I started out as a professional basketball player, then became a writer, and for the last 10+ years I’ve done sales for tech startups.
I am especially interested in animal welfare, consciousness research, and reducing suffering.
Drew Housman
Karma: 395
I saw this on Substack and thought it was great. I stopped drinking almost 6 years ago in part to try to show solidarity with a close family member who is an alcoholic. It sadly did not have the affect on that person I was (naively) hoping for, but I have noticed a uniformly positive reaction from my friends and acquaintances. Most of them want to drink less.
One guy in particular, who I wasn’t even close with, approached me at an event recently. He was so excited to tell me about how he had cut his drinking way back. I had never encouraged him to do this. He just knew that I had quit and he clearly felt this newfound connection with me. That was nice.
I agree that there are social benefits to drinking. I have many fond memories of having beers with friends and having incredible conversations full of laughter. My biggest worry in quitting was that I’d miss out on this bonding time. I thankfully have been able to almost fully recreate these experiences, just over a coffee instead of a beer.
Also, the version of me from 15 years ago probably would not have had the courage to talk to my now wife at a party had I not been drunk. But once you do a few things sober you realize life can still be very fun (and even more fun the next morning!) Dancing at a wedding sober and still having an amazing time was a huge milestone, after that I felt like I could do anything.
Thanks! It’s a lot of big exciting changes at once, when it rains it pours :)
I’m glad my story resonated, and I hope you can keep posting about mid-career transitions as you come across them. They are really inspiring.
Thank you very much! Best of luck on the job hunt, it can be such a grind. I hope you find something great soon.
Nice write up! Henry Bergh was awesome. I highly recommend a biography on him called “A Traitor to His Species”.
It’s a treasure trove of fascinating anecdotes about early animal rights advocacy. It’s been a minute since I read it, but these parts stuck with me:Bergh didn’t start this work until he was like 52! Talk about a late bloomer. He spent the first 3⁄4 of his life drifting aimlessly about, dabbling in things but never making much of an impact or trying too hard at anything. That’s great inspiration for anyone who has ever thought it’s too late for them to make a change.
Bergh’s first attempt at stirring up popular opinion in favor of animals was by arresting people who were importing live turtles in disturbing ways (turtles flipped on their back with fins tied up.) I would have guessed he’d go to bat for a cute and cuddly animal first.
The ASPCA once got a big donation from a guy who was dying and was terrified of being reincarnated as a draft horse. He’d worked intimately with draft horses and knew how bad their lives were, and I guess he felt guilty. The shocking conditions for draft horses were some of the saddest portrayals in the book.
A “sport” where dogs competed to see who could kill the most rats was very popular in late 1800′s NYC.
At one point a method for euthanizing stray dogs involved rounding them up, putting them into a giant container, and lowering that container into the East River.
I think there is room for modeling multiple approaches to reducing unethical meat consumption, and one of them is the “80% is good enough” approach that I’m trying to practice. Big tent meat reduction?
Just in case it wasn’t clear in my post, I am very interested in this approach as well! I applaud you for thinking along these lines. Every little bit helps. This Future Perfect article titled “the difference you make when you eat less meat” does a great job of showing how eating less meat can make a big difference in terms of animal welfare and climate concerns.
I think basically all of veganism is just degrees of this harm reduction approach. Someone like Brian Tomasik might look at my supposedly vegan lifestyle and weep, seeing that I crunch springtails underfoot when I walk in my lawn, I buy some produce that was grown with pesticides, and I buy non-vegan products for my wife and other family members.If more people took your 80% approach there would be far fewer conscious animals tortured in tiny cages. Which would be a huge win.
Done, thanks for the nudge.
Excuse the delayed reply, but I wanted to make sure to say this comment made me happy!
While a running physique might perpetuate a frail stereotype to the untrained eye, I know that y’all are actually packing a very strong punch in a smaller package :)
‘be fitter than almost every meat eater they know.’
Love this. Great workout motivation.
Thanks for the interesting comment and dialogue!
This part stood out to me, because I had the opposite reaction:
When meat eaters are trolling vegans, they sometimes justify their meat consumption by saying “meat is delicious!” On reflection, I actually do think that’s the explanation for why I continue to eat it—food’s one of the few hedonic pleasures I can access regularly in my otherwise spartan and sober lifestyle, I hate cooking, and it’s easy to make meat taste delicious while using it as the primary protein source in a healthy, balanced diet.
I used to love eating meat. When I went vegan I realized I could get just as much satisfaction from any protein rich, umami-filled, sauce covered or well seasoned food. My pet theory is that what everyone mostly likes when they eat animals is the added sauces and seasonings, not the meat. Bland, unseasoned chicken breast is terrible.
But like I said in my post, I don’t have a refined palate, so maybe to those with better taste buds meat really is that delightful.
