Mushrooms Eat Claude for Breakfast

I hunched over my laptop with squinted eyes, as I heard my Mom’s voice call out to me from down the hall.

Alli? Can you come in here?

I paused mid 8:42 pm email, with my fingers moving ferociously across my keyboard in my Dad’s office. On my way out, my eyes glanced around the room at the myriad of stacked notebooks, pens, photos, old checks, paperclips, all placed in his perfectly cluttered but incredibly organized way.

He was so organized. You would never know this office hasn’t been used in over three years. I sighed and pushed myself reluctantly out of his gigantic swivel chair.

As I neared her door, she called again…

Alli can you bring me my phone? It’s on the dresser by the TV.

The room was pitch black, but my body remembered the way to the dresser as I fumbled for the lamp, a small thread of annoyance at my interrupted work session.

My right hand finally found the metal ball chain that pulled the light on while the other hand blindly reached out for my Mom’s phone in blank space.

Clink.

My hand made contact with something that cut open the silence in the room.

As the light flicked on, my parents’ bedroom flooded itself with a soft warm glow. My eyes gazed down at my left hand adorned in my green and gold engagement ring, sitting on top of a hard plastic box that I recognized immediately.

The plastic felt cold under my skin, and the productivity-obsession that flooded my body moments before, dissipated instantly as I stared down at this brick sized black container filled with my father’s ashes.

This box has remained here, frozen in time for over three years, no different from the crinkled toothpaste that still sits on my Dad’s bathroom sink from the last day he used it.

My hand grazed the small white sticker with black text that read, Martin Willard Schaper, December 14th 1956 - December 17th 2022.

The corners of the sticker were peeling at the edges, and my thumb grazed the box. A vision washed over me of my Dad proudly sitting at the computer showing me his color coded spreadsheet of his financial plans on one of our final Saturdays together.

One of the last nights I was with him, he walked in from the garage, exhausted after another twelve-hour computer day. We sat on the back porch as he sipped his favorite red wine, talking excitedly about retirement.

He died five days before he was supposed to retire.

I remembered him lying on a blanket in our yard raising his first ever bite of psilocybin mushroom chocolate to his mouth. My mom had done all the research.

If she’s looked into it, I’ll follow her lead, he said.

After the mushrooms kicked in he excitedly exclaimed to us, guys the clouds are moving!

Yeah, Marty, that’s what clouds do, my Mom replied.

One of his final Saturdays, I watched from my bedroom window as he walked towards our pool holding a blow up unicorn floatie that I’d never seen before.

He jumped into the pool in sheer joy holding it as the water spilled over the sides. My mom later told me that the unicorn pool floatie broke about a week later from overuse.

I looked back at my Mom, her tiny 5’4 silhouette cocooned into one small corner of my parents’ massive California King sized bed.

What a weird finale of our human life, to have our flesh burned and be wrapped up in this synthetic plastic box…

Alli, did you find it?

My Mom’s voice broke up my internal TED Talk.

I arrived to sit at the edge of my Mom’s bed. I put her phone on the nightstand and softly said “I miss Dad”. Keeping her eyes closed she sighed and said, “I miss him too.” I rubbed her head for a few minutes in silence like she used to do to me as a kid, and then kissed her goodnight.

I walked out of the room down the hall back to my Dad’s office, and imagined him sitting here in utter disbelief working with the magic of Claude Code during one of his 4 AM work portals, fueled by the incomprehensible progression of artificial intelligence creating agents to do his accounting. He would have loved this.

I settled back down into his gigantic office chair, my body only covering about half the surface area of the seat as his 6’6 frame would have, and opened my laptop.

That weekend, I went to a World Cup party and after some pleasantries exchanged with a friend, I playfully said to him, “So, have you been getting in the mix with claude code these days?”

His eyes widened and energy heightened, I could almost see the glimmer of the ✳ spinning around in his iris.

I recognized those eyes. Claude Code Eyes.

I recognize them in myself and in my mostly startup-founder-type-mostly-male-friends.

We both laughed, with an unspoken mutual understanding that transferred through our pupils as they dilated.

We proceeded to nerd out on the wild and infinite world of agents to save us time, while spending endless hours in its grasps.

Are you using Obsidian?

Have you built your own employee org chart yet?

Claude runs my whole life.

The time it can save me with everything is insane.

We raised our eyebrows at each other as if we’d discovered a new designer drug that only the elite had access to.

I left the party early to go back into a Claude portal with my best friend who’s become a master user over the last few months.

Twelve projects run simultaneously in the background of a gigantic monitor on my living room floor while we brainstorm about the sheer possibility of me creating more space in my life, for creating meaningful content that really helps people.

The next morning, I’m exhausted from Zoom calls, spreadsheets, and a Claude code mania tear that has somehow already slowed down my new Macbook Air that I purchased last week, drooling with excitement over a silent vow to keep my new baby clean and safe.

I looked down to find smudged fingerprints covering the screen and a slightly sticky keyboard from too many laptop lunches.

I pick up my containers of rainbow colored pens and a notepad of blank paper and walk outside to my patio greeted by shuffling of squirrels and much needed breeze in the heat of Texas summer.

The sounds of the birds chaotic melody contrasted against the ceiling fan hanging above our deck clicking in perfect time. I hover a purple marker over the page, resisting the urge to check my phone for nothing in particular.

It’s soothing and confronting that there’s no notifications here, no apps with numbered banners at the bottom of the page threatening to show me that I’m behind.

I close my eyes and watch my mind tell me all the things I should be doing. Money I should be raising, projects that need my urgent response.

Out here there’s no potential for multitasking.

Just this magnificent but limited white rectangle that will only respond to inputs, my inner world alone.

