👁️ Sam Bankman-Fried: The Sickness Unto Death

Depression, Anxiety, and the Palo Alto System

I don’t publish draft excerpts every week, and I was going to skip this week - but I felt particularly compelled to share a connection that I made, somewhat out of the blue. I had forgotten that at the very same time Sam Bankman-Fried was a teenager in Palo Alto, a horrific wave of high school suicides, reputedly driven by achievement pressures, hit the community. The following very short passage explores the relationship between depression, anxiety, conformity, achievement - and fraud.

SBF, The Living Dead

The Sickness Unto Death

Bankman-Fried’s die-hard materialist rationalism is tied to the final throughline of his life: overpowering depression and anxiety.

Bankman-Fried’s distance from the world was profound. He told Lewis there were “no experiences in his childhood that mattered much.” He was in middle school when he realized that he never felt happiness. He felt nothing in the presence of art. “There were some things I had to teach my self to do … like making sure I smile when I’m supposed to smile. Smiling was the biggest thing that I almost weirdly couldn’t do.” The things that did give him satisfaction were repetitive preoccupations like trading and gaming - and above all, it seems, winning.

Sam’s disaffection with education and learning, his self-professed passive resistance to discipline, almost evokes a Bartleby. But Sam was never able or willing to openly declare that he would prefer not to. Instead, his major depression was treated with Selegaline, a powerful drug also prescribed to sufferers of Parkinson’s disease.[ After the collapse of FTX, some observers pointed out that Selegaline had been shown to increase high-risk behaviors, including gambling, in some clinical trials. But those results are tentative and seem largely confined to Parkinson’s patients.] With its help, he continued down the cattle chute prepared for upper-middle class children. Did he, a kitchen-table student of determinism, see the way prepared as his only choice? He spent his life molding himself in the image of a Silicon Valley boy genius entrepreneur, even if that fiction failed to fit.

He shared his disordered soul with his generation, and his moment. Rates of anxiety and depression among Americans have been increasing for several decades. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, anxiety rates shot from 15.6% in 2019 to 18.2% in 2022, and depression from 18.5% to 21.4%, according to the CDC. These disorders now disproportionately impact young people, increasingly ill-equipped to understand their own entrapment.

But Bankman-Fried was part of an earlier, more specific cohort that provides grim insight into this larger trend. Starting in 2009, Palo Alto’s two public high schools had teen suicide rates as much as five times the national average. That first year, three students from Henry M. Gunn high school stepped in front of oncoming Caltrains within 9 months of each other. The train - the very engine of Leland Stanford Srs wealth - became the manner of death for many victims in the following years, when “suicide clusters” recurred again and again.

An emergency CDC survey found that depression and anxiety were the primary drivers of these deaths, and advised more counseling resources and mental health interventions.[ https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2017/03/03/cdc-releases-final-youth-suicide-report/] But in broader discussions around the suicides, depression was consistently linked to the massive pressure for high achievement faced by this elite group of children. “I think we have to look at the attitude of all the adults in this community,” one local commented. “It is we who are to blame putting the pressure on the kids to succeed … No amount of school counseling will change the parents’ attitudes.”

In 2009, the same year this continuing wave of Palo Alto teen suicides was beginning, and when Sam would himself was about 17 and still very much grappling with his own emotional challenges, Joe Bankman decided to get clinical psychology degree. Already a renowned legal scholar in his early 50s, Bankman’s goal was primarily to help law students. He specialized in treating anxiety and depression, and with Barbara, “created a two-hour program for first-year students, using cognitive-behavioral therapy to help patients manage anxiety.“

Cognitive-behavioral therapy can help manage the symptoms of anxiety, but doesn’t aim to explain its roots. Kierkegaard, a Freudian a half century before Freud, located this variety of human discomfort in the friction between appearances and some deeper truth. The man who lived in dread, he observed, frozen between tension and inaction, was the man who was not authentic to himself, but instead trapped in the structure and habits of their age, and ruled by its symbols - in Palo Alto, the habits of achievement, the symbols of accumulation.

These suicides were the costs to be paid for a brighter future for the survivors. The pressure to achieve might break some - as we’ll see it break some share of Leland Stanford’s prized horses. Others survived, but broken in their smaller ways. All of this pain in service to a far-off future, for the children who would become great successes, and for the society they would enrich.

“The immediate man does not recognize his self, he recognizes himself only by his dress … he recognizes that he has a self only by externals.[ Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, Anchor 1954 Edition, cited in Becker, p. 184-187]” Sam was both master and slave to his symbols, to his hair and Corolla, to his valuation and market cap. More fundamentally, his imagination and horizons were those of Stanford, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street: fields of play for the fated and automated depressive.

But depression is the true sickness unto death - the death that arrives before the body ceases, the alienation from the true self under the pressure to conform to the Logic of the Code, the logic of linear achievement, of valuation, of status and power. Physical death, for Kierkagaard, was nothing compared to this death foretold and fated, the waking death of the half-man who serves only others. Perhaps Bankman-Fried’s brief success was only a brief detour along the way to a more final destination, the half-death of his imprisonment truer because the body still lives, occupied by nothing but the algorithm.