It is Darkest Before Dawn: Alcoholism and Addiction in Tech (CW) (TW)
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00:00
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Hand fanComputer animationXML
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:00
Come on. Justiculation, so please bear with me if I go a little overboard or I'm a little loud.
00:22
But I do want to start with a content warning and a trigger warning right up front. This talk is going to discuss alcohol and drug use and some frank sexual discussions, nothing gratuitous. But these conversations really aren't easy when we're talking about a progressive, deadly disease, and that's what addiction is. So if you're uncomfortable, please don't
00:40
hesitate to leave at any point. I don't want anyone to feel uncomfortable, and I will not be offended. So without further ado. So I'm Tim. As Mikhail said, I'm an IT director of advanced initiatives at the Wharton School for Wharton Research Data Services. You can find me everywhere as Flipper PA.
01:00
I'm a Pythonista and Django nut. I'm a DjangoCon organizer. I'm the Wharton liaison. I'm a fun-loving nerd, a hockey fan, and a guitarist. And I'm also an alcoholic addict in recovery. I'm really glad to be here today. In recovery, we take one day at a time. I truly believe, to bookend Saron's talk,
01:20
that we are all extremely lucky to get paid to do what we love. For some context, this talk was first given at Bar Camp Philly in a slightly different form, which is a highlight of my year last November. And I want to get it right out that being an addict is just part of what makes me me. This disease can really affect everybody.
01:41
In recovery, we say from Yale to jail. But here, in Philadelphia, I like to modify that, from state pen to Penn State. And there will be some laughs in this as well. So feel free to laugh at my high school and college fashion choices as we go through.
02:01
But it is a serious topic. And chances are there are a fair number of people struggling with this disease here today. Now, I should have said spoiler alert in the last keynote before I shared this part of the story about Simon. But I grew up with two loving parents and a little sister. Hi, Mariana. Both my parents are academics, foreign language teachers.
02:21
And I had a thing for computer languages. So again, I consider myself extremely lucky and privileged. I was really born on third base in baseball terms. I lived here in University City. I went to St. Mary's Nursery School growing up, which is the DjangoCon child care provider. We provide child care. And had a pretty normal middle class childhood.
02:42
My godfather, Uncle Charlie, was actually quite a computer scientist. In 1974, the year I was born, he wrote a book called An Introduction to the Theory of Computing. And it was the guy who wrote the assembly code on the chip of the memory game Simon that you can see behind me. So I remember being very young, being around computers,
03:03
eight inch floppy disks, double sided back in the day. And it wasn't long. My dad brought home a computer when I was seven, an IBM PC-88 with two five inch quarter full height floppy drives. And soon after that, I got my own computer when I was about 12.
03:21
And soon after that, started a BBS, which is what we did before the internet existed. We dialed up to one another. It was called Wellenin's White Dragon. And I still remember the number. It was 215-879-1682. So I often wonder if the people who have that number now actually still get the dial up, the horrible beep.
03:44
So I had a very, very, very lucky privileged upbringing. Fast forward to when I was 12. I left my comfort zone of University City and my parents moved out toward the suburbs. And I had never really felt like I
04:02
fit in at school or anywhere. And this is a recurring theme you'll hear amongst addicts. My computer was my best friend in many ways. My BBS was getting pretty popular. And I met a lot of other local BBSers, including some of the programmers behind the BBS system I used at the time, the Phoenix BBS.
04:22
Unfortunately, at about that age, I was abused by one of the older programmers when I was 13. I completely hid it for many, many years. And this is part of what started a cycle of shame and hiding things from people for many, many years. I started drinking and smoking marijuana in high school.
04:44
And because of this, I started to feel like I belonged in social circles, really, for the first time. We didn't have meetup groups back then for computer geeks. Dungeons and Dragons was about one of my few social outlets. So it was difficult. So when we fast forward to college, feel free to laugh.
05:06
Little new to me, I was a prime candidate to become an alcoholic addict. I started drinking and doing drugs every day. And this was about the same time I began to open up about the abuse I had gone through.
05:20
So I was exploring, like many of us do in college. And alcohol and drugs helped me be social. I was popular and accepted for the first time ever. I wasn't always the greatest student, but I'd always loved computers, so I was heavily invested in my major and got heavily involved in the early internet and the web.
05:41
I started a site called PhillyMusic.com in the mid-'90s, which was the first organized local music scene on the web, which eventually grew into a PHP MySQL site after starting with server-side includes, the height of technology at the time. And somehow I managed to graduate on time, which was another start of something
06:01
called denial, because I couldn't be an alcoholic. I graduated on time. I did well with my customized computer science degree that put together computer science and psychology, or how I like to refer to them now, how to mess with people's heads, part A and part B. I was convinced I'd grow out of it someday.
