Are we all drunk?
Michel Heitzmann
© Michel Heitzmann - Humans nowhere
Sunday night. JFK to Heathrow. Business class because McKinsey paid. Well, the client did.
I discovered the disruptive genius of Richard Branson and his Virgin Atlantic that allowed me to collect little mag lights and other useless cool things.
I should have been sleeping though. I was reading the deck I had written for the morning meeting.
In that meeting, one of them would ask a question I had not anticipated, and I did not want to go oh shit.
It would probably be a hurtful “so what?”
I always dreaded that so-what that often was accompanied by a think-better condescending encouragement. Wait! I still hate it just remembering it.
Suffering to stay at the table.
It was McKinsey after all: some folks still think I am some kind of brilliant outlier when I mention I have endured it for five years.
The table. In an old St James building in London with gorgeous wood everywhere, astonishing staircases and in the basement, a whole bunch of folks speaking English in accents I had never heard before and making charts in a pre-PowerPoint world out of the handwritten pages we gave them.
The wanna see Buckingham Palace? it is a 2 minute walk type of table.
Around it, people who had gone to Oxford, Cambridge, INSEAD, Wharton, Harvard, LSE. I was just an engineer from Columbia, having to learn every day what the rest already knew. A guy spelled Michelle by most, in the Anglo-Saxon consulting temple. Mentioning spell it like Platini only worked in Europe. Gringos went Uh? Ok, call me Mike. No, am straight.
During those Branson weekly collector treats, I lived in Connecticut. Sunday night I flew mostly to London, Friday afternoon I flew back to New York, in between I worked eighteen-hour days in a city I did not live in for a Firm whose current members experience the same as I did. I know. I talk to them during the annual get-togethers.
Now, I smile and listen to them like dinosaurs do.
Yet, I wonder if I deserved to be there.
I mean it. It ain’t charming humility for the LinkedIn crowd although that crowd should be humbler when they claim to be humbled by a mundane experience we do not care about.
The people around that table were, on average, more experienced than I was, better networked than I was, spoke way better English and certainly less shy.
I had infiltrated it through compounding effort, and the effort had to keep compounding because the moment it stopped, the gap would show.
Once I let myself say it out loud, even now, decades later, I have to ask what I was doing all those years with my sweaty palms.
I was fuelled by the fear of being found out. Imposter syndrome à son maximum.
I was performing competence. Reasonably well.
Yet, the only response to a body that knows it does not belong is to work twice as hard as anyone else in the room, indefinitely, until some collapse happens.
Le mécanisme is not that weird, as I see it now.
Monday and Tuesday go fine. The dinner on Wednesday goes fine. Thursday’s call goes fine. Friday I fly home and Saturday I do not move from the sofa and Sunday at six o’clock I start packing again. Each one a hit. Just frequent enough to keep me at the table for another week. Not really a win. Just a not yet.
Today I roam airports and I notice all these important folks, talking important things, very loud if they are Americans, that nobody else cares about.
I see the me of decades ago. Now I admit it is far more important how Arsenal is doing or how the planet is not doing.
For those still out there conquering the world, you, not Elon, who is past help, well, it is an illusion.
Let’s talk again about the madman who studied pigeons to then extrapolate to humans.
Skinner did the experiments in 1957. Pigeons that get fed every time peck at a steady rate and stop when they are full. Pigeons that get fed sometimes, unpredictably, peck until they fall over. The intermittent reward is the addictive one. The intermittent absence of exposure is the same shape.
I made it through this one too. That was what I thought. Whispered in a hotel bathroom in Frankfurt at midnight. Whispered in a taxi from Heathrow at six in the morning. Whispered to myself across years.
Not found out. Pretending. Well.
Allow me to go down history lane to a dinner party in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1917, i.e. way before I was born. I have researched this.
A shy young army officer, raised by his grandparents after both parents walked out, sat awkwardly at every dinner table he had ever sat at.
Someone passes him a cocktail. Then another. By the end of the evening he is drunk for the first time in his life, and feels for the first time in his life, that he belongs. The elixir of life. The drink had done the one thing he had spent his whole life wishing for.
