America has a drinking problem | Hacker News Reader

America has a drinking problem

theatlantic.com

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People have the cause and effect backwards in my opinion. You know why "binge drinking" isn't a problem in Germany, except for when the Australians turn up for Oktoberfest? It's because you can just buy a beer on the side of the road with your currywurst, and drink it without being hassled. If you act up, you get arrested for acting up. Try openly having a few beers in the park in Australia or the US, you'll be run out by the constabulary, or at the least they'll make you empty it in the trash. When you treat people like naughty children and bake into your culture the idea that drinking is itself an anti-social behaviour that always leads to fighting and dickheaddery, then that's how they act.

I regularly go out and have picnics with my wife and have never once been harassed about sharing a bottle of wine with our meal. My family goes camping over Memorial Day weekend to state parks all over Ohio and it’s pretty common to have alcoholic drinks but, as long as you’re not bothering anyone, nobody cares. We’ve been doing this for as long as I’ve been alive and not once has anyone cared in 30+ years.

The US has open container laws but they primarily exist for a pretense to arrest people for being disorderly, in my experience.

Edit: The person I’m responding to isn’t even in the US how is what they are saying more valid then my actual life experiences in the US?

There's a whole different side of this your comment isn't really addressing, which is how these laws apply to poor communities.

Most places I know of in the U.S. if you're walking down the street and a cop sees you with a beer, they'll make an issue about it. The thing is, it's not always super obvious, and they don't bother to look too close usually if they don't have a reason to. I don't think this is the case in poorer communities. Not only are the police more likely to be looking closer, but the situation of the people involved sometimes means they're more likely to be outside in a shared location instead of inside (smaller dwellings, shared living, etc), and open container laws are used to exert control over this populace.

Put in much simpler terms, I wouldn't be too afraid of walking down my street with an open beer if I felt like it, because police driving down the street are rare and unlikely to decide I'm an issue. I neither of those things are true to the same degree just 4-5 blocks away from me though, and I wouldn't want to risk my luck doing the same thing on a street there.

> There's a whole different side of this your comment isn't really addressing, which is how these laws apply to poor communities.

Poor communities? Really? People are oppressing others “right” to drink now? Where’s your evidence for any of this? In my “rich” neighborhood cops stop people all the time for drinks in the park or glass bottles on the beach.

> People are oppressing others “right” to drink now?

I didn't say that. I said it's a law applied unevenly, as I see it.

> Where’s your evidence for any of this?

I stated an observation based on my own experience, and why I believe it. The evidence for my belief is my own observations, which were explained.

> In my “rich” neighborhood cops stop people all the time for drinks in the park or glass bottles on the beach.

Parks and beaches will be policed differently, as public gathering places. I wasn't talking about those, even if the comment I was replying to was, I was referring to the more general topic of open containers in public in general, which is why I mentioned my street and a street a few blocks away.

It's obvious you have strong feelings on this topic (or another topic that you want this to stand in for), from both the way you approached the conversation and how you pigeonholed my statement into some other narrative that it wasn't intended to apply to. I've done my best to ignore the aggressive tone and re-framing of my point, but perhaps that approach isn't a useful strategy for productive discussion, if that's what you're actually going for?

> I've done my best to ignore the aggressive tone and re-framing of my point, but perhaps that approach isn't a useful strategy for productive discussion, if that's what you're actually going for?

What I'm going for is a stop to the race baiting. You have no evidence, just "feels", and we're now supposed to change society as a result. Racism has started increasing because people like you are going around expressing opinions with no facts. Where's the science? Or are you not interested in actually solving problems just creating more?

That would sound a lot more sincere if it made any sense.

Let me spell it out for you, since apparently the actual content of my original comment and my note about how you seemed to be viewing it as "another topic that you want this to stand in for" were not clear enough:

I said nothing about race. I wasn't intending to say anything about race. I wasn't using poor as a stand in for some minority. I was making a case for poor communities, of any color. Honestly, your response makes no sense. Given I expressed how I thought I would be treated differently based on the area I was in (that was the only difference in my comparison), no matter what race you assume I am, I clearly wasn't basing the comparison on race. Because I wasn't making a case about race, but about class.

> Where's the science? Or are you not interested in actually solving problems just creating more?

I wasn't presenting facts. I was presenting experiential testimony, very clearly as opinion, in case that made people think about the issue in a bit more depth. If I was presenting factual evidence, I would have looked up and presented that evident as references. I stand by my track record of doing this, and requesting it when people make factual assertions.

> Racism has started increasing because people like you are going around expressing opinions with no facts.

Really? That's an interesting observation coming from someone that just took a discussion that wasn't about race and decided to not only assume it was about race, but then inject their opinion about how that makes it wrong because there's no evidence that racism is the problem, and how in fact racism isn't on the rise, people assuming that about racism are. That's very meta.

> I wasn't using poor as a stand in for some minority.

Good. That’s clear now.

> Really? That's an interesting observation coming from someone that just took a discussion that wasn't about race and decided to not only assume it was about race, but then inject their opinion about how that makes it wrong because there's no evidence that racism is the problem, and how in fact racism isn't on the rise, people assuming that about racism are.

Yes finding racism (or insinuating like you’ve done here) where there is none is turning non racist people racist. And that’s not opinion, you can go learn that in on your own!

> Yes finding racism (or insinuating like you’ve done here)

I'm not insinuating I've found racism. I'm insinuating that you making a conversation about race that wasn't about it originally is ironic as it's doing the same thing you complained about. You "felt" that I was talking about race and decided to make a dismissive comment because of that. Because of what you "felt" about my comment, because it surely wasn't based on what my comment actually said.

If you believe people making issues about race that aren't really about race is part of the cause of a rise in racism, a bit of introspection on your own approach's contribution to that problem might be warranted. This doesn't mean I'm calling you racist (I feel compelled to spell this out, as past experience in this conversation with you leads me to believe you will think that's what I'm trying to say), but that your actions may be causing the the same harm they are intended to critique, regardless of your views.

> ... is turning non racist people racist. And that’s not opinion, you can go learn that in on your own!

So, something stated as fact (specifically noted as not opinion no less), and no reference provided. Do you truly not understand the difference to what I did?

> I'm not insinuating I've found racism.

Hey great, I don't really believe you though. Especially not with all the association with poor being a race thing. Some groups are tired of the racist conversation already. Some people have moved onto calling it other things so the conversation still happens. If you're not one of them, great! It's very unlikely you will convince me however, given that you'd be a bit of an outlier speaking quite literally.

> If you believe people making issues about race that aren't really about race is part of the cause of a rise in racism, a bit of introspection on your own approach's contribution to that problem might be warranted.

Please tell me on what I need to introspect on?

> This doesn't mean I'm calling you racist...

Oh I'm quite comfortable with my lack of racism, so nothing you can say would carry any weight. Sorry I felt compelled to spell that out.

> but that your actions may be causing the the same harm they are intended to critique, regardless of your views.

What harm am I causing exactly?

> So, something stated as fact (specifically noted as not opinion no less), and no reference provided. Do you truly not understand the difference to what I did?

I mean I just did what you did no?

>> There's a whole different side of this your comment isn't really addressing, which is how these laws apply to poor communities.

> Poor communities? Really? People are oppressing others “right” to drink now? Where’s your evidence for any of this? In my “rich” neighborhood cops stop people all the time for drinks in the park or glass bottles on the beach.