06:21
I was just being young. So I did the logical thing. And I moved to Jacksonville, Florida to get away from it all for a job. Jacksonville is the worst place on the planet. There is absolutely no diversity down there.
06:40
The tech scene was horrible, but it did manage to clean me up a little bit. But the drinking was always there. The drinking hung on. I stopped doing some of the harder drugs I'd gotten into by that point. But the drinking and the socializing, it was still such a crutch for me to be able to socialize with people, to be able to break down the barriers, to be able to talk to other people
07:01
and to be accepted by people. At the bar, that's why people do drink so often is because if you think about it, and misrepresentation was referenced in our last talk, there's another great documentary called The Mask You Live In, done by the same directors and film producers, which talks about how men are taught to suppress their emotions
07:21
from a very young age. If you're age five and you're crying in public, it's a problem. And if you're crying at age 10, watch out. We are trained to do this from the time we grow up. And it's to the detriment of all of us. Now think about guys at the bar. It's the one time they'll say things like, oh, I love you, bro, love you.
07:42
Or actually cry or open up about their emotions. This addiction cycle is partially, I believe, responsible because of how much we suppress our emotions and don't have actual conversations about what we are feeling, what we are doing, and it affects both men and women.
08:01
Moving on to my career, CD Now, great place to work. It was a great place to start, but they had beer on tap in the tech department and lots of drinking. So of course, the location once again had to be my drinking problem. It couldn't be Philadelphia, it couldn't be Jacksonville, it couldn't be the company I was at.
08:22
It had to be me, but I was still in denial about it being the place I was at. So I thought a bank would be a more straight-laced place to work. I was incorrect. It was a interesting startup of a bank. I actually got to design a bank for David Bowie, which I had a Bowie card for a little while.
08:41
The CEO kind of looked like William Shatner and kind of acted like William Shatner and kept a bottle of vodka in my desk back in the tech department that he would pop off to have a sip from during board meetings. So it was really not a great place for an alcoholic to work. But we talk about there being a lot of alcoholism
09:01
in the tech industry, but then I think about it. We also talk about there being a lot of drinking in lawyers, construction. I mean, is there an industry that doesn't have it? Maybe if you're a door-to-door Mormon religion salesman, that might be the one. But really, there is a heavy drinking culture in every industry. It's not just tech. We are just at a higher risk because of the behaviors
09:23
that we tend to engage in. So I started my own companies. I've started two companies and taken them to sale. The first one, Digital Content Solutions, got bought out by a local company called Kromco that not only had beer on tap, they had a Jaeger machine in the garage. So literally, every stop I had until Wharton
09:43
had a very, very heavy drinking culture. Now, I'm not blaming the companies. Tech just has this culture, which is literally a Petri dish for addiction. It's filled with temptations for alcoholics and addicts at every turn. We used to back at CD Now before going
10:01
to an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet. We were translating the site for many different languages, and we would have a Afghani translation meeting at about 11.30 a.m. on Fridays where we would smoke pot in the parking lot and then go to an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet. Do the math, we got our money's worth. But alcoholism has followed me
10:22
despite all these changes of scenery. It's my disease to own, and I clearly was not growing out of drinking. I had been pretty successful, which gave me a big form of denial. My career in technology, you know, I worked in tech and on the Philly tech scene since 1996.
10:41
I've started three companies, taking two to sales, I mentioned. I started the SLCC, the Second Life Community Convention, in 2005, which became the biggest virtual worlds convention in the world. I served at the vice president of PANMA, the Philadelphia Area New Media Association. If you're from the Philadelphia area, I highly recommend checking it out.
11:01
And I was also the co-chair of BarCamp Philadelphia, which is still the largest and most active bar camp in the nation, as well as helping run the Wharton Web Conference right here. I was a contributor to open source projects. And the funny thing is, if anybody treated me the way I was treating myself at the time,
11:21
I'd be in prison for murder. Alcohol-fueled creativity is such a total myth. Having hackathons at bars, I've done it. You know, James Joyce said write drunk edit sober, and we had modified that to code drunk debug sober. It's really total BS.
11:41
This myth of the rock star programmer is one that just needs to die. Because for me, everything became a reason to drink. A promotion at work, a friend got a raise, a business deal got done, drink. A problem at work, a friend got fired, a business deal did not go through, drink.
12:00
Co-workers are going out, drink. Death in the family, drink. My nephew was born, drink. I was drinking when I found out my nephew was born. I was having a party. I missed his first birthday because I was hungover. I called my family and said I was too sick to go. Little did I know I was actually telling the truth then.
