I had never smoked weed before moving to California (from Europe) in my early 20s, at which point I was fairly quickly introduced to it. I had no experience with drugs of any kind besides alcohol either, and I quickly became fascinated with the effects it had on my brain. Picking it up with the same intensity I would pick up any other interest, I read a lot of stuff about the subject (Timothy Leary, Sam Harris, Aldous Huxley, etc.) and tried a few other psychedelics.<p>Then for a couple years I had a job that made me utterly miserable, and I smoked as soon as I got home every night. I don&#x27;t believe it strongly affected my intellectual performance (a lot of my highly upvoted HN comments from that time were written while high), but it made me okay with not doing nothing productive, merely aimlessly consuming media (this is summed up really well in a South Park episode, where Randy tells his son Stan: <i>&quot;Well, Stan, the truth is marijuana probably isn&#x27;t gonna make you kill people, and it most likely isn&#x27;t gonna fund terrorism, but, well son, pot makes you feel fine with being bored, and it&#x27;s when you&#x27;re bored that you should be learning some new skill or discovering some new science or being creative. If you smoke pot you may grow up to find out that you aren&#x27;t good at anything.&quot;</i>).<p>Now I have a job that I really like and am in a generally better place in life, and smoke maybe once a week or so. My personality tends to be fairly inwards-oriented, and I get anxious fairly easily (like many hackers, I presume), and weed helps me step back, and get perspective on my mental state. It&#x27;s also a good social bonding agent, and also an interesting substance to use when you&#x27;ve been working on a creative problem for a while and are stuck (my experience has been that it&#x27;s harder for my brain to learn completely new things while high, but easier to make connections between things I already know, or see known things under a new light).