Low Maintenance

How to Grow Out of Weed

By Ben Sinclair
Dec 22, 2025
782 likes | 74 comments | 52 shares

I helped create a show on HBO called High Maintenance. I also played the show’s only constant character— a weed dealer in Brooklyn.

True fans of the show know that it’s not about weed — it’s about the personal lives of New Yorkers. The show’s voice is intimate, nonjudgmental, and curious. It was potheads telling stories about quirky, neurotic New Yorkers, and that honesty was the point of connection — a relationship with familiar city struggles and coping with all of that. We couldn’t get highmaintenance.com, so we went with helpingyoumaintain.com, which felt even more appropriate.

While figuring out the show, it all jelled when it was decided that I would stay out of the spotlight. It wasn’t about the dealer. I would stay in the shade, like this guy.

The result was a character who was chill, non-judgmental, humble, almost Buddha-like. But also a persona of a creator who was happy to give the spotlight to the under-represented types on TV.

For a long time, that identity worked. I got to express my own vulnerability through these weekly character journeys. It helped me feel real and seen for both my best qualities through the Guy and my, shall we say, messier qualities through the characters. I felt helpful because people recognized themselves in it, and that gave my life meaning. Admitting that I was a pothead felt like the door I walked through to reach sincerity, tenderness, and presence — the things I wanted most.

But identities, like substances, can get you stuck if you hold them too tightly. And weed, the plant itself, is famously sticky.

At some point, the combination of weed and the success of the show stopped getting me high on a deeper level. The thing that once opened me up began to quietly define the edges of who I was allowed to be. The attachment to weed, and the attachment to the version of myself that made High Maintenance, started to feel less like creative freedom and more like maintenance in the literal sense: upkeep, repetition, preservation. I was gripping the rope for dear life.

photo by Zack DeZon

Low Maintenance is a personal investigation into that grip — when something that once helped you feel alive stops working, but you keep reaching for it anyway. How do we drop the rope?

This isn’t a sobriety blog. It’s not a takedown of weed or nostalgia bait for a past success. It’s an attempt to understand how identities form, why we cling to them, and how hard it can be to grow out of something that once saved you — especially when other people love you for it.

This is not the story of how weed ruined my life.
It’s stories of how things quietly postpone moving on with our lives.

This Substack is an attempt to understand that postponement—not with shame or dogma, but with curiosity. To personally explore what weed gave me, what it took, and how to grow out of something without pretending it was never useful. And to hear stories from others who can reflect their own experiences.

There will be podcast interviews, short essays, thought experiments, video experiments, music creations, and so much unknown.

Some posts will be funny. Some will be uncomfortable. Some will feel like unfinished thoughts written in real time.

Subscribe if you’ve ever felt fused to a version of yourself that once worked beautifully — and are quietly wondering what comes next.