The Lawyer, the Addict | Hacker News Reader

The Lawyer, the Addict

nytimes.com

89 pointshvo32 comments

The pressure to maintain a lifestyle that you perceive to make you whole is an interesting one. My career started in the film industry and the long days, emotional personalities and industry norm resulted in abusing blow, while I don't think it ever got totally out of control in my life, I did go through a year of using it every day, and some days all day. Of course, it's a cycle. You use it to live that life, you make money living that life, you spend money using things to live the life, you have to live that life harder. I switched back into tech in my mid 20s, and eventually ended up relatively senior in a quickly growing startup. After about a year I started to use adderall more and more and more to keep up and feel more focused and more like the engineering minded folks around me. I'm thankful that eventually my boss (our ceo) pulled me aside and told me he felt that I was using adderall and booze in an unhealthy way and he wanted me to stop. However, the next thing he said to me is actually what made me stop. He said we really love you the way you are without drugs, we really love John as he is. Whoah, that was like a slap in the face. I'm really grateful for that as I'm sure I could have ended up down some pretty crazy rabbit hole. I suspect more bosses could do with being like this.

>The pressure to maintain a lifestyle that you perceive to make you whole is an interesting one.

Disagree on "pressure to maintain a lifestyle"...I'd make it more general and say just straight pressure. When people are under extreme pressure for long periods of time they look for an "out".

Thanks for explaining my own feelings to me?

I wasn't commenting on you or your feelings, the part I quoted was written by yourself and addressed to an unknown 2nd person:

>The pressure to maintain a lifestyle that you perceive to make you whole is an interesting one.

Since you're probably not addressing the dead lawyer or his wife or the new york times writer I took this to be a general comment open to the floor & voiced an opinion on it. Anyway...moving swiftly along.

Outside of the drug abuse, the lifestyle can be found in a good percentage of homes all over Palo Alto. Working 60+ hours/week for years on end(check), angry and threatening one minute, remorseful and generous the next (check), sustaining himself largely on fast food, snacks, coffee, ibuprofen and antacids (check), the last call he ever made was for work (likely), displayed no photos of his children or me in his office [because...] he didn’t want the partners to see him as “distracted by my family.” (yep).

While this doesn't exist in every household it exists in a lot of them. Going for walks at dusk you can hear the household arguments spawned by this lifestyle. Not every house, every night. But they are common enough. Sometimes you just want to reach out and say "I understand" to the person in the house that's very obviously blowing up due to stress.

What is less common is drug abuse. I don't know how people find the time for a drug addiction, alcohol addiction, or any other kind of addiction that isn't "overworking themselves" because that is very much a primary addiction.

Silicon Valley is the 1950s Hollywood for techies. They come from all over the world to work with the best of the best, for a shot at something incredible. And much like Hollywood for actors, it ends up chewing up and eating more people than anybody outside the bubble realizes.

There's a lot to be said for the area. All kinds of positives. But it's also a very destructive area at a very personal level. There is a lot of personal sacrifice happening at the altars of "educational opportunity", "changing the world", "better lifestyle for my family", and whatever other benefits people have talked themselves into believing that more money can provide for their families.

My advice, and I should take it myself, is to recognize when you are breaking down and take a break. The world will get by for 2 more weeks without that one all-so-important feature that you're working on right now.

>I don't know how people find the time for a drug addiction,

It's not a case of "finding time". It's a case of escape aka I need this to cope. With that mindset there is definitely time.

One of the reasons why I stay away from drugs...that's a rabbit hole I don't want to go down.

"One of the first things I learned is that there is little research on lawyers and drug abuse."

Or really any other profession. I work in politics, in DC, and drug abuse is rampant. Absolutely horrible. I've found people snorting pills in the bathroom, steps away from the offices of members of congress. Adderall, cocaine, Xanax, and a myriad of painkillers is the norm. Having to shake a colleague awake and pour coffee into him because he was so jazzed on adderall all of the previous day, that he had to drink himself into a drunken stupor just to fall asleep. Now it's 8am and he needed to be at a committee hearing in two hours. It's under reported and invisible.

I think highly stressful jobs bring out a "solutions" mentality. Drugs help. With sleep, with productivity, with being on the ball....until they don't....