I often trick myself into thinking that things that I have learned are well understood by society. But maybe not.

Example: I was stopped for non-working taillights when I was a late teen. I was let go with a warning. I was also a white kid driving an unsuspecting handmedown car in the “wealthier” part of town.

It’s easy to imagine a similar stop being leveraged to search a car and fish for drugs or other “criminal behavior” if I was a different race in a rough neighborhood with a lot of street crime.

Spoiler: I had a joint in the biblebelt and it was ~1999-2000. I could have been arrested for sure.

Yea and once I was driving a sports car at exactly the speed limit. Cop paced me, ran my tag, ultimately found nothing and didn't couldn't me. Sometimes things look odd to a cop, like a sports car not speeding or a junker in a rich neighborhood. Assuming it's race related and others don't experience the same "profiling" is wrong.

Firstly, I'm clearly not talking about camping. I'm talking about parks in the suburbs and cities. Secondly, "having a wine with my wife" is treated very differently from "having some beers with my fellow twenty-somethings," without needing to bring in the extra baggage that would be included if those twenty-somethings happen to be black.

I'm sure I can drink a wine in the park with my wife too, now that I'm old. Doesn't make it OK the way the police treat the young and/or brown.

And no, for what it's worth, it's not as bad in the US as it is here, because Americans (generally) respect the freedoms of others much more than Australians do. Which is why in my experience the subsequent dickheaddery isn't as prevalent or extreme there either.

People in the US drink in the parks, the suburbs and the cities, especially in the evenings. The care and discretion one needs to take is proportional to how much free time the cops in the area have and circumstance / setting. You can drink openly at the beach. If in a small town park, you'd want to either have the alcohol in an unmarked bottle, a soda can, or a brown paper bag. In the cities the cops are typically concerned with real crime that they do not care and one can almost openly drink. In some areas one can legally openly drink, like in Las Vegas.

Access to alcohol is a separate thing altogether, and is freely available depending on county and state, but, in the areas where the majority of Americans live (ie, not Utah, or similar), it's very easy to get alcohol and it's not seen as a bad thing.

The issue is that the US is so large and disparate that everyone's experience will be slightly different, and, no offense, but your opinion of drinking culture in the US seems off base and I get the sense you don't know what you're talking about.

> You can drink openly at the beach.

In CA at least, drinking at most beaches is not legal: https://beachlifeexpert.com/beaches/alcohol-guide-california...

not legal, but very socially acceptable

... if you are young and white. For people of color, the "selective enforcement" effect kicks in which makes these laws so immensely prone to abuse.

I don't know why you threw in 'young', that clearly isn't part of the equation. My retired mother and her retired friends all love to drink on the beach. It seems to be very popular with the elderly.

depends on the specific beach, in my area you’ll be stopped within 30 mins or so of cracking a beer. Maybe not some, but beer, regardless of container, is heavily patrolled for.

But that goes back to the original point. In cultures where drinking is accepted, you don't have to put your alcohol in a paper bag or hide in an unmarked container. You buy it and drink it however you want so long as you aren't bothering others.

In the US, you have to be sneaky about it and you're always one bored cop away from trouble.

> because Americans (generally) respect the freedoms of others much more than Australians do.

Oh that’s rich. A certain political party’s primary goal seems to control and reduce freedoms.

Also what evidence do you have that “brown” people are targeted more than others?

> Also what evidence do you have that “brown” people are targeted more than others?

I tried to engage with you upthread assuming positive intent. This comment seems like deliberate baiting and I don’t think it’s the least bit authentic. I don’t think there’s any question that non-white people in America are selectively policed more than white people except by those arguing in bad faith.

No it’s the truth and you likely don’t want to hear it. Americans do not respect each other’s liberties. Prove me wrong.

This likely depends on what state and what park you're in. I've travelled the US in an RV and I've definitely seen people scolded for simply enjoying a glass of wine in a state park. Lots of parks also have huge signs all over the place warning that alcohol is not allowed, so presumably they are taking it seriously.

Australia allows drinking in parks unless it's a designated no-drinking area (usually any area outside an alcohol store). That being said different states in Aus handle alcohol differently and some are very strict. The major states of NSW and Vic are pretty chill though.

In Australia, all alcohol (yes, even beer and wine) can only be bought at designated liquor stores. The vast majority of which are only open 10AM~10PM, with a handful in Sydney and Melbourne open after midnight.

Further, public drinking is all but restricted to destitutes outside of NYE and Aus day.

Contrast that with Germany. Every two blocks there's a Späti, many open 20–24h daily, each selling beer, wine, and spirits, at all hours of the day. You'll find hordes drinking in the streets, parks, and riversides anytime weather permits. It isn't unusual to see people sharing a beer on the U-bahn on the way to the work.

One culture demonises (although indulges in) alcohol, the other embraces it.

I'm not sure that is Germany as a whole though, Berlin yes, but in Munich there are not nearly as many spatis, and from the people that I've interacted with, in smaller towns the only place to get a beer in the evening/night is the gas station.

True. Also in Baden-Württemberg they banned selling alcohol at gas stations at certain times (iirc) and here in Bavaria there were some temporary bans (I think due to covid). But all this is /mostly/ because our (in Bavaria) shops aren't allowed to be open 24/7, it has nothing to do with alcohol per se.

And yes, in general I 100% agree with the local policy that beer is free to buy and consume from age 16. The majority of people (I know) start drinking responsibly by age 20-25 and from the stories I heard from other countries there are quite a few less hospital visits involved.

> in smaller towns the only place to get a beer in the evening/night is the gas station.

That is because that is only place to buy anything. You wont buy bread in small town in the night either. Because the stores are closed.

Saying Australian culture demonise alcohol is a laughable claim. Australian summers are about BBQs and beers on the beach.

The public drinking laws are not because the government thinks the average person can't be trusted. It's because the homeless population has a large drinking problem and it often results in people getting assaulted on the street. These laws let the police do something about this before it results in harm.

If that’s the case then I think that the government is solving the wrong problem.

> These laws let the police do something about this before it results in harm.

Yeah, as if repression is the answer to homelessness. Homeless people drink or consume other drugs to relieve the various stress associated with being on the street (as evidenced by drinking and drug use amounts immediately going down in housing-first projects), or to self-medicate physical health problems (alcohol is an effective pain number) that the life style brings with it or the mental health conditions that caused their homelessness in the first place.

Actually helping people with housing and healthcare would be a way more efficient usage of public funds than wasting it on police that is using it for power trips against the powerless.

>Actually helping people with housing and healthcare would be a way more efficient usage of public funds than wasting it on police that is using it for power trips against the powerless.

In Australia there is usually somewhat good access to housing/welfare. Certainly leaps and bounds ahead of the US. The problem is that your options are either a homeless shelter which prohibits drugs, or the welfare system which requires you to apply for jobs and attend checkups. To some people, neither of these options is desirable so they choose to live on the street.

The system in Australia isn't perfect but it is fair to say that it's almost impossible to be involuntarily homeless for an extended period.

Does the brown paper bag magically fixes this situation?

No. The police aren't stupid, they know what you're doing. And are you really going to spend a Wednesday afternoon going to court arguing with a court official about a $60 ticket?