This is great, thanks for sharing. The jacked influencer memeplex is soooo focused on animal protein, it can be really hard to step out of that sphere of influence.
I was also highly sensitive to the reports I read from people who stopped being vegan because it didn’t work for them. There’s a good lesson in there about making sure to try things for myself in the real world instead of reading endless reports and then simply assuming I’d have a certain outcome.
I look forward to reading your post about eating more plants!
I had the same thought. I enjoyed this, and I super appreciate the author writing it all up! Fascinating stuff. But it sort of felt like a home inspector telling me, “So your foundation is definitely going to crack and cause your house to fall into a sinkhole. I might tell you how to fix that in a few weeks. In the meantime, here’s an incredibly detailed analysis showing your roof is in good shape!”
That’s a good point, thanks
The likelihood of having a strong rebound effect when stopping THC use seems really bad, thanks for pointing it out. There’s definitely a lot to explore in this area.
Can you explain more about what you mean when you say people are wrong about their subjective experience? To me, what you feel in your internal world simulation is what matters, whether or not time is objectively speeding up or down.
And when referring to people, do you only mean humans? Seems like animals can have totally different subjective experiences of time that we should take into consideration when thinking about harms being done to them.
I am basing that on an article linked to in the above Applied Divinity Studies blog post called The Subjective Experience of Time: Welfare Implications, where the author states:
“convergent evidence from their neurology, behavior, and the temporal resolution of their senses indicates songbirds and honeybees experience 2-10 times as many subjective moments per objective unit of time as humans.”
I liked that post a lot, thanks for sharing. I wholeheartedly agree with your first footnote — “The moral importance of time-dilation turns out to be an absolutely fascinating question”
It’s something I want to learn more about.
Ha, that’s great, points for a novel earning to give strategy. Some of the stuff that happens to Dream Drew would not be out of place in a Rob Zombie film or the Saw franchise, so I see where you’re coming from.
When watching shows or movies now I usually look away from anything even a little gory out of fear that the images will find a way into my dreams.
Thanks for sharing. I’m so glad you were able to find relief. I’ll have to take a closer look at EMDR.
I started reading The Body Keeps the Score a couple years ago but set it aside because the writing style grated on me. Maybe I should give it another go.
Thanks, yeah, I think starting with the simples possible thing is usually a good idea.
Unfortunately, I could not build the app myself nor could I supervise a bright high schooler building it. But I am brimming with enthusiasm and would love to help out in other ways if I could!
I just got a forum DM from an EA-aligned mental health charity saying they might be able to recruit volunteers to build some digital tools to help in this space. I look forward to having a call with them and seeing how I can contribute.I’ve worked in tech basically my whole career but it’s always been on the growth/sales/marketing side of things.
Oh and thanks for calling out my mistake on imagery reversal / imagery rehearsal, that is now fixed that in the post.
I liked that a lot, thanks for the share. This reminds me that I wanted to note that I also have incredibly positive dreams as well. I have higher dream highs, I am pretty sure, than most of my friends. This is especially true if I am able to lucid dream.
There are so many interesting things to note in that post and in Gwern’s comment.
There’s one part of Gwern’s post I’d like to pull over here because I think it adds to the conversation around how bad nightmares are (or aren’t.)
I agree with Harri’s observation that some dreams can feel like they are lasting an incredibly long time. And if it’s a bad dream that’s obviously really bad.
Gwern brushes that concern aside by saying:
“You can’t remember or produce hours of experience corresponding to [the dream], and when you try to intervene by waking people up in lucid dreams or doing tasks, they seem to still be processing time at a normal 1:1 rate.”
It doesn’t seem relevant to me that the awake person is processing time normally. I care about the subjective experience of whatever person is suffering. And if someone has an awful experience that feels like it lasts hours or even days, I think that’s worse than a subjectively shorter bad experience. This kind of stuff happens with psychedelics, too.
I really enjoyed the Schwitzgebel post, thanks. When he says “We don’t really care that much about our hedonic states in sleep” it reminded me of the TV show Severance.
In the show (minor spoilers) a group of people get a procedure so that their working self has no memory of their self when they are not at work, and vice versa. The selves that work are treated almost like slaves by the selves don’t work, even though it’s technically the same person.
It’s weird to imagine that there is one version of me that routinely goes through torturous experiences. Meanwhile, the awake version of me is mostly just like, “Meh, whatever, dream Drew has been bitten by poisonous snakes before, one more time won’t hurt him.”
You’re welcome, I’m glad it resonated with you!
I think people definitely underestimate how often a cold email will get a response. I had a great call with Paul Shapiro from The Better Meat Co. after a cold email as well. He told me to start a plant based lobster company. That felt like a stretch for me, haha, but I loved his enthusiasm.