But I started in farm land learning to build with raw materials, fixing tractors and other machines, growing food, while most of my peers sat inside watching TV. My muscle and cognitive memory is well developed from development of electronics products, a life of building homes and barns to stripping cars to frame and rebuilding them.

Weed has nothing to do with underachievement. It’s a contemporary culture that champions low effort fail up office work or asset ownership. Having worked in web apps the last 10 years, the only challenge I’ve faced is keeping pace with low output office lifers who never learned to rotate a tire or grow a potato.

Weed just makes someone more of their inner self. I get stoned and take on a project because that’s what I’ve done my whole life (built new garden boxes and ripped up an old sagging deck last weekend). A stoned couch surfer was already a lazy couch surfer.

This is the only part of your comment that I think there's some nuance to disagree with. I don't think it's an untrue statement, but I do think it's partly a matter of whether weed or any of those maladies come into the picture before you learn to do anything remotely ambitious or self-directed. If you're already the type of person who's taking on projects, looking forward to an interesting future, challenge-seeking, etc.. then that's fine it's no problem, that's a state you're going to come back to, but it's also not something you really earned at the outset either, you're more likely to just be pre-disposed to those things early on for some reason or another.

I was and am this type of person, but I didn't really realize it in a tangible way until my early-mid twenties, and if I'd be chronically indulging in weed or drinking or gaming, it seems pretty plausible I'd never have been able to get out of the place and rut I was in, but if I wasn't in a rut, I don't think it would necessarily put me in one. I was in a terribly unambitious state in my late teens, floundering and depressed, it's not a productive personal thing to enable more methods of just dealing with it, much like being a lazy couch potato doesn't encourage a person to start a lifelong fitness journey, and having kids early should reduce your inclination to take unnecessary risks.

Anyway, I just think that while it's not to blame for a person becoming a loser, it's plausible that it doesn't help a person become not a loser if they find the crutch at the wrong time.

Congrats and I don't mean to be demeaming, but you sell it as if that were a peak achievement and it's actually quite mid. The hardest part of those achievements would be studying and testing for calculus and algebra, for which I assume you had to drop the weed to retain some cognitive function.

Here's some predictive power I go on a limb with, you said EE and I bet you mean Electronic Engineering and not Electrical.

Along with physician or lawyer, those would be quite surprising and incompatible with weed because you would be responsible for significant real world risks and responsibilities. Again no offense but you are probably working on something with not much real world responsibility which is why it's compatible with smoking weed.

That's ok, not everyone needs to be a top performing human being responsible for their actions, and if they were you would be working in an industry with drug testing instead of a workplace that values creativity and approves of drugs. And your head would roll if there's an incident you are responsible for and it comes out that you are smoking regularly (god forbid while you make the malpractice)

Was I close?

Cheers

The idea is that each of us learns from our observation. And of course the observation and judgment of those we trust.

I'm not expecting or caring if you are influenced by my particular observations.