critique by way of movies such as American Beauty, teenagers found escape by hanging out at the skatepark and smoking low-grade weed out of a perforated Coke can. All while blasting a Napster-pirated copy of Smells Like Teen Spirit. People mocked D.A.R.E and mocked safeytism doubly so. Willingness to experiment and push the boundaries was even associated with a sort of alternative masculinity. The bravest and boldest were taking mushrooms and taking heroic doses of acid. There was status in that - much respect was attributed to those who were most willing to task risks (see MTV’s Jackass).
Shifting back to online: Millennials, as the generation of ‘Post’ — post-rock, post-metal, post-modern — inherited nearly five decades of accumulated multimedia as they came online. On any forums in the early-mid 2000s, you would find numerous posts on drugs. These were by Millennial nerds and autists, which composed a different social formation to the skater-bro. Here, one could still find a pervasive optimism about the future, driven by technological innovations, and observe a kind of quasi-60s revivalism. SomethingAwful had to dedicate an entire subforum to the culture. In all such places, the spirit present was one of youth rebellion coupled with that revivalism: high-minded drug use was a means towards spiritual enlightenment. People spoke of Leary, of Osho, and read DMT: The Spirit Molecule. You could see strains of this everywhere online. It wasn’t hard to find.
Erowid, a generational intersection between millennial nerds and Gen X ones, compiled an incredibly large corpus of experiential diaries. It remains one of the most interesting cultural artifacts of that era - a collective journal documenting radical fringe and dangerous experimentation with every substance under the sun. In retrospect, it reads as Lovecraftian horror, with many users blazing towards a permanent and infinite psychosis. Yet, I think there was a beauty in it, a mad and crazed quest to reach the most extreme psychological states possible - against the edge of madness. It was, unsurprisingly, an entirely white autist phenomenon.
By the late 2000s, the enthusiasm had diminished. Millennials culturally normalized weed, and it was [becoming] an accepted recreational drug. No one smoked out of bent coke-cans anymore. Guys got high with their friends and watched Adventure Time. Or played some Halo 3 co-op. This was the pre-history to many modern Millennial norwoods. Meanwhile, disjoint cultural forces had begun to mock and tear apart the more nerdy psychedelic revivalism, which had already started to fall out of favor for the youngest Millennials and the oldest zoomers. What persists in this trend might be singularly represented in the figure of Joe Rogan, who alone seems to carry this cultural torch. No doubt partially accounting for his popularity amongst norwoods.
Somewhere during all this, there was also a shift towards party drugs. Xtasy was the new king. It was the drug of Scene and Emo. The drug of intense hedonistic experience, and it was the first precursor to Zoomer drug subculture. If drug use amongst millennials could be framed as a suburbanite rebellion against their reagenite parents, Xtasy was the first drug of early Web 2.0. It was the drug of MySpace and Facebook. And it came at a time when social media brought a tremendous amount of self-regard for our digital presence and image. Not only did everyone want to party — they felt an intense and burning need to be seen doing so. It was a novel and new marker of social status. This brought a brief revivalism of rave culture (previously primarily an Urban phenomenon) and interspersed it throughout the suburbs of America. Although the revivalism was short-lived, the nihilistic hedonism of it was henceforth entrenched. Where the Erowdite sought the spiritual edges of inner experience, this new group favored a simplistic escape from the doldrums of modern life.
If the original hedonism of X was still high-minded and social, it would soon decay into its lowest form. X faded back to the periphery. Opioids rose. Xannies rose. Lil’ Peep emptied a bottle on a bus yet managed to keep releasing music two years post-mortem. Many zoomers have grown up smoking weed, but it isn’t a rebellious act anymore — it is “I don’t feel good. I want to feel good”. This is what I’ve been told. And if they go harder, they go harder with the intent to escape. And not just Xanax and Opioids, but cheap and dirty shit such as codeine and whippets. Teenage trannies empty bottles of cough syrup under Amazon-purchased LEDs as they blast 100 Gecs. This is the world you see in Euphoria, though I’ve been told by many zoomers that it is simply an extreme glamorization of how it actually goes.
What is the Amarnite perspective on modern zoomer drug culture? Who is drawn in by it? Who is destroyed by it? Does the high-minded approach still exist - at all?
Now, offline (and most millennials were still offline around 1999-2001), culture was heavily shaped by music. MTV was the defining culture-orienting force then, and it would remain so for nearly a decade after. Although Wigger culture was still in ascendancy - primarily driven by Eminem - rock and metal were still thriving. This era's defining rock/metal ran from Nirvana, Faith No More, Metallica, Tool, and all the way to Slipknot, Radiohead, and Greenday. This was the music of suburbia. You know who the Tool kids were, who the slipknot kids were, who the Greenday kids were. Music was a social signifier and stratifier of suburban social groups. Yet this music, down to the core, was rooted in a seething hatred of the conditions of suburban life. Anyone with an IQ above room temperature wanted out.