It does if you're homeless, but keep in mind that the homeless are effectively judgement proof [0] and this technique didn't work for me as an electrical engineer (in Indiana) when I was cited.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgment_proof

This certainly does not explain having such laws in the vast areas of the US that doesn't have such a homeless problem. While I know there are homeless folks everywhere, it isn't such an issue to pass special drinking laws.

I think your drinking laws are more rooted in conservative Christianity and disdain for poor folks that might just drink up their welfare money somehow.

I think it does because legal codes mostly do not evolve organically in every small town, they are just copied from elswehere, though enforcement which requires human discretion is more local of course.

The only effect Christianity had on drinking laws was not allowing the sale on Sundays before noon, with some places not allowing sale at all on Sundays. Banning drinking in public has more to do with not wanting your public face to be a bunch of drunk people.

often results in people getting assaulted on the street. These laws let the police do something about this

Aren't there laws against assaulting people on the street that the police could use, then?

Sure there are, but those require someone to be assaulted to enforce them. If they can short-circuit the process during the "drinking in public" preamble to the assault then one might say violence was prevented instead of punished. The perpetrator ends up with a lighter sentence (DIP not nearly as frowned upon as violent crimes) and the would-be-victims aren't even involved.

Pre-crime! Just have the police harass the people most likely to commit crimes, then put them in jail for increasingly long times as their criminal record gets progressively longer.

At least you understand that a lot of American policing is deliberately abusing poor people and minorities who aren't doing anything wrong, under the assumption that later they'll do something wrong.

What I understand is that talk like this is unnecessary and inflammatory.

I haven't seen evidence to suggest that "a lot" of American policing involves officers abusing their power. It definitely happens and, when it does, needs to be dealt with.

I have known and worked alongside enough law enforcement and emergency workers to know they're too in fear for their own lives most days to be making unnecessary trouble. Their top priority is to de-escalate situations and make it home to their families. It literally takes one wrong assumption or letting down of the guard in a bad situation to end up dead, so while I do sympathize with _anyone_ who has been wronged by authority, I can't support blanket statements like the above.

There are many laws like this that attempt to prevent an uncommon Bad Thing™ from happening at the expense of individual freedom. Some are created as a response to some event. Some are the result of some group pushing their moral values in law. I think we have seen that in most cases these types of laws that conflate correlation and causation are harmful and often abused to the detriment of specific groups.

Like gun control! Chicago, with its restrictive gun control, hasn’t fixed gun crime at all, just continued to restrict law abiding citizens rights.

This is a totally solved problem in Australia and NZ. It's just that in the US it would require either country wide action or very strict border patrol/checks.

Yea totally solved in a completely isolated country with coast guard checking inbound ships.

As a counter point, guns are basically illegal in MX, yet they have no problem.

Then there’s 3D printers, apparently nerf guns can be converted as well.

So no, there’s still guns available in Australia and NZ, if people want them. You just don’t have the divisiveness and hatred there like we do in the US.

Chicago gun laws aren’t the problem. 60% of the crimes in Chicago involving firearms are committed with a gun purchased out of state, specifically Indiana, which has some of the laxest gun legislation in the country. Downtown Chicago is closer to the Indiana state line than the suburbs of Chicago.

Are you missing the point where there’s a law on the books but some people don’t care? Say you get rid of the Indiana, then they’ll get there guns elsewhere. The problem is not the guns

> then they’ll get there guns elsewhere. The problem is not the guns

The harder it is to get guns, the less people that will get them. Are you really saying that if you make people drive 500 more miles to acquire guns, gun crimes levels will stay exactly the same?

I I think you make some good points as far as general cultural attitudes exacerbating the problem. To an extent, I also think the same can be applied to all drugs. These are social, cultural, and health issues more often than they are criminal issues.

But they certainly become criminal issues if you put them in the criminal corner.

So then the answer is to decriminalize so they can continue to violate a law and receive no punishment? Is that what we’re supposed to do with laws we don’t like?

Binge drinking is a problem in germany.

You can allmost call it youth culture, most kids go through, before becoming adults. In my late teenage years, it was common and expected on parties to drink, until you have fun, who can drink the most (and puke afterwards), etc.

Most people, like myself, had enough of this after some time and matured - but I know too many people, where the booze and beer stayed with them.

> You can allmost call it youth culture, most kids go through, before becoming adults

Yes, exactly, this is "kids being kids", we all go through a period of our life where we do stupid shit, related to drugs or other "extreme" things where risks of hurting ourselves is probably higher than the reward, but it's fun so why not?

But then we grow up and change in "proper" adults.

I think when we talk about "binge drinking" it's important to understand the context. While talking about stupid teenagers is fun sometimes, when it comes to if a country has a problem with binge drinking or not, we should probably restrict the conversation to binge drinking with adults, not teenagers who do stuff they most likely won't do when they are adults. As you said, most people eventually do grow up and adjust accordingly.

You're trivializing alcohol and drug consumption in a dangerous way.

Binge drinking and other drugs consumption are very serious youth problems leading to lifelong health issues or even death.

I'm also pretty sure there is a correlation between youth and adult consumption.

Finally, Germany has a higher alcohol consumption per year per person than the USA

They're not saying teenage binge drinking is never problematic – they actually used the words "risks of hurting ourselves is probably higher than the reward".

The point is that youths do risky things; it's a normal part of growing up, and is how you learn about risk and responsibility. Youth binge drinking shouldn't be seen as separate from youths just doing risky things because that's what youths do, else you'll come up with "solutions" that don't address the real issue and fail to solve anything at all.

It's fair enough to say that someone who parties a lot in their early twenties, but doesn't hurt anyone else or themselves too seriously, then grows out of it and lives an upstanding life is not a major problem, whereas someone who continues to drink excessively and destructively when they're older and needing to be responsible is a problem.

And sure, they're somewhat related, but not so much so that they should be considered one and the same, when the underlying causes are usually very different.

> The point is that youths do risky things; it's a normal part of growing up, and is how you learn about risk and responsibility. Youth binge drinking shouldn't be seen as separate from youths just doing risky things because that's what youths do, else you'll come up with "solutions" that don't address the real issue and fail to solve anything at all.

Like banning flavored vapes! This was my argument, kids being kids, talk and explain to them why what they’re doing is damaging. Nobody accepted it for that argument, why are people accepting it for this one?

First of, I don't think criminalisation helps, but rather complicates the problem further.

And kids doing crazy stuff is one thing ... but another one is to have a culture around it, that endorses it. Because like I said, I know too many who got a regular drinking habit, out of those stupid blackout drinking sessions back then. I very much do believe that germany has a drinking problem, too, to where the roots are the youth. With 14, a buddy of mine won a full bottle of wine at a winefestival, they just handed over to us. Which was the first time I puked from it. Amazing. Technical illegal to give to minors even back then, but common practice in some areas. Because they all celebrate the drinking.

Yes, there is some level of binge drinking in Germany, but it's not the same as the binge drinking that is common in the anglosphere, and especially in British culture, which is quite a bit more extreme.

Some people are just wired differently and are more or less susceptible to alcohol addiction.

The UK has both the freedom to drink in a park and a binge drinking problem.

Last I checked, everybody in London is kicked out of the pub at some stupid hour like 9pm and they have to go to restaurants to keep drinking.

Check again. Most pubs are open until midnight, and some are open further than that.

That's more than 20 years ago, now the pubs are open much longer.

