This one is personal.
I started working on Shroomies in 2018, after my dad died and I entered one of the darkest periods of my life. I was depressed. I was taking SSRIs. I was very close to self-harm. I didn’t feel like myself, and I didn’t know how to get back.
Then a friend invited me to a psychedelic mushroom session.
I thought it sounded ridiculous. I’m not a Burning Man guy. I’m not a hippie. I don’t like the Grateful Dead. I definitely don’t like Phish.
But I went.
What happened over the next six hours started a much longer process of figuring out what was happening inside my own head. I eventually had a few more experiences. Things changed. Some changes were good. Some were difficult. But I came out of that period knowing myself better.
Most importantly, I’m still here.
Book Party Fun!
Are you in New York? I’ll be holding a book party in Brooklyn on September 24 and I need a rough headcount so please RSVP here!
That experience also made me curious. What were these substances actually doing? Why were people using them for depression, PTSD, end of life care, relationships, and creativity? Why had something dismissed for decades suddenly become the subject of serious medical research?
So I started reporting.
The result is Shroomies, a book about psychedelic mushrooms, the people using them, the people studying them, and the strange cultural shift happening around them.
It isn’t an argument that everyone should take mushrooms. Psychedelics carry real risks, and I would never recommend experimenting with them alone. It’s a book about what happens when people who have run out of answers start looking somewhere else.
That feels very close to what Keep Going has always been about. Failure doesn’t always arrive as a failed company or a lost job. Sometimes it is much more subtle. Sometimes is that the status quo stops working for you, that your biggest enemy becomes yourself. Then you have to figure out what comes next. You don’t have to try mushrooms but please try my book.
Shroomies is out today, September 8, in hardcover and on Kindle. If you’re a journalist or simply review books anywhere, I’m happy to send you a copy. Just drop me a line at john@biggs.cc.
I hope you read it.
As always, thank you for listening and supporting me. It means the world.