12:20
I was sick, I have a disease. It's a deadly progressive disease. His second birthday, I was in rehab, and I wrote him a letter, because my uncle has this disease and just celebrated 30 years sober. I have this disease. I do not know if my nephew is gonna get this disease, but I do wanna have a conversation with him at some point about it,
12:41
and know he can always talk about me. The shame continued to build. I was successful, but I was in denial. After every flyers season, our local hockey team ended, I would try to take a month off from drinking with varying degrees of success. So Brené Brown is a professor
13:00
at the University of Houston's Graduate School of Social Work, and she is considered a leading researcher on shame. I've become a big fan since I've been in recovery. Shame is one of the most primitive emotions, and no one wants to talk about it, and shame can quietly marinate over a lifetime. So here are some of her quotes on shame. I think shame is deadly,
13:21
and I think we are swimming in it deep. The less you talk about it, the more you got it. Shame depends on buying into the belief that you are alone. Shame cannot survive being spoken. Shame cannot survive empathy.
13:42
Empathy and altruism are absolute keys to a strong community, and the amount I've witnessed here at DjangoCon and within the Django community is absolutely amazing. The fact we can have these conversations, these absolutely wonderful conversations that are difficult but need to happen, as Russ showed us last year with his talk on depression,
14:03
are ones we must have to really have a healthy community. Let's consider the stigma around alcoholism for a moment. I can have a beer at lunch, right? It is Friday. Alcoholic at the table? Would you smoke in front of a cancer patient?
14:23
You blacked out because you were wasted. That was hilarious. Would you think it was hilarious that somebody with Alzheimer's didn't recall something? These are diseases. Why don't you just try beer, no hard stuff? Yeah, because addicts are obviously great with limits.
14:41
The stigma makes it really hard for people with this disease to get help. It is not a question of willpower any more than you can will another disease to go away. I avoided recovery for years after knowing I had a problem because of the whole God thing, which was just an excuse. I told you about taking a month off after the flyers were eliminated from the playoffs.
15:02
That was one of multiple attempts to stop, and really just another form of denial. Oh, I can stop for a couple weeks. I must not be an alcoholic. That said, I will take this disease over any other. I don't have cancer. I don't have AIDS. My medicine is that I get to get together
15:25
with a bunch of friends for an hour and talk about my biggest problem and my favorite subject, me. So some uncomfortable facts to consider. One in six Americans binge drink four more times a month by CDC estimates,
15:41
and that number is higher in technology circles. For me, it became daily or every other day. I'd party all weekend long, sometimes into money. I'd be the one planning the party after work. Happy hour with coworkers. They'd go home like normal earthlings, and I'd go on to the dirtiest, dingiest dive bar I could find in South Philly.
16:01
Eating often became an afterthought, and when you start getting text messages from bartenders at 7.05 a.m. on a Saturday saying you're late, that's what's known as a hidden indicator it might be time to get help. Excessive drinking costs America $255 billion in crime, medical care, and lost productivity annually.
16:23
I'd avoid missing work because that might mean I'm an alcoholic. I've also always loved what I do, so I really threw myself into my career as a way to justify my bad behavior by saying, oh, I've got a full-time job. I'm doing well at work. That was the one thing I could hang onto that would get me through.
16:42
I made sure to keep up appearances and always perform. I made calendar appointments in my phone so I didn't forget anything. One in every 10 Americans over the age of 12 is addicted to alcohol or drugs roughly equal to the entire population of Texas. This is why it's so important
17:01
that we have these conversations. I drank heavily from the age of 18 to 40. This disease is deadly and progressive, and there is help out there. So of that population the size of Texas, only 11% ever receive treatment. My sobriety, Kate, is April 12, 2015.
17:21
It was the last day of Polycon 2015. I saw a talk by Jacob Kaplan-Moss called The Talent Myth, talking about the myth of the rock star developer, an amazing talk. Go watch it on YouTube after we're done here. It's really an absolutely must-watch for everybody on the planet, let alone our community.
17:43
This helped put me, I'm not saying Jacob Kaplan-Moss got me sober, but what I am saying is that it put me in the right mindset so that I had had a great week at PyCon but it involved a lot of heavy drinking and Jacob's talk put me in the right mind frame that when I came back from PyCon, the next morning my family was gathered
18:01
in my living room, knowing that the Flyers had just been eliminated from the playoffs and I was about to embark on my yearly attempt at a month off. I was in the right mindset for what they had to say and I entered rehab and it's probably the best decision I ever made, other than maybe asking my wife to marry me.