In this context, one can understand the role of drug culture, and it’s attraction. Where Gen X was experiencing it’s own self-cultural critique by way of movies such as American Beauty, teenagers found escape by hanging out at the skatepark and smoking low-grade weed out of a perforated Coke can. All while blasting a Napster-pirated copy of Smells Like Teen Spirit. People mocked D.A.R.E and mocked safeytism doubly so. Willingness to experiment and push the boundaries was even associated with a sort of alternative masculinity. The bravest and boldest were taking mushrooms and taking heroic doses of acid. There was status in that - much respect was attributed to those who were most willing to task risks (see MTV’s Jackass).
Shifting back to online: Millennials, as the generation of ‘Post’ — post-rock, post-metal, post-modern — inherited nearly five decades of accumulated multimedia as they came online. On any forums in the early-mid 2000s, you would find numerous posts on drugs. These were by Millennial nerds and autists, which composed a different social formation to the skater-bro. Here, one could still find a pervasive optimism about the future, driven by technological innovations, and observe a kind of quasi-60s revivalism. SomethingAwful had to dedicate an entire subforum to the culture. In all such places, the spirit present was one of youth rebellion coupled with that revivalism: high-minded drug use was a means towards spiritual enlightenment. People spoke of Leary, of Osho, and read DMT: The Spirit Molecule. You could see strains of this everywhere online. It wasn’t hard to find.
Erowid, a generational intersection between millennial nerds and Gen X ones, compiled an incredibly large corpus of experiential diaries. It remains one of the most interesting cultural artifacts of that era - a collective journal documenting radical fringe and dangerous experimentation with every substance under the sun. In retrospect, it reads as Lovecraftian horror, with many users blazing towards a permanent and infinite psychosis. Yet, I think there was a beauty in it, a mad and crazed quest to reach the most extreme psychological states possible - against the edge of madness. It was, unsurprisingly, an entirely white autist phenomenon.
By the late 2000s, the enthusiasm had diminished. Millennials culturally normalized weed, and it was [becoming] an accepted recreational drug. No one smoked out of bent coke-cans anymore. Guys got high with their friends and watched Adventure Time. Or played some Halo 3 co-op. This was the pre-history to many modern Millennial norwoods. Meanwhile, disjoint cultural forces had begun to mock and tear apart the more nerdy psychedelic revivalism, which had already started to fall out of favor for the youngest Millennials and the oldest zoomers. What persists in this trend might be singularly represented in the figure of Joe Rogan, who alone seems to carry this cultural torch. No doubt partially accounting for his popularity amongst norwoods.
Somewhere during all this, there was also a shift towards party drugs. Xtasy was the new king. It was the drug of Scene and Emo. The drug of intense hedonistic experience, and it was the first precursor to Zoomer drug subculture. If drug use amongst millennials could be framed as a suburbanite rebellion against their reagenite parents, Xtasy was the first drug of early Web 2.0. It was the drug of MySpace and Facebook. And it came at a time when social media brought a tremendous amount of self-regard for our digital presence and image. Not only did everyone want to party — they felt an intense and burning need to be seen doing so. It was a novel and new marker of social status. This brought a brief revivalism of rave culture (previously primarily an Urban phenomenon) and interspersed it throughout the suburbs of America. Although the revivalism was short-lived, the nihilistic hedonism of it was henceforth entrenched. Where the Erowdite sought the spiritual edges of inner experience, this new group favored a simplistic escape from the doldrums of modern life.
If the original hedonism of X was still high-minded and social, it would soon decay into its lowest form. X faded back to the periphery. Opioids rose. Xannies rose. Lil’ Peep emptied a bottle on a bus yet managed to keep releasing music two years post-mortem. Many zoomers have grown up smoking weed, but it isn’t a rebellious act anymore — it is “I don’t feel good. I want to feel good”. This is what I’ve been told. And if they go harder, they go harder with the intent to escape. And not just Xanax and Opioids, but cheap and dirty shit such as codeine and whippets. Teenage trannies empty bottles of cough syrup under Amazon-purchased LEDs as they blast 100 Gecs. This is the world you see in Euphoria, though I’ve been told by many zoomers that it is simply an extreme glamorization of how it actually goes.
What is the Amarnite perspective on modern zoomer drug culture? Who is drawn in by it? Who is destroyed by it? Does the high-minded approach still exist - at all?