This is the narrative that North America tells itself that the EU doesn't have a binge drinking problem as a result of a more liberal policy towards alcohol. It seems like a way to justify a more liberal policy here and it also sounds like a great sound bite people like to say that isn't validated.

Germany has one of the highest alcohol consumption rates. Significantly higher than Australia. Almost double Canada.

Yes. And yet you don't see drunken cockheaddery at the same rate you do here. This is entirely my point.

My US city allows you to consume alcohol in public in a big section of the city center. So people stand around in line for BBQ drinking beer they've got in a cooler. Of course it's also completely legal for women to be topless in public in this city so it's not the American norm by any means.

What are your thoughts on gun control?

Title is definitely true (america has a drinking problem), in a way. Excessive drinking is normalized, though not as common as problem drinkers think. Since college I always drank too much, but my real issue was that I assumed everybody drank as much as I did (maybe 20-30 drinks per week). Since I wasn't drinking as soon as I woke up or getting shakes without drinking, I thought I was fine. It wasn't until I realized that I drank waaayyy more than most people that I started working on reducing consumption. Thankfully I only drank that much because I just have fun being drunk or enjoy the taste - I've never used alcohol to cope with stress, anxiety, shyness, etc - so it was easy when I decided to go cold turkey for a month. So I'm sharing in hopes that I can help someone else realize they drink too much even if they don't think they do, and that it's totally doable to cut back.

Just in this one month, I've already noticed a huge difference in my life. It's amazing to wake up rested and energetic every day, never having that dread about a hangover, being groggy, or wondering if I did something embarrassing last night. I feel present in everything I do, rather than having my routine and my attention thrown off by alcohol. Saving calories makes my weight more stable and lets me indulge in more food if I want to. I'm saving tons of money, especially at restaurants. I'm already regaining the hyperactivity and excitement towards life and events that I had in grade school before I started drinking, because now I can look forward to stuff other than getting drunk. It feels great to go to parties, restaurants, watch a movie, go on a date, do anything, and not even think about alcohol. For me drinking was fun and easy, but now I've learned that drinking is shallow and comes at way too high of a cost compared compared to the deep joy of living sober and enjoying life for its own sake again.

I wouldn't hesitate to recommend drinking less to anybody who does drink. You don't need to be black and white and think that it's either cold turkey or stay where you are. You don't need to worry about the "benefits" you get from red wine and whatever other stuff people love to talk about. Just try drinking less. Maybe don't drink on weekdays, set a maximum number you can drink in a day, take a 1-day break, take a 1-week break, start drinking lower-percentage drinks, set a maximum number of drinks per week, there are tons of options. I tried them all and over time I was able to consistently reduce how much I drank. I used to have trouble imagining not drinking during a weekend, and now I'm already having trouble imagining wanting to drink more than a few times a month at most.

Alcohol is like junk food or soda. It's fun and it's easy. But life is a lot better if you can break the habit and stop making it part of your life, or at least make it a once-in-a-blue-moon indulgence rather than a regular thing. Learn to love things with deeper and healthier value. If you don't control these things, there's the risk that you'll gradually get worse over time. You don't want to look at yourself in 20 years and realize you gained 50+ lbs and don't recognize yourself because you didn't take the chips or chocolate seriously. You don't want to look at yourself in 20 years and realize you have cirrhosis or heart disease because you didn't tone down the drinking. You don't have to be obese or an alcoholic to benefit from making healthy lifestyle changes.

I am in your same boat, I have always liked drinking very much, but I never dipped into any sort of serious "drinking problem" territory. For me the best way to reduce alcohol -- and stay healthy in general -- is to count calories. It's impossible to overdrink if you only have 200 calories at the end of your day and can only drink 1 beer. Nothing else has helped me cut back like that.

Yeah, that's a great way, even if you just do it to wake up to how many calories are in alcoholic drinks. I've switched to seltzer/carbonated drinks for both weekdays and weekend nights, and it's been great. Just as much fun for me to chug on friday or sip on after work without any health concerns (and a fraction of the cost)

The statistics about alcohol consumption are so stunning that I often wonder how accurate they are.

If these numbers are correct, the top 10% of alcohol drinkers consume the equivalent of 10 drinks per day: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/25/think...

The unit for a single drink is a fixed measurement, so someone pouring a tall glass of wine or a very stiff drink could be consuming 2-5 “drinks” in a single glass, but regardless the consumption is extremely high.

It sounds like a lot but I know lots of people in rural areas with extreme poverty (grew up in one of the poorest counties in the midwest) where this sort of drinking was commonplace. They drink as soon as they wake up and don't stop until they fall asleep. Anecdotal I know but certainly believable for me.

Yeah, I'm from the poorest county in my state and 10+ beers a day is honestly absolutely nothing to quite a decent part of the population out here.

In the US drinking actually goes up with income and poorer people tend to not drink at all - but more of the ones who do are alcoholics.

This is possibly the reason why studies say "moderate drinking can be healthy".

The average of the top 10% of anything is going to be absurd compared to the population average; probably around 2 standard deviations over the mean. If you looked at the average caloric consumption at the top 10% of people, you'd probably find the amount similarly unbelievable.

Ten drinks isn't that much hard liquor: it's about 450ml. That's a little more than a can (392ml).

> Ten drinks isn't that much hard liquor: it's about 450ml. That's a little more than a can (392ml).

Sure, the volume isn't unfathomable. But most people drinking a Mickey (13 ounces ~ 9 drinks) would render them useless.

Not if you regularly drink much more than that.

Yes, obviously weight also plays a big role in my previous statement. But the statement is still true: given that over half the population doesn't drink daily, if they decide to drink 10 drinks, it will have drastic physical effects. For what it's worth, the modern day description of "tolerance" is merely the individual's ability to mask their inebriation. There is a big difference of not being affected by something (being tolerant) and fooling others that you are unaffected.

I think you’re incorrect about a few things.

First, tolerance to substances is more physiological than simply learning to hide it.

Second, consider one drink an hour ten eight hours. You’d barely be inebriated. It wouldn’t be particularly drastic.

Again, the modern view on alcohol tolerance is that people develop masking abilities. Their BAC and physiological effects remain relatively constant from [1]:

> Functional tolerance refers to a phenomenon where a person can ingest significant amounts of alcohol – either at once or slowly over time – and not appear to be intoxicated. A person who has developed a functional tolerance to alcohol may be under the influence of alcohol without it being noticeable, thus allowing them to participate in certain daily activities in a manner that appears normal to others.

This is also what TIPS, the training given to bartenders, teaches [2]. Finally, to the point about spreading out the drinks. Yes, this is how people consume large amounts of alcohol daily. I maintain that someone who barely drinks or never drinks will be incapable of doing their job after 4 hours, even after spreading out the drinks. They certainly shouldn't drive a vehicle.

[1] - https://americanaddictioncenters.org/alcoholism-treatment/th... [2] - https://www.tipscertified.com/

This link is only for "High-Functioning Alcoholism" which is not the same as the entire spectrum of Alcoholism, your link even mentions this in the first sentence.

> When someone is colloquially termed a “high-functioning alcoholic”, they may be able to carry out daily tasks of living [trimmed] without exhibiting the full range of clinical impairments commonly associated with alcohol use disorders.

The sources listed in the article further breakdown different types of tolerances and their effects. For example source 5,

[5] https://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/aa28.htm

> Tolerance means that after continued drinking, consumption of a constant amount of alcohol produces a lesser effect or increasing amounts of alcohol are necessary to produce the same effect (1). Despite this uncomplicated definition, scientists distinguish between several types of tolerance that are produced by different mechanisms.

