the unexamined life is not worth living

Margaret Talbot interviews (New Yorker 27 Apr 09) several users and researchers of "steroids for your brain" like Ritalin and speed and others with fancier names.

A recent Ivy League grad (millennial?) said, "One of the most impressive features of being a student is how aware you are of a twenty-four-hour work cycle. When you conceive of what you have to do for school, it's not in terms of nine to five but in terms of what you can physically do in a week while still achieving a variety of goals in a variety of realms -- social, romantic, sexual, extracurricular, resume-building, academic commitments." While he's spot on about the blurring boundaries of the work day and the play day, sadly, he's taking speed just to work more, not better: he boasts of getting a B on papers he wrote on speed. Aren't 80% of Ivy League grades B or better?

A competitive poker player (Gen Y?) said, "In a competitive field -- if suddenly a quarter of the people are more equipped, but you don' want to take the risks with your body -- it could begin to seem terribly unfair. I don't think we need to be turning up the crank another notch on how hard we work,. But the fact is, the baseline competitive level is going to reorient around what those drugs make possible, and you can choose to compete or not." If shear amount of work were what counts, maybe he would have a point. But quality matters more. Brain gain with drugs might seem easier, but more effective is reflecting on what you do -- choosing where to put your effort, thinking about the best way to do it, and above all considering the impact you want to have on the world. As the oracle told Socrates, "Know thyself." As he explained, "The unexamined life is not worth living."