Emily Eakin in the New York Times:
Nearly everyone struggled during the pandemic, but Justin Smith-Ruiu’s struggle took a particularly disturbing form. An American philosopher who teaches at the University of Paris, he was on a fellowship in New York in March 2020 when the city shut down, stranding him in a rental apartment in Brooklyn. He caught Covid the same month, and though he recovered from the virus, he sank into a deep, existential despair.
His job, his career milestones, even the homes, schools, hospitals and other institutions around which human social life revolved: All of it suddenly seemed flimsy and meaningless, like so much make-believe. “I had the sharp sense that the things that we take to be real just aren’t real,” he told me. “It was quite extreme.”
Smith-Ruiu, 53, could have sought counseling or joined the Great Resignation by quitting his job. Instead, he turned to drugs — first cannabis, then psilocybin (“magic mushrooms”) and, finally, muscimol, a psychedelic made from another mushroom, the fly agaric.
Yet his interest in mind-altering substances was as much professional as personal: His crisis of belief in the world around him was also, he concluded, a problem for his field.
More here.
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