They then list the details of "Functional Tolerance", "Acute tolerance", "Environment-dependent tolerance", "Learned tolerance", "Environment-independent tolerance", "Metabolic Tolerance".

To imply that Functional Tolerance is synonymous with all forms of alcohol tolerance is incorrect, and it's incorrect to say that's "the" modern view on alcohol tolerance.

Source [6] is a book called "Understanding Why Addicts Are Not All Alike Recognizing the Types and How Their Differences Affect Intervention and Treatment" which should tell you that generalizing all alcoholics into a single type is probably not the most correctly accepted modern view on alcoholism.

That's 60% of a fifth/750ml "regular" bottle of liquor. It's an enormous quantity of hard alcohol. If I drank that much in a day I would never be sober.

You just described alcoholism.

Depending on your body weight, you should be able to metabolize it in about twelve hours, so you would have twelve hours of (hungover) sobriety a day.

Honestly, as someone who has 2-3 drinks per day, I've always been more surprised by the amount of people who basically don't drink at all. In that chart it's over half of Americans.

Travel a bit, any you'll quickly discover that a couple drinks in the evening is basically normal in much of the world. I'm not arguing that it's healthy (it's not), but the median American really doesn't drink much - our Puritan values run deep.

As someone who doesn't drink more than 2-3 per week and have in the past been in the 2-3 per day category, perhaps it's related to age and/or kids. When kids were tots, I couldn't afford the time to socialize, and now I'm older, consumption has dietary/sleep impacts and I can't afford that too much. Also weirdly I simply don't enjoy the buzz as much.

I also drink about this much per week. I like a beer or wine or whiskey every now and again, but I've never really seen the point in getting buzzed or drunk (or high for that matter). When I do drink, I only have 1 or 2 at a time, not out of an express desire to stay sober, but because I'm usually pretty naturally satisfied by that amount.

For whatever reason, I like sobriety. It's strange to me that people should think we need a religious motive to prefer sobriety, as though escaping or distorting reality is inherently preferable. Maybe I equally misunderstand the motives of the heavy drinker?

>as though escaping or distorting reality is inherently preferable. Maybe I equally misunderstand the motives of the heavy drinker?

You understand the motives just fine. Reality for many people is some combination of boring, stressful, depressing, etc.

So yes, escaping reality is very much preferable to these people. And alcohol and other drugs are very effective at this.

To state the obvious, improving your situation so you don't want to escape reality would be preferable. But that takes a hell of a lot more time, motivation, resources, and effort than just cracking open that next beer.

> To state the obvious, improving your situation so you don't want to escape reality would be preferable. But that takes a hell of a lot more time, motivation, resources, and effort than just cracking open that next beer.

To that extent, I've gone through some very hard times (for me anyway--not interested in comparing traumas), and for whatever reason much of my cultural upbringing suggested I should reach for some whiskey; however, ultimately I was just too aware that that wouldn't fix my hurt and that "the only way through it was through it" cliche was ultimately true. What really got me through was accepting reality and acknowledging that even though reality was painful, avoiding pain isn't the objective in life (or that's my moral philosophy, anyway)--enduring a trial well is life-affirming. Embrace reality, truth, etc even if it sucks.

EDIT: "everything in my cultural upbringing" -> "much of my cultural upbringing". On reflection, I think the philosophy which allowed me to be successful was largely traditional, Judeo-Christian philosophy which permeates much of American culture. Credit where due.

I would argue this isn't universally true. As I shared in another comment, I recently took a month-long break from drinking. For me it hasn't been difficult, but it's made life seem to explode with excitement and energy, just from taking alcohol out of my life. I think many people would benefit more than they expect just by cutting out alcohol for a month or even just a week.

And sometimes when you try anyway, the universe decides to punish you for it. Some people experience this multiple times. I don't blame them for wanting to escape reality.

Speaking only for myself, it isn't about escaping or distorting reality. When I'm sober, I have zero desire to talk to strangers or people I'm not close with. I instinctively view it as an unwelcome intrusion when someone approaches me in public. Come to think of it, I get bored pretty quickly even in conversation with friends.

After a 3 or 4 drinks, the extroversion switch flips in my head and suddenly I want to stop and chat with just about anyone about any topic imaginable. This adds value to my life, and so I drink regularly and have a few at a time (not 10+ drinks a day though. That's probably more on the escaping reality level)

> It's strange to me that people should think we need a religious motive to prefer sobriety

I would not at all be surprised to see a strong correlation of people who are religious and people who never drink. Even "one drink a week" or whatever is a significantly different category than "zero drinks, ever."

I think I agree, but I’m not sure how that fits into the conversation. The OP was marveling at people who don’t drink heavily (and attributed their casual drinking to puritanism), not those who abstained altogether. People who abstain altogether in my experience are either religious, recovering alcoholics, or people who have been close enough to alcoholism to keep a wide birth. In my experience the latter camp is significantly bigger than the others, but that could be unrepresentative for any number of reasons (e.g., I don’t happen to hang out with many devout Muslims).

Eh, you throw out the 1/3 of the religious who have a direct religious prohibition against drinking and the correlation probably goes away.

Maybe depends on whether "would never drink again" and "basically never drink" are included in your definition of "never".

There are a lot of non-religious reasons people don't drink, and a lot of daylight between "one drink a week" and "zero drinks an ever". I fall into the "maybe 3-4 drinks per year" category. It could be more, it could be less -- alcohol just doesn't really occupy a different space for me than, say, pickles. I like pickles well enough, if one comes with my sandwich at a diner I'll eat it. But I only think to get a pickle from the jar in my fridge like once or twice a year, and eating pickles and drinking alcohol have about the same impact on my life and happiness.

I'll bet some sizable chunk of the people who don't drink at all do it for medical reasons. (e.g. Older people on prescription medications).

Take it to the extreme of an LSD trip, you can get something out of it that you can't get any other way. You take a day to mentally dig into your psyche and cut through so many of your mental ruts, while having some crazy hallucinations.

Sobriety is great and preferable 99% of the time to me, but your framing of "escaping or distorting reality" is founded on a trust that your senses and current mental processes are objective reality and that reality is desirable.

Going away from the psychedelics, if I want to have an afternoon where I'm more giggly and enjoying of food, chemical enhancement for that experience seems like way to go, same way someone would listen to music to get in a work mood.

> Take it to the extreme of an LSD trip, you can get something out of it that you can't get any other way. You take a day to mentally dig into your psyche and cut through so many of your mental ruts, while having some crazy hallucinations.

Maybe. I'm unconvinced that this is the only way to achieve any kind of insight. In particular I'd be surprised if it outperforms a cup of coffee or a rhapsodical conversation for any type of insight.

> your framing of "escaping or distorting reality" is founded on a trust that your senses and current mental processes are objective reality and that reality is desirable.

How can a high be "more real" than what you perceive through your senses? That seems almost incorrect by definition, so I guess I plead guilty to the charge of believing that sober experiences are more real.

With respect to "I'm assuming that reality is desirable"--yeah, if you think reality isn't desirable, then you're escaping, so I think you're [agreeing violently][0] with me here. I am guilty of the charge that I think escapism is bad and confronting reality is good.

