joalturn wrote:
My former best friend may fall into this category.
We became close while in the army. He had some troubles with marijuana prior to joining. No run ins with the law, just smoked too much and became lazy/unmotivated. He decided to join up to turn his life around.
When we got out we talked about dabbling in smoking weed a little bit. It took a while, but he finally scored some skunk weed. We smoked one night, and it was super fun. I left and went back to my normal life, while he was just embarking on his journey back into that world.
Over the course of 3 years he began to smoke more and more to cope with the stresses of school (we were both in nursing school at the time) and the stresses of the COVID lockdown world. He eventually failed out of nursing school 2 times and was at a dead end of sorts. He worked a job as a security guard in an assisted living facility and spent the rest of his timing lighting up and focusing on his own “grow” operation.
Things took a turn when I mentioned a small research project I did on the effects of psilocybin on depression. He took it upon himself to begin to grow his own shrooms and experiment with their effects on himself. He influenced his then girlfriend to do the same.
So one random night in September 2021, both of them were tripping on shrooms and watching TV. His GF turns to him and says they should move to Hawaii. And that was just what he needed to hear.
In the course of 4 months they ended up having a backyard wedding, selling their home, buying a home on the big island of Hawaii, and using the profit from their house to ship all of their belongings and vehicles to Hawaii in January of 2022. They moved there with no jobs lined up and no real clue of what they would do when they got there. He eventually gets a job in a chocolate factory and begins to slowly but surely break off all communication with everyone he knew back on the mainland.
The last time I spoke to him was September of last year. I have no clue if it’s going amazingly, or if they’ve fallen back into their old habits. But they definitely hit the reset button hard on life and never thought of turning back.
And in case you were wondering, he landed a 100% VA disability pension when he got out of the Army, which has allowed him to financially do all of these crazy things that other people would be unable to do otherwise. I believe he gets $3500 tax free every month, which must be enough when combined with whatever he makes at his factory job and with whatever his wife brings in.
What I read here is that his downfall is your fault.
