EA - Some Observations on Alcoholism by Devin Kalish

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Some Observations on Alcoholism, published by Devin Kalish on July 8, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.This is a tough one to post, it’s also a little off topic for the forum. I went back and forth a great deal about whether to crosspost it anyway, and ultimately decided to, since I have in some ways posted on this topic here before, and since there are several parts that are directly relevant to Effective Altruism (the last three sections all have substantial relevance of some sort). Doing this also makes it easier for this to be relatively public, and so to get some difficult conversations over with. The short version of it is that I’ve been an alcoholic, mostly in secret, for about three years now. This blogpost is a lengthy dive into different observations about it, and ways it has changed my mind on various issues. I don’t want to post the whole thing below because, well, frankly it’s huge and only occasionally relevant, so instead I’m going to post some relevant quotes as people often do with linkposts of things they didn’t write. There’s a good deal more in the link.First, here’s a quick summary of how things got started:“I started drinking during early 2020, when as far as I can tell there was no special drama going on with Effective Altruism, and I had already been involved with it in a similar capacity for a couple years. Most of the alcoholics I’ve met at this point either got started or got significantly worse during the pandemic, I was no different.But the truth is my drinking even then wasn’t terribly dramatic a coping mechanism. There was never anything that meaningfully ‘drove me to drink’. The idea that drinking at this point could land me here wasn’t part of my decision at all, I was just kind of bored and lonely and decided it would be a fun treat to drink a beer or two at night - something I had very rarely done before.As the pandemic wore on, it became something I looked forward to more and more, and eventually I discovered the appeal of hard liquor, which I never switched back from, and eventually I started working on my thesis for my first MA. The combination of my thesis and hard liquor turned a casual habit and minor coping mechanism into something more obviously hard for me to let go of. Over the course of the next three years things got slowly worse from there, and I came to realize more and more how little control I had.It wasn’t some meaningful part of the larger story of my life, replete with a buried darkness in my soul coming to the forefront, or a unique challenge driven by terrible circumstances. I have had to push back in therapy repeatedly on these subtler and more interesting attempts to make something of the event. The truth is sober reflection makes it all look like little more than a meaningless tragedy.”Here are some reflections on what it feels like:“One thing that I think people on the outside of this get wrong is the way conscious and unconscious feelings work in this context. I have been asked many times, especially in therapeutic contexts, what it feels like to get urges to drink. Truthfully, it doesn’t feel like much of anything as far as I can tell. It isn’t like thirst or hunger where there is some identifiable physical sensation. The easiest description of how the ‘urges’ start, is with intrusive thoughts. Not necessarily something as consciously obvious as ‘hey, you should drink’, but often more abstract things about drinking. ‘Do you think you’re going to drink tonight?’ ‘what happens if you drink tonight?’ ‘what happens if you don’t drink tonight?’ ‘if you do this, then you can drink tonight’. Argue with these, and they keep going all day until you drink. Drinking, in fact, is largely how you settle the argument, how you release the building tension.Do not argue with these thoughts, it does not help, o...