William Griffith Wilson spent the next seventeen years drinking himself to ruin. Failed law school as he was too drunk to pick up his diploma. Made and lost a fortune speculating in stocks. Was committed four times to hospitals. The doctor there eventually told his wife that he would either die of his alcoholism or have to be locked up permanently because his brain was going. Bill W. had his last drink on 11 December 1934.
Since I know the date, you are figuring out that the man did something exceptional. Stay with me.
Six months later, on a failed business trip to Akron, Bill W. found himself in a hotel lobby on a Saturday afternoon. Six months sober. At the end of the lobby was the bar. Through the door he could see men laughing (different times, women were doing other things).
He had figured out that the only thing keeping him sober was talking to another drunk. He could not stay sober by himself.
So instead of walking into the bar, he walked to the lobby telephone and started calling names from the church directory on a side table. He was not calling to confess. He was not calling to pray. After many calls, a minister, instead of doing what ministers usually do, said: I know a drunk.
The drunk was Robert Smith, a surgeon in Akron whose hands shook in the morning. They talked for six hours on first meeting. Dr Bob took his last drink on the 10th of June 1935.
Alcoholics Anonymous dates its founding to that day. Today, almost two million members worldwide. No app. No notifications. No streaks. No algorithm. No status.
Everyone is a first name and an initial. The anonymity is not coincidence. It is the architecture. The whole thing is built so a stockbroker can sit beside a surgeon beside a janitor beside a senator and none of it matters. The only fact in the room is whether you can stay sober today.
It works because step one is non-negotiable: admit you are powerless over alcohol.
That sentence is doing all the work. Not admit you have a chemical dependency. Not admit you have an illness. Admit you cannot win against this. The fight is the addiction. The admission is the exit.
The genius of step one, the part that the wellness industry has never been able to copy and never will, is that it makes room for the possibility that the shame was correct. That you had, in fact, ruined things. Hurt people. Failed at marriages. Lost jobs. Made promises you did not keep. Step one does not tell you the verdict was unfair. Step one tells you the verdict is allowed to be true, and the only way forward is to stop arguing with it.
How does this relate to my London story? I craved acceptance and recognition preventing me from being the charming person I am today.
I reckon that most humans not just surviving are in the same boat. Performing and blinded from being themselves. Not paying attention to the important things.
Which brings me to the apps I built for those who are spinning wheels.
I built three. They are on iOS and Android. They are free. They have no notifications. They have no streaks. They have no algorithm. They do not remember nor remind you. You have to remember them.
They are useless to someone who has not yet admitted what their schedule is doing to them.
They gather dust until the day you decide you do not want to be at that table on those terms any more. That day may not come. For most people it does not. The apps will be deleted in a storage cleanup along with the photo editor you used once in 2022.
This is not a roadmap bug. This is the stance. A tool that nags you is the table in a different costume. I refused to build that. Which means I have built something that will fail. I know.
I built it anyway. With money I earned at the exact table I am now writing against.
Somebody will find them at the right moment. Maybe six people. Maybe six thousand. That is a sketchy business case. But then again, it is not pretending to be business.
Like you, I use AI every day and it is the Red Bull without the stomach ache. That thing lets me actually connect dots when before I was just attempting or talking about it.
And now it is also at the table.
The hours AI saves on a deck are not given back. They are spent on the next task. The week a strategy team used to spend thinking is now three prompts. The output looks like thinking. It is the absence of thinking.
I coach in organisations now. I watch this happen in real time. My gut, every week now, is to ask: could you please be human? Could you please think?
Less and less time is dedicated to thinking let alone pause.
The new question at the table is no longer did you do the work but did you do it faster than the person across from you who has learned to prompt better. The table has not gone away. The table appears to have more chairs and I fear that soon it will become musical chairs. Disappearing like those guys in the basement.
The way out of this madness is admitting the gap may never close on someone else’s terms.
And then search for somewhere else on your terms.
Wait! Are you reading this at work?
Did AI just do what you were hired for?
Am not monetising. The apps are free. They do one thing: clear the noise so you can hear yourself, hear others, hear the planet. iOS and Android. thequietframe.com/app.
Thanks for reading.
Nice. Im a friend of Bill too. 33 years. Love your take on AI also