By Joanna Woronkowicz
I’ve never taken psychedelic drugs.
This isn’t a moral stance or a political position. It’s just a fact about my life. Somehow I’ve made it to my mid-forties without ever trying mushrooms, LSD, or anything similar.
But recently I read an essay in Granta that made me think about why people do.
The author begins by describing a feeling that I suspect many people around my age recognize. Sometime during her forty-eighth year, she writes, she began hearing herself say things like: “I don’t really need to live much longer,” or “If I died tomorrow, that would be fine.”
She didn’t mean that she was depressed or suicidal. Quite the opposite. Her life was good: meaningful work, close friendships, a partner she loved. But when she looked ahead, she saw mostly repetition. The major life-shaping milestones—the things you imagine in your twenties—were already behind her.
She writes:
“I felt like I knew who I was, and what my life was, and looking to the future, I saw only repetition. My work, my friendships, my relationship with my boyfriend were all good. I just didn’t see the value in decades more of living.”
Reading this, I felt an uncomfortable jolt of recognition.
By a certain age, you’ve done many of the things that once felt like the defining events of adulthood. You get the degree. You build the career. You get married. Maybe you have kids. These are the markers that structure the story you imagine for yourself when you’re younger.
And then one day you realize that the major plot points of the story may already have happened.
Life continues, of course. But it can start to feel like the same chapters repeating themselves.
The author decides to confront this feeling in an unusual way: she tries psychedelic drugs for the first time. Mushrooms. LSD. Experiences she had never had before.
Without spoiling the essay (it’s worth reading), what she describes isn’t just hallucinations or altered perceptions. It’s something more subtle. The experiences open up angles on things she thought she already understood—her relationships, her memories, the texture of ordinary life. Even after the drugs wear off, she finds that they have stirred new thoughts that continue to unfold.
In other words, they disrupt the sense that everything has already been seen.
I found myself thinking about that essay today while visiting the ArOS Museum in Aarhus.
ArOS is a large contemporary art museum. And I should confess something: I’m not really a museum person.
Music moves me. Theater moves me. But visual art often doesn’t. When I walk through museums, I often feel like I’m waiting for something to happen emotionally, and it just… doesn’t.
And yet I still go.
Maybe because I hope something will happen. Maybe because I think it’s good for me. Maybe because, as a cultural economist, it feels like something I’m supposed to do.
So there I was, walking through the galleries today.
And honestly, a lot of what I saw struck me as… not very good.
Some of the pieces had that familiar contemporary-art effect where your first reaction is: couldn’t my kid draw that? There were installations that felt heavy-handed, paintings that felt random, conceptual pieces that seemed more like a joke than an artwork.
But somewhere along the way I found myself thinking: maybe that’s not really the point.
The point might simply be that I saw it.
I saw something that I hadn’t seen before. And in seeing something unfamiliar—something strange, confusing, or even irritating—it nudged my thinking slightly sideways.
Not dramatically. Not in a life-changing way.
But just enough to notice something differently.
Which is what made me think of that Granta essay.
Psychedelics, at least as the author describes them, seem to work partly by disrupting the familiar patterns through which we normally experience the world. They introduce perspectives that wouldn’t have occurred otherwise.
Art, at least sometimes, might do something similar.
Not every artwork will do it. In fact, most won’t. But occasionally you encounter something that makes you pause, or laugh, or feel annoyed, or see something ordinary from a slightly different angle.
And maybe that’s why people often say that art exposes us to “different perspectives.”
It’s a phrase that can sound vague or a bit pretentious. But there might be something real behind it.
Seeing something you haven’t seen before—whether it’s a painting, a performance, or an installation that initially looks like nonsense—can shift the way you think, even slightly.
And crucially, different works will do this for different people.
Which might also explain something about the endless arguments we have about art: what counts as good art, what counts as bad art, what deserves public support, what belongs in museums.
The uncomfortable truth is that the effect of art is wildly uneven. A piece that leaves me cold might hit someone else like a revelation. Something that seems trivial to one viewer might open up an entirely new way of seeing for another.
If that’s true, it suggests two things.
First, we probably benefit from having a lot of different kinds of art around—even art that many people think is silly, bad, or pointless.
And second, we might want to be a little cautious about declaring too confidently what counts as “good” or “bad” art.
Because the value of a work might lie less in its technical perfection than in whether it manages to show someone something they haven’t seen before.
Anyway, this is probably one of those observations that feels less like a revolutionary insight and more like a statement of the obvious.
But sometimes the obvious things are still worth saying out loud.
My guess is that I won’t be doing mushrooms anytime soon.
But in the meantime, I’ll probably keep going to museums.
**Post image is David Faulkner aka. Mr. Crystalface, Face the abyss.