18:22
So some uncomfortable facts to consider continue. 23 million Americans self-identify as being in recovery from drug or alcohol addiction, 23 million. That's a lot of this country and worldwide, do the math. I got away from everything for a month
18:41
and started to build my recovery experience toolbox, the experience toolbox of how to handle situations. I was worried about leaving my colleagues up the river without a paddle in the lurch. You know what's funny? Believe it or not, the world kept spinning without me at work. It was absolutely incredible. I wouldn't have believed it
19:01
but there are really no excuses to get the help you need. It will make your life so much better. It was Lou Gehrig who said, today I consider myself the happiest man, the luckiest man in the world. Today I really do consider myself the luckiest person in the world. So really, if you have a problem,
19:21
please reach out to me or somebody else. It'll be kept confidential. We can talk. So some uncomfortable facts in DjangoCon terms. There are about 450 attendees here at DjangoCon. We sold out, great work, Jeff and the whole team. Approximately 45 of those people
19:41
are addicted to alcohol or drugs and are actively using. Approximately five will receive treatment and I am one of those five. Let's examine our culture and community a little bit. Programming and startup culture, we've heard it many times here already.
20:01
How many companies have you seen with beer on tap, a bar, microbrews in the fridge, offered as a perk? People in technology are already at high risk for alcoholism and addiction. The obsessive compulsive behavior is celebrated and it's all around us. Digital design and tech in general has a culture of promoting alcohol use.
20:23
Most earthlings are capable of having a few drinks and stopping and they absolutely have that right but for those of us who cannot stop, where one drink is too many and there's never enough, it's really a temptation we have to remove. You know, I used to say things like, oh, I'm not a problem drinker, I'm a solutions drinker.
20:45
I don't drink to have a good time. I drink to stop the voices in my head. Turns out those voices are your friends sometimes. It's a conscience, motivation, empathy. They get buried under the sea of addiction you're swimming in.
21:03
So our culture encourages heavy drinking as a way of socializing, networking and business. I sold one of my companies in a bar. There are a fair number of us who can't just stop which leads us on a destructive path. When alcohol becomes a perk of the workplace, we risk alienating people in the quest for cool.
21:22
This is unacceptable. The stigma of this disease will often present people who have a problem from expressing it. It did for me for many years. There are quite literally people who should be at this event who are not here because of this disease.
21:41
I want you to meet Nick D. Nick was my rehab roommate at the Melbourne Institute Rehab in April, 2015 during detox. Now detox, it's about the lowest point you could imagine in life, filled with shame. So it does create a bond between roommates who are going through detox together.
22:01
Sort of a in the bunker foxhole mentality. Again, we weren't best friends, but we had been doing well in early recovery. Seeing each other at alumni nights back at the rehab every Tuesday night, we'd go back even very early on to show people that there is hope who are currently in there. I saw Nick on Tuesday, October 20th, 2015
22:22
at Melbourne Alumni Night and he seemed to be doing really well. We were about six months in at the time. On Monday, October 26th, a couple of days before I gave this talk for the first time, Nick relapsed, overdosed and died at age 24. This is a deadly progressive disease
22:41
and it needs to be addressed. So what can we do? Get professional help if you have a problem. Recognize the stigma. Tell a friend to get professional help. An intervention can save a life, even if it doesn't work the first time.
23:02
Don't be afraid to talk about it. These topics have to be on the table. Care instead of mockery, empathy, not judgment. Don't celebrate this disease. Sentiments like work hard, play hard are bullshit. What are we, kindergartners? Ooh, you get to go for recess, you worked hard today.
23:22
Examine your work culture. Penn, Wharton and my boss are absolutely amazing and supported me in every way to get the help I need. Without any shame, I've had nothing but support. Can we say that about many other workplaces? Again, I'm not here to tell any earthlings
23:40
who can drink responsibly to stop drinking. I believe in having fun and absolutely insist on enjoying life. But if you're like me, you'll know you have a problem. And if you think you have a problem, please, please get help. Reach out to me. I will talk to any of you about this. That is part of my medicine, is helping another alcoholic or addict
24:01
get the help they need. It helps keep me sober. So the miracle. I have a daily reprieve from the urge to drink. I reach out to other alcoholics and try to help them. And in doing so, I help myself. I've been sober on my birthdays for the first time since before
24:21
Nirvana's Nevermind was released. I've had more honest laughter and joy in my life than I've had in 22 years of addiction. I get to spend a ton of time with my nephew, watching him grow up. He's three and lives five blocks from me. I actually enjoy being myself again.
