Home / Woo Woo (October 2026)

I hate being bored, but I've come to realize it's a bit like exercise. It's painful in the moment, but it often leads to new, interesting, and sometimes important things I might not have discovered otherwise.

Since I started letting myself get more bored, I've noticed that I'm really interested in consciousness, and that has led to an interest in all of these adjacent woo woo things like meditation, mysticism, near death experiences, aliens, psychedelics, remote viewing, dreams, and so on. I'm not saying all these things are literally real, but I've come to believe they are worth looking more into and might be able to help us better understand ourselves.

Without going into all of these fields, I've noticed that when you dive into the science, the results are frustrating. For example, if you dig into the tests on whether human consciousness can influence the results of random number generators, it seems like, yes, in aggregate there is a small but statistically signifigant positive result. But there are also studies that can't replicate this, there could be causal flaws in the experiments, and it's all vague enough that it's hard to say for sure.

At the same time, there seems to be an enormous amount of anecdotal evidence for a lot of this woo woo stuff. Tons of credible people with seemingly nothing to gain reporting very similar sounding experiences independently. I mean, former president Jimmy Carter said in his autobiography and in an interview with GQ magazine that one of the most memorable parts of his presidency was working with a CIA-hired psychic in California who gave them the accurate coordinates of a downed aircraft in Africa. Wait, what?

I've been surprised that very few people want to talk about this stuff. I'm the annoying guy that brings up sudden savant syndrome at a party, only to find out that it mysteriously causes people to need to use the restroom.

When I ask people why they don't care about this stuff, the most common response is that they have too much else to worry about. Fair enough. In an evolutionary sense, we're wired to survive and procreate, not talk about aliens. But if that is the case, shouldn't it imply that poorer cultures would spend less time on these questions, because they have to spend more time attending to basic needs?

I've had the opportunity to live in a bunch of different places, and I've noticed that poorer cultures tend to talk about woo woo stuff more than rich cultures. And it's not just more religion, it's talk of medicine men, ancient lore and stories about weird things that happened. My naive reading of history is also that this stuff was much more common to talk about in the past, presumably when people had a harder time fulfilling their basic needs.

Why is this? I'm sure there are tons of factors, one being that wealth and free time might not be correlated this way. I don't feel qualified to speculate too deeply, however, at first I was skeptical of the argument that people are too busy to care about any of this woo woo stuff. Sure, we are all busy, but the average American also spends 2.6 hours a day watching TV, so it's not like it's impossible to make time. Ultimately, it's a priority thing.

Why don't we prioritize these things? I can't speak for anyone else, and obviously everyone should be free to care about whatever they want. But it is also odd to me that I wasn't into this stuff at all until recently, too. In fact, I thought it was all a big waste of time. I was rational, logical, blah, blah, blah.

I think the biggest reason is that I'd never experienced any woo woo stuff first hand, so I assumed it was all fake. But once I dipped my toe into some of this stuff, I was shocked to find out that there was more here than I'd assumed. In addition to not experiencing anything, I'd never really been introduced to these ideas. It's not like you have a class on lanmaoa asiatica mushrooms at school, although if school spent more time on the stuff we don't understand than on memorizing the stuff we've already figured out, I would have paid more attention.

Building on that, there aren't really any big institutions that focus on this stuff. Religion wants you to think they have the answers, government wants you to think they have the answers, school wants you to think they have the answers. There isn't a big institution that has an incentive to say, "there's a bunch of weird shit we don't understand" because it makes them less powerful. They are all the guy at the party that has the answer.

The main people that have a financial incentive to talk about this stuff are opportunists, and I used to assume that most people in this woo woo world were out to sell you some magic crystals to make a quick buck, and that if you believed in this stuff, you were a sucker. I now know that, like many things, this is only partially true.

Lastly, I think deep down this stuff is so weird and unknown that it's kind of scary - it's overwhelming to think about how little we know about existence. It's much more comforting to focus on what we understand. And we're getting pretty good at understanding materialist physics. But while we understand how gravity works, we're in the stone ages when it comes to why we experience gravity. It's like we're fish that have mapped every inch of our tank, but we won't accept that there is anything real outside our tank, despite a non-trivial number of fish getting taken out of the tank, put back in, and having similar stories about that really weird thing that happened.

When I was younger I mostly assumed everyone knew what they were doing, we'd figured most stuff out, and woo woo stuff was almost certainly fake. Now it's kind of the opposite. We don't know very much and what if all this weird stuff is kinda true? Not that every story is exactly true, but that the themes are directionally correct. The truth is likely somewhere in between, but I feel more energized thinking about the more mysterious aspects of reality than I do thinking about it as purely mechanical, and lots of the mystery seems adjacent to understanding consciousness.

It reminds me of the meme about how we're born too late to explore the earth, too early to explore the stars, and just in time to sell b2b software. But what if the next frontier isn't outer space. What if it's hiding, at least in part, within ourselves, and what if we've lost some of our curiosity by being so focused on the material world? Maybe things really were more mystical back in the day, simply because people had the time to notice? Or maybe believing in these things plays a role in experiencing them?

Writing this all out has helped me realize that people are mostly right. We don't have the time to dig into all this woo woo stuff. But it's not exactly that we don't have time, it's that we don't make time to be bored, and by not being bored, we don't spend as much time sitting and looking up at the stars and thinking, "what the fuck is going on?" Anyways, how funny would it be if UFOs are real and right at the point in history when we all get camera phones, we start spending all our nights looking down.