[0]: http://joe.blog.freemansoft.com/2020/02/recognizing-violent-...

> How can a high be "more real" than what you perceive through your senses?

"Perceive" is the key word here. To draw an analogy, if your mind is a computer, your senses are raw data inputs, which your unconscious mind parses, filters, and transforms before the data is eventually passed to your conscious mind. Some hallucinogens give you a peek into this process - you get to see what's going on under the hood, so to speak.

Like a young child, you might find yourself enamored by the beauty of the simple greenness of a leaf.

These substances can teach you that there are many valid ways to "perceive" an event. It's not so much that what you perceive while intoxicated is "more real", but that it's an equally valid (and sometimes drastically different!) interpretation.

They're simple lessons that can mostly be learned without any drugs at all (meditation helps), but a proper trip can hammer a lesson home in such an immediate, visceral, enduring way that I'm not sure there's a sober equivalent.

Sometimes escaping can give you a little distance and a perspective from which you can see reality more clearly. Sometimes confronting reality is just (mis)applying ingrained cognitive patterns to a bunch of details.

Also, sometimes things are just really shitty and there's nothing that can realistically fix them and escapism actually is a reasonable choice.

> Also, sometimes things are just really shitty and there's nothing that can realistically fix them and escapism actually is a reasonable choice.

I don’t buy this. Even when you can’t fix things (and I’ve been there) you can still process through your emotions and accept and make sense of your new normal. You don’t have to do it all at once, but that’s the only path to recovery—drugs and alcohol won’t get you there.

>In particular I'd be surprised if it outperforms a cup of coffee or a rhapsodical conversation for any type of insight.

Ego death is a hell of a thing to experience. We can talk about it and how some people can reach it through years of meditation, but LSD is a sure ticket to it and the value of it is in the qualia of the experience, not the knowledge of what it is.

Imagine your psyche is a factory you've built over your life and you're standing high above it supervising. Regular introspection is walking through the lines and tuning the machine. Ego death is a tidal wave knocking down everything you've built, adjusting to your new reality, and the rest of the day is watching as it all comes back together. There's a level of forced commitment and intensity of the experience that you can't simulate. I'm not claiming you'll reach enlightenment, but something more akin to the learning from tearing down and rebuilding an engine, except it's ~~you~~.

There are real gains to going through it if you're of sound mind.

One reason some folks gravitate to mild-altering substances is "transcendent understanding"; drugs put the mind in enough of a different mode of operation that very frequently, it can enable you to understand things you can't understand, sober. And I don't just mean "fuzzy unprovable emotional things", I also mean concrete, empirical stuff like science, math, and programming. Some of this comes from "disinhibition"; some drugs like alcohol can remove various "writer's block" types of things where the mind (under normal, sober conditions) obstinately refuses to consider what, in retrospect, end up being painfully obvious solutions to a problem.

Some of it, though, genuinely comes from causing the mind to operate in a rather different mode and make connections and "leaps of understanding" that it just can't do under normal circumstances. It essentially forces a sort of "educational learning-difference" on you, and if you manage to muscle through and learn how to solve a problem in that state (and get the empirically correct answer), you've essentially allowed your mind to come up with a totally different approach to a problem it would never normally take.

Having previously been one of those programmers chasing the "Ballmer Peak", it definitely was more than just an XKCD joke; the joke worked because it was documenting a real phenomenon that's been known for ages. Several recreational drugs, like alcohol, marijuana, can also be used as "performance-enhancing" drugs in the same way things like Adderall can; it's down to careful dosing and discipline - you have to carefully stay in the "eye of the storm" and not get too inebriated, and you also need to exercise a careful awareness of how the drug's effects can "lead you astray" (i.e. something like Adderall can give you a rush of manic hyperfocus, but it's easy to waste this on irrelevant details, instead of focusing on something productive. There have been plenty of comedic stories of people taking Adderall and … instead of doing their homework, doing something daffy like carefully organizing all the books on their shelves … by color.) So you have to be aware of the drug's "biasing" effects and carefully wrangle your behavior during it.

All that said, I definitely recommend against long-term use of alcohol in particular, just due to the chronic toxicity of it. For a while it's great, but over time, it really starts to wear you down, and do more harm than good. Eventually you're so damn tired all the time, that any productivity gains from mental breakthroughs are wiped out. If it was used on rare occasions for breakthroughs/inspiration, it might be viable, but using it as an anti-adhd/procrastination drug (for which, anecdotally, it was very effective) just isn't sustainable, long-term.

I think having children limits serious partying, but what do you drink when you’re eating your evening meals? Only water?

Maybe it’s a southern European thing, but I can’t imagine eating a heavy meal without the acidity of a red wine, for example.

I often drink flavored fizzy water - they are a great alternative to soda: no caffeine, no sugar, but some flavor and carbonation. Other times I drink water, or juice because it's there for the kids. Sometimes alcohol too, it really depends on the circumstances.

All the pediatricians and dentists I meet say juice is basically as bad as soda due to sugar content. I never imagined juice falling victim to new knowledge about health, but it makes sense considering sugar (and carbs) are basically public enemy number 1 for almost everyone in the world.

Fruit is nature's candy. So it tastes good! But it really is nature's _candy_, so it also harms your teeth.

Solid fruit is not the problem, juice is. You wouldn't eat 10 oranges at once, but you can drink 10 oranges worth of sugar in a glass of orange juice.

Would you consider a fruit smoothy a problem if it has no added sugars?

Total sugars is the relevant metric, although added sugar serves as a good proxy if you’re comparing nutritional labels.

A fruit smoothie that keeps all the fiber and hence is more filling and hence causes you to eat less sugar by way of eating less fruit overall is fine. A smoothie where you filter out the fiber or otherwise eat excess amounts of sugar would not be.

I can’t imagine drinking anything but water 99% of the time. Or milk if you’re a kid.

This. My parents never let me have soda or juice when I was just thirsty. That probably had more to do with saving money than health, but the constant repetition of "if you're thirsty, drink water" has been etched into my soul.

Gotta set examples. Yes, water... mostly. Gotta set good examples. On-site filtered water is pretty tasty.

Occasionally a glass of wine or cider is nice, but that's not every day - we usually finish a wine bottle in a week or two using the preserver.

I usually have an espresso for that + water. If only because I find the wine people annoying and so I refuse to learn how wine pairing works.

You can just drink whatever you want, the vast majority of people who drink wine have no idea and no interest in talking about the wine or food/wine pairings. If someone is giving you a hard time about your wine choices you could either turn it around on them and ask them to order for you. If it was me though I’d maybe just ask them to be less judgemental though.

> our Puritan values run deep.

Not at all. It's expensive and very harmful. Why would I drink alcohol when I can enjoy a meal out with friends without drinking at all?

One could easily see this as deeply Puritan reasoning in comparison to e.g. a stereotypical Southern European culture where the question is rather something like

“It’s cheap, and we all live to be 80 anyways. Why wouldn’t I casually drink alcohol while I enjoy a meal out with friends?”

1. The lucky ones make it to 80, lots die to unimaginably painful cancers, let's not increase our odds by drinking volatile solvents

2. If you have a drink every night out with friends you build a tolerance to it, and you put stress on your body for no gain.

3. Dehydration, sleepiness, and worse sleep and cost are big downsides

4. You can have better, cheaper effects with edible weed.

It's mentioned in the article, but Europeans tend to look down on being drunk and view wine/beer as just part of the meal.

