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Plasticity
In his 2018 text, How to Change Your Mind, journalist Michael Pollan describes the plasticity of the quality of experience psychedelics can offer in different contexts:
The difference between these two experiences of the same drug [psilocybin mushrooms] demonstrated something important, and special, about psychedelics: the critical influence of “set” and “setting.” Set is the mind-set or expectation one brings to the experience, and setting is the environment in which it takes place. Compared with other drugs, psychedelics seldom affect people in the same way twice, because they tend to magnify whatever’s already going on both inside and outside one’s head. (Page 6)
Money, like psychedelics, can feel entirely different with a different set and setting:
a) Mandatory child support to your x,
b) Voluntary contributions to your grandchild’s college education,
c) Those drug deals you would do in cash out of your Oldsmobile late in high school,
d) And that time you bought a digital cat with cryptocurrency.
Although the contrast is intuitively jarring, these relationships all involve money. How broad is this range?
