I was skinny to begin with and I take an appetite-suppressing drug on top of that (bupropion, Wellbutrin), so Ozempic hasn’t been at the top of my radar. But this article about it in The Atlantic is quite good.
Without making the comparison directly, it presents a strong case that Ozempic is the LSD of our time, in spiritual terms.
William Braden’s “The Private Sea: LSD and the Search for God” (1968) had a huge impact on me as a teenager. My mom is a Jehovah’s Witness. My dad was an atheist who encouraged me to read Nietzsche and do martial arts, which exposed me to Buddhism and Taoism (Shaolin monks!). Eating mushrooms at 16 changed my life. That book put all those things together for me.
It’s about the now-forgotten religious movement called death of god theology, about a cultural shift to viewing the sacred as immanent rather than transcendent, and how the “LSD mystical experience” encouraged that shift. Alan Watts was another one of my favorite authors (This Is It). I suppose that makes me different than psychology people who got here via MBSR.
But “enlightenment in a pill” presents theological problems. What does it mean to have kensho without the years of mental training leading up to it? Is there a universal “mystical experience”, or is that a Western fantasy? Are psychedelic experiences even legit? Are psychedelics useful in the practice of Buddhism? There’s a book I’ve never read on this topic called Zig Zag Zen.
In The Atlantic, Shayla Love makes the extremely interesting point that Ozempic is doing the same thing for a different aspect of enlightenment: a shortcut to dropping desires, which is pretty much the basic goal of Buddhism. So Ozempic presents an empirical test of the Second and Third Noble Truths. Can the cessation of desire bring liberation without the Eightfold Path?
She even connects this to neuroscience research on liking vs. wanting:
Anna, a 51-year-old in California who works in marketing—and who requested to withhold her last name to discuss details of her medical history—told me that several months after she started taking Mounjaro, she began to feel listless. Anna was diagnosed with depression 20 years ago, and treated her symptoms successfully. This was different. She still enjoyed aspects of her life: playing with her dog, spending time with her kids. “I still get joy out of them, but I have to force myself to do them,” she told me. In subreddits about GLP-1 drugs, others express similar concerns. “Does anyone feel depressed or feel lack of enjoyment of life while on ozempic ?” one person asked. From another: “Does the apathy fade?” “I just haven’t been finding much interest, joy, or motivation to do things. I haven’t been able to pinpoint why, exactly,” someone else wrote.
Desire, or wanting, is a discrete mental phenomenon that is driven by the neurotransmitter dopamine. In the 1980s, Kent Berridge, a neuroscientist at the University of Michigan, led a study demonstrating that the neurobiology of wanting was separate from liking. Wanting is the motivation to pursue a reward, whereas liking is the enjoyment we get from that reward. This wanting is different from a cognitive plan, like wanting to stop by the library later; it’s an urge to act. Berridge and others have shown that wanting involves different chemicals and areas of the brain than liking does. This means we can want what we don’t like, and enjoy what we don’t crave; for example, Berridge has argued that addiction stems from the triumph of desire over enjoyment. Anhedonia, the loss of pleasure in activities that used to be meaningful, is commonly understood to be a symptom of psychological conditions such as depression. A better term for what’s happening to some GLP-1 users, Berridge said, would be avolition—a loss of motivation and wanting.
She even ends the article on a note about the Middle Way:
This doesn’t mean people have to forgo enjoyment of the present moment—in fact, Buddhism encourages such pleasures.
The Buddha’s first sermon also described the Middle Way: a balance between the extremes of asceticism and indulgence. Enlightenment is approached not by breaking completely free from desire, but by gaining awareness of how and why you want things. After many months on the drugs, some GLP-1 users appear to be finding their own Middle Way. “I have had to learn more about what desire is, how it works,” Anna told me. When she meditated on what exactly she liked about her favorite hobby—collecting perfume—she realized that she is drawn to the infinite variety of scents, how they produce memories and smell different depending on where on the body they’re applied. I told her she sounded a bit like a Buddhist.
But of course there’s more to talk about, theologically!
“Buddhism” is a 2500 year old tradition, so there isn’t actually a single “Buddhist” perspective on much of anything. Buddhists also debate issues of immanence and transcendence.
Is Buddhism nihilistic and world-rejecting? The point, after all, is to AVOID reincarnation and…extinguish.
But first of all, “desire” is an English word, a translation of “tanha”, whatever that means in Pali. It has connotations of unhealthy craving and grasping. Shayla Love is correct that Buddhism preaches a Middle Way between asceticism and indulgence, but this is the oldest level of teachings.
Mahayana Buddhism, following Nagarjuna, deconstructs the distinction between samsara and nirvana. That makes enlightenment immanent, this-worldly. Ideas of impermanence and dependent origination get elaborated into emptiness. Emptiness becomes Buddha-nature. The world…is fine how it is. Appreciate each moment. Savor your tea and get up when you’re finished and fully do the next thing.
But Vajrayana came even later, with its own set of texts called tantras, not recognized by other branches, which take the idea even further and find the sacred in the profane. Desire, wrath, and other poisons can be sublimated toward good ends. It’s just that this is a dangerous path, normally requiring an extensive vetting and initiation process. It should only be taught in secret, because the message will land wrong for the unprepared.
Hakuin loved tobacco, actually.
Not all reductions in desire are created equally. Love already pointed out we already had antipsychotics, and those don’t make people enlightened. I’d add that rimonabant, the anti-cannabinoid, failed as an anti-obesity medication because being anti-high made people want to kill themselves. Simply taking opiates contaminated with MPTP didn’t make people enlightened, either.
The 4th Noble Truth is needed, after all: suffering ends and desire subsides by following the Eightfold Path, which entails a value system, good habits, and a meditation practice.
It’s good if Ozempic turns out to help people, though. LSD can be quite helpful without being sufficient, too. The one time I saw the Dalai Lama in person, it was at the Society for Neuroscience meeting, where he said that he’d be the “first patient” if we came up with a cure for suffering that didn’t dull you like drugs. He’s also joked that if meditation cured everything he wouldn’t have knee problems…