Unless you're British. Or Scandinavian. Or big swathes of Eastern Europe. Basically anywhere with atrocious weather.

Two Finns are in a bar. After hours of silence, one man raises his glass to the other and says, “Cheers.” The other man snaps back, “I didn’t come here for conversation.”

https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2009/great-directors/aki-kaur...

I love this one but prefer the ending "Are we here to drink, or talk?"

My experience of Spain was that people didn’t drink to excess. I specifically recall Feria de Abril where alcohol was abundantly available. It turns out being social is the focus, and the only inebriated people I saw were foreigners and a few teenagers.

New Zealand was culturally very different, where excessive drinking was strongly encouraged in the social groups I saw in my early 20s, and across a variety of social groups as I got older.

South Euros have no binge culture like the North Euros. While they are not abstaining, somehow overconsumption seems to be far less of a problem down there. Be it alcohol or food.

I just grew up hating alcohol by looking at grown ups acting stupid and mistreating their wives and children.

That's why I never developed a taste for alcohol. I sometimes drink socially but that is very rare: 3-4 times a year, 1 or 2 drinks each time. That's about it.

> mistreating their wives and children

...and husbands. Not all people who drink alcohol to excess are male.

Statistically it is far more men than women; and since this account is from an anecdotal point of view, it’s entirely possible female abuse of alcohol wasn’t witnessed.

Source on the statistics? I'm curious.

The honest statistics show that it’s about 50/50 male and female initiated violence. See Murray Strauss’s 30 Years Denying the Evidence.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233717660_Thirty_Ye...

It’s just that some groups find the honest research inconvenient so they try, largely successfully, to suppress it. The suppression behavior on certain sides of issues has been discussed by plenty of reputable people, including Steven Pinker in his book The Blank Slate.

These days in order to believe the results of any research paper I need to read it for myself with an incredibly skeptical eye for what is being left out, how questions were asked, etc.

Most published research results are false, so it's not a good idea to believe individual papers whether or not they appear to be correct. It's not the purpose of publishing them either.

Basically why my Mom's side of the family barely drinks, myself included. My great grandfather was a drunken gambler who managed to drive the family into poverty to the point the only things the family owned were two chairs.

A version of this caused my grandfather and father to never touch the stuff - and acted like it was kryptonite when I grew up.

> but the median American really doesn't drink much - our Puritan values run deep.

For many of us, it's not about Puritanical values. We simply choose healthier behaviors.

It's true that the median alcohol drinkers in America doesn't drink much at all. The vast majority of alcohol is consumed by 10% of the population.

Drinkers tend to cluster with other drinkers, and non-drinkers tend to become less interested with attending gatherings that revolve around alcohol consumption. This can lead to misperceptions that either everyone is drinking a lot or no one is drinking much depending on which cluster you end up in. It's strange to hear some of my heavy drinking acquaintances insist that everyone drinks heavily, because that's what they see in their personal bubbles.

The parent is entirely wrong about it being puritan based. The US long ago lost its puritan influences as a primary. The US is a very different place today vs the 1960s or 1980s culturally. Puritanism is a small fraction of influence in the US at this point culturally.

The reason Americans drink less alcohol at the median, is due to how American populations are heavily distributed in housing developments, in suburbs, versus the higher density & primate cities that you see in nearly all of Europe. We gather less frequently European-style, we don't walk or bus or train nearly as much, so the majority generally avoids drinking & driving. In the US if you're going somewhere, the odds are high that you're driving to and from; drinking and driving is an incredibly high penalty risk to take now.

Anti-alcohol movements have been a feature of the US since the 1800s, I doubt a social historian would have difficulty drawing a line from the Puritans, to the Women's Temperance League to MADD. It's MADD's lobbying for laws against drunk driving that put the nail in the coffin of 1960's Mad Men style 3 martini lunches and 1980's high school ragers.

Religion can fade away while its values endure.

Most "American Values" are basically just puritan ethics. In America, you won't see someone sipping a beer on the subway for the same reason you see someone take take a 4 week summer vacation, or a nipple on TV. Most of the quirky values that separate us from western europe (like hard work, temperance, abstinence, etc.) can be traced back to our puritan roots.

Also nudity is a big thing. Sexy is used to sell many things, but nudity is viewed in very weird way from European perception. Violence is somewhat interesting too from same viewpoint.

> The US long ago lost its puritan influences as a primary...Puritanism is a small fraction of influence in the US at this point culturally.

Are you including the US' views on sex and nudity and the puritan work ethic in that? Sex and nudity in films will make them get an instant R-rating, but murder will only get a PG-13.

The puritan work ethic is the reason Americans work themselves to death and judge the poor: "They obviously deserve it because they must not work hard." It's obviously circular reasoning, but "not working hard" is a moral failing in the US.

> We simply choose healthier behaviors.

Hmm, I wonder where your desire to choose healthier behaviors came from...

Mine came from feeling like junk even after 1 beer/wine/cocktail the next day. I experimented with thinking it was an allergy to grains, allergy to hops, wine quality - but I think it's just alcohol.

Could be, but in general Americans obsess more about health than other nations, which also can be traced back to our Puritanical heritage.

I'd never heard that Puritans had any obsession with body health. What is the connection?

Mostly as a connection between sin and disease- physical sickness was seen as a reflection of spiritual sickness.

I'm not sure if you're serious with both your arguments here: Americans obsess with their health? They have one of the highest rates of obesity globally ...

Likewise, how does this have anything to do with religion (Puritanical heritage)?

Doctors? Research studies? Not from some 16th century English religious movement. I don't know why so many people on this site try to harp on this.

Your parent says that it is part of the Puritan ideal to be healthy more so than maybe in other religions or belief systems.

He is suggesting your desire to be healthy comes from this.

How recent is your data? As of 2015, 18% of Americans are binge drinkers:

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/americans-are-dri...

I imagine it’s only gotten worse with the pandemic.

Binge Drinking is just having more than 5 drinks in a few hour time period, doesn't have to be everyday can just be occasionally. Its a pretty low threshold, compared to the article's top decile which you need to drink which is averaging above 9 drinks a day.

The Puritans also drank a ton.

> our Puritan values run deep

The Puritans drank plenty. I suspect that many such misconceptions about them are derived from HL Mencken's (wildly inaccurate) quip that "Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy."

It's more the fringe offshoots of the congregationalists that shattered off in the Great Awakening as they moved west. There's also a strong current of xenophobia in many of the 19th century abolitionist movements, as the Germans, Irish, Italians, Poles, etc brought their drinking cultures with them.

The puritans are undeservingly white-washed and praised.

They were extremists by contemporary standards (an insanely low bar).

They barely waited until they stopped starving to start being jerks to each other and antagonizing the natives.

If you want to idolize early settlers idolize Rhode Islanders, they were basically successive waves of people who left Massachusetts because the latter was no place for anyone who let their conscience get in the way of their ideology (amazing how little some things change in 400yr) and they managed to maintain some of the best relations with the natives.

Lest we not forget the many, many people who simply can not stand the taste of alcohol. There's quite a few people that fall into that category.

Some of us can't even stand fermented breads, let alone a light wine.

A personal question, and I truly mean no offense - are you on the spectrum?

The only people I've met (in real life) to date who can't stand the taste of alcohol are children and people with Asperger's, I assume because bitter tastes are a sort of sensory overload for them. Purely anecdotal and could be a complete horseshit theory, but I'm just curious.