Yes, I understand the anecdote here is a lawyer, but it certainly needs to be studied for all professions and modern lifestyle affects - lawyer, banker, programmer or blue collar or service jobs with infrequent customer interaction

Of all the heartbreaking details of his story, the one that continues to haunt me is this: The history on his cellphone shows the last call he ever made was for work. Peter, vomiting, unable to sit up, slipping in and out of consciousness, had managed, somehow, to dial into a conference call.

i just linked this quote to several people too. the next quote that really hit home was this one:

"Over all, the results showed that about 21 percent of lawyers qualify as problem drinkers, while 28 percent struggle with mild or more serious depression and 19 percent struggle with anxiety."

Because the percentages seem comparable in tech for engineers.

I wonder how this compares to physicians?

Do you have source for three tech claim? People around me don't seem to be that depressed nor alcoholic, but I don't work in SV.

Depression is really not something you can necessarily glean from being around people, especially in an office environment. I imagine the same is largely true for alcoholism as well.

I am always surprised how we are managing to make the workplace less and less healthy to the point that of causing severe health issues. Most people know this but it seems to be impossible to stop this trend.

Especially lawyers, doctors and lot of tech people make good money and could afford to work less but instead kill themselves.

Came here to post that same quote. It's amazing to me how much, in a world of plenty, we are still able to wrap ourselves, and our identities, so much in work that we completely lose sight of why we started working in the first place.

> vomiting, unable to sit up, slipping in and out of consciousness, had managed, somehow, to dial into a conference call.

How would the writer know anything about how Peter was feeling when he dialed into the conference call? Maybe Peter was perfectly fine and lucid at that moment.

The events may be very sad, but that quote is made up, or call it "dramatic license" to be more generous.

Medics probably got an accurate time of death, and one is able to extrapolate from that the time of his vomiting, which likely matched the time he made the call.

Your comment is a little heartless.

Do you think the medics were able to extrapolate that he was "unable to sit up" at that moment? That he was "slipping in and out of consciousness" at that moment?

If the writer (the ex-wife) had evidence she would have said so because it would have made the story more compelling. She could have said, for example, that the other callers on the conference call could hear him vomiting. But she didn't.

I don't have a problem with dramatic license or artistic license; historical books and movies are full of scenes that no one witnessed. But when the grandparent of this thread said, "Of all the heartbreaking details of his story, the one that continues to haunt me", he seemed to believe that it happened just like that. I wanted to point out that the writer is inventing a scene -- it is not literally true.

The junkies I've seen tend to have really poor sitting up skills while using. Extrapolating from that to a junkie who is overdosing seems straightforward and highly probable.

I completely understand this guy's mindset.

I am a 23 year old programmer who just graduated college. My goal is to work at a place that makes me happy. I think the first step is by working on personal projects to post on my Github and put on my resume. But when I get home after a depressing 8 hour day of staring at code that makes no sense and accomplishing nothing, I'm burnt out and tired and depressed and more coding is the last thing I want to do. So I'm trying to get a prescription for Adderall, because last time I took Adderall I was extremely focused and interested in programming, and I got tons of work done on personal projects that were a huge part of getting me the (albeit shitty) job I have now.

I have only one friend, and he usually hangs out with his girlfriend, so I have basically no social life. When I want some down time, I instantly get depressed because I have nothing to do and no one to do anything with. So I smoke weed. I'm instantly happy, and video games and movies are instantly interesting and enjoyable again.

I don't see how I can escape from these things. I truly feel like drugs are the only thing keeping me going right now.

This breaks my heart to read, as you're so young, and so free, and this should be a happy time in your life.

I hope you find your way. :)

Don't do the drugs. Tech companies are marathons not sprints. It is not about one week, it is about years of innovation. You need to be healthy, creative and on top of your game. In our industry it is about being smart, not lots of hours of work. Being mentally healthy will pay off in the long run.

> You need to be healthy, creative and on top of your game

If I don't take drugs I can't be on top of my game because I have no energy or focus or motivation to program without them.

> In our industry it is about being smart, not lots of hours of work

You don't get hired because someone thought you were "smart". You get hired because you're experienced in stack X or because you worked at prestigious company Y or graduated with a great GPA from prestigious university Z. X won't happen for me without drugs. I can't focus without them. Y won't happen without X. Z I can't afford and even if I could I would need drugs to get me through it. I feel like I have no choice.