The story I’ve been telling myself lately is that my technology usage can create more time for crafting a simple prayerful creation with an endpoint.

My whole life existence until this point has rewarded me doing laundry BEFORE art.

As my pens moved across the page, a memory of being in college comes to me — watching students painting canvases on the lawn outside our dorm rooms and thinking what a waste of time, my productivity genes already fully expressed.

The birds continued their frenzy in the background as the totality of my focus is required to draw a long thin flower. If I stop then nothing happens.

What is this doing to my nervous system?

As I complete the nonsensical explosion of neon color on the page, I notice it’s actually complete. This rectangle reality has no other tabs, and accomplishment from making something you can touch in real life warms my body.

I put my pens down, close my notebook with satisfaction and walk back inside towards my laptop.

The following week, I emerged from my rainbow-wallpapered office with my Claude code eyes bulging out of my brain filled with a cocaine like wonder.

I could almost taste the freedom as I stared at my org chart of agents I've coyly named after psychoactive substances. I was so proud of my little team — Lucy (my calendar assistant), Molly (my networking tracker), Gigi (my trello task review agent), Dimitri (my zoom to action items transcriber), Mary Jane (my investor relations manager). They’ve all been working so hard for me, 24 hours a day with no lunch break or HR complaints.

I maniacally click always allow, always allow, always allow on all my open Claude tabs until they all seem busy enough for me to dash out of the room for a short lunch break.

My eyes felt overwhelmed, the quickness of my creations felt exciting but short-lived. It feels like more of a head high. As I open my fridge to pull out a carton of eggs with a kink in my neck, I wondered, where is this all heading?

Perhaps these agents give us the same feeling as the ultra wealthy inside their shopping-mall sized homes with twelve assistants scurrying around…Alone in a mansion, rich, and spiritually bankrupt.

Or perhaps they’ll help us reach the promised land Utopia of true time sovereignty.

I ungracefully scramble my eggs in the pan directly to save time, feeling like a good little robot. My nervous system felt suspiciously similar to the first time I took a friend’s prescription Adderall in college in the school library. I stayed up all night maniacally color coding my notes for an accounting exam, aced it, only to realize the knowledge completely emptied from my memory by the following week.

If Claude Code was a pharmaceutical, it would be Adderall.

But does the world need more cracked out minds or more cracked open hearts?

I looked down at my very not-instagram-worthy eggs splayed on my plate in front of my screen. They look like how my brain feels. The D.A.R.E. program told me mushrooms would do this to my mind, maybe they should have been more worried about entrepreneurs getting hooked on Claude.

I start eating my eggs without really tasting them while haunted by an ominous vision of me shoving aside the subtle joy of my personality to grind my life away in front of a screen, watching my intuition shrivel to the size of a raisin.

The truth is that it works. Just like the Adderall, these agents have saved me copious amounts of time, and money. There’s no way we would have gotten the wild amount of diligence for investment deal done without the support of Claude, with Mary-Jane at the helm.

I settle back into my office chair for a computer lunch hunched over with terrible posture, feeling like Sméagol hovering over his precious ring.

You can never finish a laptop like you finish a book.

The promise of more is always waiting for me down the seductive black hole of productivity.

I open Claude to check on Lucy, Mary-Jane, Molly, and the rest of my team, thrilled with their progress.

Under my feet is a PEMF mat that’s supposed to mimic the health benefits of walking barefoot outdoors.

I facilitated a mushroom ceremony last weekend, and before it began, asked people to make sure their phones were out of the room completely, and everyone nodded in compliance.

A few minutes later, I asked again.

About 50% of the room revealed they hadn’t previously complied, and laughter filled the room as they reluctantly got up to part with their black internet boxes to place in the other room for our sound bath.

What's the real drug here?

I looked down to turn my own phone off, liberated immediately by the promise of space from the blue light of my screen for several hours, consciously uncoupled from Claude for a weekend.

Claude code seems to empower me that I can do everything all at once, yet mushrooms seem to remind me I don’t have to…

Mushrooms would eat Claude for Breakfast.Unless we let Claude eat humans for Breakfast first…?

I went back to my parents’ house a few months later, and one morning went back to visit the black box of ashes sitting in my Mom’s room.

This time in the daylight so the plastic exterior looked extra plastic-y.

My Dad’s toothpaste was still by the sink, and I walked into the closet to find a pile of his clothes hanging on a metal hook, untouched from when he had changed into them the day he passed.

I wondered how different my relationship with work really was from his. Albeit dressed up in rainbows and mushrooms and a vibrant lifestyle, it appears I’m still a workaholic.

But mine is about getting people closer to mushrooms, closer to nature, closer to themselves, it has real meaning. Surely all the hours I spend in front of a screen count differently if I’m working towards a more conscious world.

I surely learned the lesson. Right?

I walked outside into the yard and lay down in the spot where he passed away in our home in Georgia, something I like to do when I’m home visiting my Mom.

I stopped in front of the cross planted into the ground next to the large flat stone on the path my Mom told me his head was when he transitioned. I laid down with my head on the stone like I’ve done many times before. I like to look up to see what he saw in his last moments.

I could feel the trees’ shadows tangled with sunlight spots dancing across my face.

Komorebi. My fiance told me about this word recently, it means the shadows that trees make on surfaces when the sun shines through them.

Lying there with the cold flat stone on the back of my neck, I take a deep breath in and smiled.

I gazed up at the trees tangled inside of each other in perfect messiness as the sunlight oscillates between shadows and light over my eyes and I feel the warmth from the sun starting to seep through my skin.

I felt the urge to get up and check my phone for nothing in particular, but decided to stay a little longer.