Why I’m Doing Mushrooms
at Almost 60

As we get older, our thinking gets more rigid, more predictable. Maybe that’s when we need psychedelics the most.

By David Hochman

Photograph Yianni Mathioudakis/Unsplash

The urine cup was the least strange part.

By then I was three hours into an in-person screening in a basement suite at USC that looked like the wellness division of a dystopian Netflix drama. Fluorescent lights, beige walls, doors leading to other doors. Two grad students sat across from me, delivering steady, earnest eye contact. Their questions were voluminous, direct and vaguely concerning.

Had I ever heard voices no one else could hear? Any history of setting fires or uncontrolled rage? Did anything like that run in my family? What about blood pressure meds, antidepressants and anything recreational, prescribed or conveniently unmentioned?

We talked through childhood, my marriage, grief, work, sleep, exercise, sex, fear, mortality and the general load-bearing capacity of the structure known as me. Then came the drug test (I aced it, lo) and an important safety briefing: there will be no driving that day, no freelancing the dosage, no deciding halfway through that the moment calls for tequila. A trained guide will be in the room the entire time, all seven hours. All I could think was: Bring on the drugs.

I am almost sixty and I am about to take psilocybin. I’ve never even seen mushrooms in person. For all I know they show up looking like something scraped off the underside of a canoe. And still, I want them with every ounce of my Just Say No-era being.

Inside the body, the psilocybin in mushrooms converts it into psilocin, which acts on serotonin receptors involved in mood, perception and the brain’s ability to form new connections. For several hours, familiar mental boundaries can become unusually permeable. Colors intensify, time bends, emotions surface, and you might find yourself chatting with Eleanor Roosevelt.

Researchers believe this temporary period of heightened “flexibility” may help some patients break out of rigid thought patterns, including those associated with treatment-resistant depression, addiction, and the fear and anxiety that can accompany cancer or the end of life. Even so, as my new lab buds reminded me, psilocybin remains federally illegal and unapproved as a medical treatment, with risks that include panic, nausea, elevated blood pressure, and, for vulnerable patients, mania and psychosis.

I spend too much time in line at CVS. I don’t care about Real Housewives. I think this is why psychedelia keeps gnawing at me. There’s a sameness I want to unhinge.

Maybe you’ve read Michael Pollan. Maybe you watched that Netflix documentary with the time-lapsing spores and the radical mycologists who look like they just saw God. Or maybe, like me, you have a friend who’s blown your mind by telling you how he’s blown his. My friend Larry swears he saw his dead son during a mushroom trip, not in some fuzzy dream but right there with him in the room, for hours. You don’t nod politely and go back to the guacamole after a story like that.

My actual invitation arrived through the most mystical portal available to a man my age: a sponsored ad on Instagram for the psilocybin study, wedged between pictures of pickleball shoes and a cake shaped like a dachshund.

Why not me? Why not now?

I clicked.

In my family, sixty is not the beginning of the third act. It’s roughly the intermission. We live forever, my people, generation after generation, grinding it out for decades longer than seems medically reasonable, almost as a dare to the universe. Live long, they proved. Nobody said anything about living well.

I don’t want that deal. I prefer a version with more joy, more surprise and definitely less kvetching. I want greater connection, edgier adventure, richer experience, unexpected insight. Introversion has served me well as a writer, but just once I’d like to walk into a party and say the first true thing that comes to mind instead of something I workshopped in the car. I’d love to stop showering before Zoom calls out of self-consciousness about a dwindling hairline. Steve Jobs used to say there were two kinds of people, the ones who’d done psychedelics and the ones who hadn’t, and that the difference showed up later, in how they thought, in whether their work felt like it was pouring out of them or being extracted with pliers. I have spent a long time extracting. I would like, just once before the credits roll, to feel something flow.

And it’s not like I’ve never touched a drug. My freshman year at Vassar, my roommates and I kept a giant calendar taped to our door, and every night we smoked weed, someone scrawled an X. By spring the whole thing looked like a game of tic-tac-toe played by lunatics. I don’t recall most of those evenings, but one is not entirely gone.

With the aid of some mediocre cannabis and the total confidence available exclusively to nineteen-year-olds with no classes until noon, I experienced what I annoyingly started calling My Epiphany. Capital M. Capital E. Capital WTAF.

It started with a fifteenth-century oil painting. My roommate Jeff was studying for an art history midterm and showed me an image of Verrocchio’s Baptism of Christ. Key parts of the painting had been rendered by the master’s twenty-year-old apprentice, Jeff explained, and he asked if I noticed anything different about the two angels kneeling near St. John and Jesus. Not really, said Philistine me. Look closer. This time the angel on the left suddenly popped. The bounce of the curls. The blue robe catching light. The jeweled clasp at the shoulder. The liquid in the eyes. A body occupying real space instead of sitting there like a cartoon.

Pollan argues that psychedelics might matter more the older you get, precisely because the grooves have had longer to carve themselves into your thinking.

“Ever hear of a guy named Leonardo da Vinci?” Jeff laughed. “That’s his angel. He’s basically inventing the High Renaissance right there.”

At two in the morning in a dorm room in Poughkeepsie, my mind melted a little. I felt as if I understood art for the first time: the match-strike moment when one person makes something that did not exist before. Jeff had a pile of examples—a young Louis Armstrong opening “West End Blues” with a trumpet cadenza that redrew the possibilities of jazz; James Joyce breaking the novel open in Ulysses; Iggy Pop turning the lead singer into a shirtless, self-destructive live wire. I felt a Whitmanesque communion with all things. I couldn’t stop playing “Heart of Gold.” Maybe that weed wasn’t so bad.

Go ahead, roll your eyes if you want. I hear you assuming this was some stoner one-off, forgotten by the following weekend. It wasn’t. My grades shot up from a 2.8 to a 4.0, and the inspiration stuck, for years. As a journalist, I chased adventure, remote places, fascinating conversations, meditation retreats and profile subjects who’d had their own private detonation, all of it in search of something, anything, akin to that magic connectedness to the universe I felt that night. For a long time it worked. I found reasonable facsimiles of it on assignment in Kyoto, up a river in Ethiopia, in conversation with awe researchers like Dacher Keltner and also just hanging around with my wife and kid.

Lately, however, that feeling has felt harder to grasp. The nest is empty, but we still haven’t converted our son’s room into a yoga studio. I spend too much time in line at CVS. I don’t care about Real Housewives. I think this is why psychedelia keeps gnawing at me. There’s a sameness I want to unhinge. Pollan argues that psychedelics might matter more the older you get, precisely because the grooves have had longer to carve themselves into your thinking. Psilocybin doesn’t hand you new material so much as it loosens the grip on the old material long enough for it to fall into a different shape. The ego gets demoted from commanding officer to middle manager for an afternoon. The mind goes soft and permeable in ways it usually can’t afford to. I’d accept a CVS receipt a mile long for a trip like that.

“Anything you’re worried about?” the two researchers with clipboards wanted to know as the intake wrapped. I told the truth as best I could. I admitted I’m afraid of losing control. I also admitted that control has started to bore me.

Which is to say, I’m going in scrappy. I’m open to a pivotal midlife moment that doesn’t require learning mahjong or a solemn inventory of my prostate. This is a weird, excellent age. We have scars, passwords, grudges, skills, people we’ve buried and people we’ve raised and people we’ve disappointed and occasionally amazed. And still…there is plenty left in there to disturb.

David Hochman is a writer in Los Angeles whose bylines appear in GQ, The New York Times, Esquire and elsewhere.