I hope you will believe me when I say that you will probably be able to get what you want out of an Adderall scrip a few times... But I suspect you won't get much more out of it than some code, and it will not get the move out of your current situation you want. I don't know from personal experience; I know adderral works, but if you want to be hired by a good team, it's often not just code that's being hired for, it's the person who's joining the team that is what we really want.

If you are feeling like shit after work and you want to move up and out you should consider that when most of us interview a person, we can't recommend hiring someone who is trapped. It sucks, but it has horrible effects on how a person interviews.

There is probably a way out though. I highly recommend that if you want to find some motivation for coding and for interviewing, you should use the job you have to pay for trying out some group physical activities that are not gender specific (e.g. pickup basketball is almost all male, but usually rock climbing is not) and learn to relax and enjoy your companions, and your activity. This will give you the head space to think about what you need for your personal project. It should provide positive feedback about you that is unrelated to your self-imate in tech. It should let you exercise your social skills, and give you the energy you need to do your project (albeit with less time, but with more focus and a clearer head) and interview comfortably.

And hopefully it'll give you a peer group that has little to do with tech who can know you on normal human level and give you important feedback to let you know you're valuable for who you are.

And here's the key: it's sustainable. Engineering, tech, etc. is a career that you may continue in for the next 40+ years. If you don't wind up working for facebook or google in your 20s, you may well end up working for their successors in your 30s when you're ready. Or you may work for someone else, which would be great too, as long as you're happy and doing what you enjoy with people you like.

You could do with some support. I am available to help you. contact me at twitter.com/dirkdk if you are open to it

If you cannot see the way to exit from that dark place don't be ashamed to ask for help. And please talk to a psychologist, sure it will help you.

"Peter battled his own brand of melancholy...he wasn’t someone who ever really felt happy. He had moments of being “not unhappy,”"

This hit a bit too close to home. not quite as severe for me yet, as right now in those moments i hide it behind a facade of dry humor and try to be an optimist.

I'm 25 and work in tech out here in SV, and have no current impulse for illegal drug use and only a light drinker. But, I admit there is a non-zero chance I could one day become Peter.

Fuck. Me. - i need to take better care of myself.

I recently had to cope with a colleague that has chosen this route, this level of addiction is traumatic to see. Things had gone a long way from recreational and I had to have words with the enemy - HR - as a thing I felt compelled to do.

I have friends that take things recreationally for them to not go down the hell hole my former workmate chose, however, from reading the article I can see that they might be immune, they have shifted to sociable alcoholism and could shift over to the full on disease of addiction much like the subject of this article. Maybe mid life crisis could be the mechanism and not some childhood trauma thing. The opioid crisis has been an expensive mistake, there is too much blurring of prescription and street drugs in all these stories.

When pushed into a corner and/or under huge pressure people make decisions that solve the short-term issue...but at a cost.

I have direct and very recent experience with the patent group at the firm mentioned in the article (WSGR) because my company is suing their client, but I think the following needs to be stated about all law firms.

True, law is an incredibly stressful profession. True, it selects for competitive people. True, the hours can be crushing. But few other professions reward individuals for lying so much.

Patent lawyers and most other lawyers lie day in, day out. Often their job cannot be done without lying. They lie to clients (overbilling), colleagues (opposing counsel), judges at every level, and as the article points out, their families. Often the lies are in print. It's essentially a prerequisite to rationalize these lies as "argumentation" or viewpoint, but often they're just lies. For most people who are not complete sociopaths, lying takes a toll. It's not at all surprising to see that it can add up in frightening ways.

Lawyering done with a high degree of skill and latitude involves none of these things. I recognize the critique, at least from a distance, as a dysfunction caused by practicing in a high-stakes environment without the ability to persuade clients to take reasonable and just positions. Once upon a time bar association had fee schedules to ensure that one would not find any particular representation so lucrative as to apply pressure of this kind. I also will say that law schools do not necessarily encourage budding lawyers to cabin their argumentation, which unfortunately promotes a 'say anything' approach by younger lawyers like you describe. It's effective only in the short term.

So this explains why it's called the bar exam ;-)

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