Writing under my real name

Starting today I’m publishing under my real name — Sasha Putilin.

You could already find my real name in the event links I’ve been posting on Twitter for two years. So this announcement should feel like a mere formality, and yet it feels like I am the Narrator in Fight Club putting a gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger to take control of Tyler Durden.

In Fight Club, the Narrator created Tyler Durden as a way to channel drives he can’t admit to himself: aggression, rebellion, sexuality, and the hunger to belong to something bigger than his consumerist IKEA life. In Jungian terms, Tyler Durden is the Narrator’s shadow — the part of his own psyche that he rejects because it doesn’t fit his conscious, polite and society-approved self-image, so it shows up as “someone else”.

I created my twitter account @42irrationalist in April 2020 to talk online about drugs and speedrunning enlightenment without colleagues, future employers, and — crucially — the UK government finding out. I’d already immigrated to the UK back then but I wasn’t yet a citizen. To become one you must be a person of “good character” — pay your taxes and don’t commit any crimes, drugs-related or otherwise. It seemed wise not to post anything that could be misconstrued as incriminating under my legal name — even if nothing I discussed was illegal per se.

The @42irrationalist identity was a strategy to manage these external constraints. It wasn’t a shadow itself — I already knew I liked psychedelics and weird meditative states. But it was a container for the real shadow — wanting to belong to a larger psychedelics and meditation culture, wanting to do public-facing work in it. And that didn’t fit the Home-Office-approved respectable-immigrant tax-paying persona. The account was the mask, and the shadow was the desire to take it off. Much like the Narrator I wanted a bigger, riskier and public self-expression — and like him I could give you an intellectual critique of society while declining to act in line with my desires.

Some of this secrecy comes from growing up in Russia where drugs are heavily stigmatised and the drug laws are draconian. Since the age of 18 I have had a significant interest in psychedelics. I’d order then-legal compounds online and receive samples that’d arrive in plain white envelopes. Very few select people in my life would know about this. And without most of my closest friends knowing I ended up trying 20+ different psychedelics — almost all were discoveries of an American chemist Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin. Incidentally, he is my namesake. If you ever wondered where he got his “Sasha” nickname from: his parents were Russian, and Sasha is the conventional shortening of the name Alexander in Russia. My first name is also Alexander, but it sounds formal, so I prefer to go by Sasha.

Back to the @42irrationalist account. Twitter is a network of different subcultures, and the one I joined — postrationalist twitter — encouraged anonymous posting. Most accounts were anons with weird avatars, so mine fit there well. It would take another essay to explain what postrationalism is. To make the long story short, you can think of postrationalism the following way: postrationalism recognises limitations and harm caused by rationalist memes & explicit modes of thinking — and ventures into illegibility, tacit knowledge, nebulous ways of meaning-making. If this doesn’t make any sense, you can simply think of postrationalists as a bunch of internet weirdos who are into meditation, psychedelics, developmental psychology and emotional/spiritual work.

Two years of posting passed and postrationalist twitter started going offline. 2022 was the first year of big postrationalist events. Vibecamp happened in the US. In Europe Jess, a woman who I knew primarily as the poster about Kegan stages on her now-defunct blog ssica3003.wordpress.com, organised European Vibe Weekender (almost immediately nicknamed JessCamp by attendees). She rented a mansion in Lisbon and sold 35 or so tickets to postrationalists all across Europe who came together for the event. Back then I was experiencing Jess’s blog aura as threatening, but I still ended up buying a ticket. In-person Jess turned out to be lovely, as did all of the attendees. This was the start of my online and offline identities merging.

A year and a half later, I became a resident of Newspeak House for one year. Newspeak House (aka the London College of Political Technology) is a small private residential college and a meetup space running 200+ events per year on the intersection of politics, science, technology, civic society. During my year at Newspeak House I ran 16 events, most of them were fight clubs meetups for the community of people around Qualia Research Institute — a non-profit studying consciousness and psychedelics. The @42irrationalist identity kept spilling into real life more and more.

During the same year I applied for several grants (e.g. I received a grant from Scott Alexander to replicate a neurotech study). And I straight up mentioned my blog in several of the applications, some of which were public. By the time I actually applied for British citizenship you could find this blog by googling my legal name, clicking on the 2nd result, and looking at the links there. The very thing @42irrationalist was meant to compartmentalise had completely leaked; the “shadow” was becoming the main identity.

Sometimes it is said that the goal of the shadow eating process is to become ‘a monster’ — something dangerously unthinkable from the perspective of your old self. This is what my life is now — instead of skittishly ordering then-legal drugs online I run events where people seriously discuss psychedelics, write about drugs and meditation online, build some actual psychotechnology. Recently I even applied for a job while mentioning my @42irrationalist twitter handle and got an offer.

And two weeks ago I applied for a grant from ARIA (the UK government’s R&D agency) to run a monthly consciousness studies circle. The application form had a “personal website” input field. It was optional. I paused: do I put my Substack there? Of course I do. How could the UK government not know this Substack exists?

*Bang* Dear reader, you met me at a very strange time of my life. *Pixies start playing*