Somewhere out there, floating in a massive stretch of nothing, is a tiny blue speck. (Spoiler: it’s us.)
In 1990, Carl Sagan looked at a photo of Earth from billions of miles away and basically said: everything you’ve ever known, every person, every problem, every awkward grocery store run… It’s all happening on that dot.
And yet: alarm clock. Inbox. The thing you said in 2014 that you still think about sometimes.
Existence is genuinely, deeply, cosmically absurd, and most of us are out here fully dressed for it, commuting in little shoes, sending follow-up emails, as if the fundamental mystery of consciousness is something to revisit later when things calm down a little.
They never calm down. (You know this.)
Humans have always known this, actually. And they’ve always reached for something to help them sit with it. So why does getting a little stoned make us suddenly want to contemplate the nature of consciousness, the inexplicable persistence of the necktie, and whether fish are having a good time?
Genuinely great question. Let's talk about it.
Weed Has Been Doing This For a While
This isn’t new behavior.
Humans have been getting a little altered and asking big questions for… a very long time.
Across cultures, across centuries, across wildly different belief systems, people have consistently reached for plants and substances as a way to step outside their default perspective. To loosen the grip of everyday thinking just enough to see something else.
Cannabis has been part of that mix for thousands of years.
And as we get closer to modern history, you start to see a pattern: some of the most curious, creative, and introspective people were… not exactly avoiding it.
- Carl Sagan: Wrote anonymously about cannabis for years. Said it helped him see familiar things as if for the first time. The guy spent his life staring into the cosmos and apparently weed made him better at it.
- The Beats: Writers from the Beat generation like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, documented cannabis as part of a broader effort to break out of rigid thinking and explore consciousness more freely.
- Charles Baudelaire: A part of the Club des Hashischins, a parisian club devoted to exploring what hashish does to the imagination. They took notes. It was very French.
Even outside of explicitly “philosophical” circles, you see it show up the same way:
- Louis Armstrong: One of the most influential jazz musicians of all time. Openly spoke about cannabis helping him relax, stay present, and move through life with a little more ease. Vocal and completely unapologetic about it his entire career.
- Maya Angelou: Acclaimed writer and civil rights activist. Documented cannabis use during formative creative periods while developing her voice and perspective.
- Steve Jobs: Co-founder of Apple. Said it made him relaxed, creative, and helped him think differently and approach ideas from new angles.
Different eras. Different disciplines. Different everything. But they all had the same basic instinct: let the brain go somewhere it wouldn't normally go.
Your Brain, Off the Leash
To make one thing perfectly clear: THC doesn't make you creative.
It doesn't install new thoughts or hand you a better brain. It just... loosens the grip of the one you already have.
Specifically, it disrupts something called the Default Mode Network (DMN), which is like your brain's inner hall monitor. The DMN is the part that keeps your thoughts on the hamster wheel. The to-do list. The social autopilot. The constant low-grade hum of “am I doing this right?”.
When THC quiets the DMN down, something called divergent thinking opens up. Dots connect that wouldn't otherwise connect. Familiar things start looking strange and interesting again. A thought you'd normally file under “weird, moving on” becomes something worth actually following.
Which is why stoned conversations go places that sober ones don't. And why those places are sometimes genuinely interesting.
You know the ones:
- Wondering who decided the right order of the alphabet
- Deeply investigating whether the color you see as "blue" is the same blue everyone else sees
- Becoming briefly but sincerely convinced that dogs understand more than they're letting on
- Wondering what the first person to eat a lobster was thinking. Like the whole journey they went on.
- Pondering how many people were poisoned trying new plants to learn which ones are edible.
- Being increasingly unsure if déjà vu is a glitch or a feature
None of that is your brain malfunctioning. That's your brain running around the yard without a leash for once.
And it turns out that’s sometimes all it takes to see something differently.
You Don't Need Much. Just a Porch and a Seltzer.
So if THC quiets the noise and lets your brain wander a little further than usual, the question becomes: how do you actually use that?
The answer is you don't need much.
A low, manageable dose is usually where this kind of thinking lives. Enough to soften the edges, but not enough to send you into orbit. The sweet spot is less "heroic journey" and more "really good afternoon" so you stay present enough to follow a thought, and relaxed enough to actually enjoy where it goes.
Research suggests divergent thinking peaks at lower doses. Go too far and the DMN doesn't get a gentle nudge, it just clocks out entirely. Dose is the difference between joyfully investigating the philosophical implications of which side of the bed you sleep on and “I am an animal and my animal instincts are animalistically screaming chips.”
The neat part? That's exactly where Cycling Frog lives. Our seltzers are light and sessionable for the slow burn of a good conversation or an afternoon with no real agenda. And our gummies are great if you want to go a little deeper into the rabbit hole.
Either way: a quiet space, someone worth talking or listening to, and enough screen-free time to let a weird thought finish its sentence is all you need. The rest takes care of itself.
While You're At It, Consider the Following:
Next time you're settled in with a THC seltzer and a slow afternoon, here are a few questions worth sitting with:
- Your actual hottest take that you've never said out loud
- Whether aliens exist, and if they are also stressed about work
- Whether dinosaurs looked how we think they did or if they were just enormous weird birds the whole time
- What your cat is actually thinking when she stares at the wall for three minutes straight
- Whether there's a timeline where you ordered something different for lunch one day and it completely changed everything
- If numbers were invented or discovered and why that question makes your head hurt
- Whether the dance you do when you're alone in the kitchen has a name
- If fish know they’re wet???
- Whether the best conversation you ever had is one the other person even remembers
- Whether cereal or milk goes in first actually matters and why you have feelings about it
- How spiders would wear pants. How giraffes would wear ties. How frogs would hold chopsticks.
- How you would explain your job to a medieval peasant
- If a raccoon broke into your house and you had to negotiate with it what's your opening offer
- Whether your pet has a nickname for you and if it's flattering
- Whether your skeleton is having a good time in there
- What's the one piece of advice you'd give to your younger self that you *know* they wouldn't listen to?
- If you could perfectly archive one single memory (not a period of time, just one moment) to revisit later, which moment would you choose?
- what is the single most meaningful *small* thing you do every day?
- What object in your house is going to confuse archeologists the most in 1,000 years?
- If life is short, what is the *biggest* thing you're overthinking right now that you should just let go of?
- Whether the inventor of the alarm clock had friends
Grab a seltzer. Get comfortable.
The dot is pale and blue and floating in nothing and existence is genuinely absurd. But that’s okay. Just sit back and enjoy the ride 🐸