24:41
It's a miracle. So I'm gonna close with this. Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That's why we call it the present. Be sure you do something nice for someone else today. And by the way, if they find out, it doesn't count.
25:03
Altruism is its own reward, and it's the key to recovery. It's helping another alcoholic or addict out. Every day isn't perfect. I strive for progress, not perfection. I am really lucky that there is a solution to my disease. And once again, I get to hang out
25:21
with a bunch of my close friends who are like I am and talk about my favorite topic and biggest problem, me, almost every day, if not twice a day. And life is good. So I really wanna thank the Django community for providing a platform where we can talk about the really important issues. If there's an issue of any type you wanna bring up,
25:41
the Django community is a place that will embrace it, and that is one of our greatest strengths. Put the technology aside. Come for the technology. Stay for the community. That's all of you. That's everyone here and everyone across the world. It's one of the most amazing communities I've ever been a part of. I give a talk on how Wharton found Django, and I talk about all the technical things,
26:00
and we went through analyzing what kind of plug-in ecosystem does it have, how does the ORM work, and at the end of it, I talk about how damn lucky we got by landing on such an amazing tech community. The Django community and the Python community have been absolutely amazing in embracing Wharton as we've moved to Python and Django as our framework and language of choice,
26:23
and everybody who supported me, the Django community, my wonderful colleagues, my friends, and my family, the warmth has been great. The lack of judgment has been amazing. The understanding of the fact that I have to put significant time into recovery has been amazing, but most importantly, I can now say,
26:41
hi, I'm Tim, and I'm an alcoholic, and thanks for letting me share. Thanks so much, heartwarming.
27:27
If anybody has any comments or anything they'd like to share, we've got a couple of minutes before lunch, and thanks so much. I think I'll just say for everyone, thank you so much for sharing, and thank you so much for telling us your story.
27:42
Thanks, Russ. Hi, Tim. Hey, Alex. Do you think communities where they serve alcohol, and that's kind of a normalized thing, are uninclusive to people who are recovering from alcoholism? I mean, I'm a vegan, and sometimes it bothers me when people around me are eating meat. It makes me feel a little bit uncomfortable.
28:02
I'm wondering if that's sort of the same thing, like if you feel uncomfortable when people around you are drinking. It does when it's really the focus of an event, but for me, it's very different than maybe any other alcoholic or addict. So some alcoholics and addicts have different triggers. I am not okay when the focus of an event
28:21
is the bar, the alcohol, and I was partially responsible for leading those kinds of events before, lest I sound like a total hypocrite when I was in my active addiction. But things like the Monday night bowling night, where it is not the focus and people are having drinks, I'm okay with that. Not every alcoholic and addict will be, but I think the key here is to find a balance,
28:41
because I don't know of any alcoholics or addicts who want everybody to stop drinking because we have a problem. Again, we're a small part of the population, but we do exist, and as a vegetarian, I can relate, but I was very glad to see DjangoCon once again showing how amazing it is, a tagged vegetarian vegan table yesterday. Thank you, Ryan Sullivan and Alex
29:01
for putting that together. It's just another example of how amazing and inclusive this community really is. I completely agree. Thank you, Tim. Thanks, Alex. Thank you, Tim, for a really amazing and honest talk. I know that some of us here work at companies that do have the beer on tap and do have sort of a heavy drinking culture.
29:20
Do you have any tips about how we can approach the people in power in our workplaces to maybe at least remove the kegerator? Yeah, sometimes it's hard because it's so entrenched in the culture. My last company, for example, was a very blue-collar, rough-and-tumble, you know, man-up type of community, so it's a very difficult thing to broach
29:42
depending on the context, but I think more and more as this topic gets talked about, it gets easier and easier, especially with things like YouTube where you can find all kinds of resources or the statistics I quoted here when you actually put them out there. I think there are a lot of people who just don't realize how large a problem this is. However, it's getting a lot of attention,
30:02
and with the problems we're having with opiate addiction in this country now, especially with companies that have promoted opiates as non-addicting, OxyContin in particular, has gotten a lot of attention, and while that's a very sad story when you hear stories about senior citizens who are copping heroin
30:21
because they can't afford their opiates anymore, and the way the effect opiates have had on the suburbs is not something that they can sweep under the rug anymore, so I think it's getting noticed a lot more, so there are a lot more resources out there, and the conversation has started, which has made me proud to be in recovery.
30:41
Thanks, Lacey. All right, I think it's lunchtime. I'm gonna go listen to some very loud music in the data center for a few minutes, but I'll be up there to see y'all soon. Thanks so much, heartwarming. You all are amazing and awesome. Thank you, DjangoCon. Thank you.