Or perhaps people who aren’t on the spectrum who don’t like the taste just keep it hidden and phrase it in some socially acceptable manner as to not offend the drunks.

A good point.

I missed this comment, but in case you see it: no, I'm not on the spectrum.

I am a supertaster however. That likely is the cause of my distaste for alcohol.

> our Puritan values run deep

Not for me, I just hate the taste of alcohol, would much rather a can of coke.

Split a bottle of wine with the wife most days. That equates to 2-3 "standard" drinks per day I suppose. I find buying standard bottles of wine (versus boxes, 1.5L big bottles, etc.) exerts a certain amount of discipline. You're going to be averse to uncorking a new bottle after you just finished one :)

Same. We each have a larger glass with dinner, and a smaller glass afterward, and that's the bottle.

FYI: both you and your wife are classified as heavy drinkers by the NIH. https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohol-health/overview-alcohol-co...

I’m curious, what do you tell your doctor when he/she asks how much you drink?

One. One shelf.

Like everything alcohol consumption is a power law.

Many things are power laws, but many things are not. It's really easy to overfit your intuition here and assume it's all power laws, but that's an overcorrection from everyone previously assuming everything was a normal distribution.

The reality is that some stuff is power laws, some stuff is normal, some stuff is bimodal, etc. The more useful mental exercise is to try to learn what the actual distribution for something is, instead of assuming, and then try to dig in a bit more to figure out what causes might lead to that.

Power laws tend to arise when you have some amount of network effect and an iterative positive feedback loop. That shows up in popularity, wealth, etc. But things like, you know, height, are not a power law distribution.

Alcohol consumption does have some steep curve to that, but it's not clear if it's actually a power law. I assume its driven by both addiction times tolerance. In other words, if you couldn't build up a tolerance to alcohol, I'd expect something like a linear distribution reflecting levels of a addiction. But the more you drink, the higher your tolerance, so the more you need to drink, which leads to something more like quadratic or higher.

The top 10% of drinkers drink more that double the drinks of the remaining 90% of drinkers.

Right, so the interesting question to ask here is, around the biology of alcohol tolerance. How much alcohol does someone have to consume tolerance level X, and in turn how much more alcohol does someone at tolerance level X need to consume to reach the same level of inebriation as before?

At some point people become chemically dependent on alcohol so it's not necessarily an issue of inebriation. There's an upper limit based on blood alcohol concentration. Within the top 10% there are probably even more extreme drinkers than the average of 71 drinks a week.

The irony here is that these folks consume 60% of all alcoholic beverages. These are the whales of the industry. Makes you want to rethink the adult drinks market.

My uncles were 2 bottles of rye a day guys. 10 drinks seems low honestly.

> but regardless the consumption is extremely high.

It's high, but not even close to some of the historic records. In early 1800s the per capita consumption was roughly equivalent 90 bottles of whisky per year. And that counts a lot of non drinkers in the denominator.

For those curious:

1.5 ounces per drink

1.75 L per bottle (assuming a handle)

33.814 ounces per liter

59.175 ounces per bottle

39.450 drinks per bottle

3550.5 drinks per year

9.720 drinks per day

It’s easy to understand when you realize that certain types of alcoholics can’t bear to be sober. That is to say, they are drinking around the clock. An all-day buzz would take ~16 drinks a day to maintain.

One of the “tells” of this class of alcoholic is drinks stashed all over the place to facilitate this round the clock buzz.

Even those are at the extreme end of the extreme. It doesn't take long to develop a tolerance that allows one to function the next morning with 10-15 drinks/night, which is two to three wine bottles. I've seen several people fall into that trap out of desperation due to insomnia, since the never-ending hangover can be preferable to chronic extreme sleep deprivation. That's easily 3500+ drinks a year and all it takes is one of those per 9 teetotalers to get 1 drink/day average.

10 drinks of 100 proof vodka is ~200 ml (less than two thirds of a coffee mug.) That sounds like what I did pretty often in college (I remember saying I liked college at the time, in retrospect I may have been lying.)

FWIW, there definitely are people who drink 10+ drinks a day every day. The top few percent of drinkers in the country drink an epic shitload.

In my head the greatest drunks are USA, South Africa, Russia, Sweden, England. The numbers involved in these countries are mind boggling. Not purely based on country-wide numbers, but based on binge drinking behaviours, quantities involved at parties, and destruction that follows.

The problem I have with it all, drunk people tend to affect other things: destroying public property, drunk driving (destruction of private property and death (sometimes death of sober people at wrong place, wrong time)) fights and injury (go check what an EC/ER looks like on a Friday night for hospitals in these countries), domestic violence, rape, animal abuse, emotional drunk spirals (can lead to suicide or relationship damage), financial destruction (lemme buy all you fine oaks 100 shots on my tab)..the list goes on.

Nah, skip alcohol if you can. I makes small men feel like strong men, and strong men feel like small men and creates a vicious cycle to cope with those false emotions, resulting erratic/impulsive/dangerous behaviours. Rather meditate, go to bed early, use cannabis (not daily) and make sandwich.. I've not seen a single instance where alcohol has improved someones life, mentally or physically. Alcohol is a false remedy that fills your hearts and minds with a false view of the world. Step away for a while.

Same goes for streaming/internet consumption, tv/news, caffeine, nicotine, porn, fast foods, religion, politics. All those things blend into a horrible mindset. Step away, introspect and modify your own behaviour/culture, reflect about who/what you are. It's a worthwhile experiment and costs nothing (in fact, it will save you time and money).

> The top 10 percent of American drinkers - 24 million adults over age 18 - consume, on average, [...] 10 drinks per day.

What counts as an "American drinker"? Apparently only 24M of our 330M population. That's 7% of the population.

So the average of the top 0.7% Americans consume 10 drinks per day. Since averages are heavily affected by the outliers at the top, you're looking at probably between 2-3 per 1000. I absolutely believe that many Americans consume the equivalent of 10+ light beers per day.

What's more surprising to me is that only 24M Americans count as "drinkers". Our college population alone is 17M.

It's hard to reduce the US to a single culture. Alcohol consumption habits vary greatly from region to region, or even city to city depending on where you live.

I've noticed that heavy drinkers tend to cluster with other heavy drinkers. The more you see your friends and coworkers binge drinking regularly, the more you feel it's an acceptable and even common behavior. Likewise, non-drinkers tend to cluster with each other because it gets tiresome to have friends who want every event to revolve around alcohol.

Statistically, the median drinker in the US doesn't drink much alcohol at all. The vast majority of alcohol is consumed by the top 10% of drinkers. You may have simply ended up with a cluster of heavy drinkers that aren't representative of the median US alcohol consumer.

Statistic here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/25/think... Note that the median US alcohol drinker consumes less than 1 drink per week.

Nice comment. I also want to emphasize that your point about regional variance is true in Europe as well, this without even mentioning several well known European drinker stereotypes.

That’s a great (surprising) reference. Intellectually I know functional alcoholics exist but it’s still tough to come to grips with that many people drinking that much alcohol.

I’m curious what it looks by age, geography, and household income.

I'm in the top decile of that posted chart. Some weeks I'll be higher, some weeks I'll be lower. Usually lower, but always above the ninth. Posting on a throwaway for what should be pretty obvious reasons.

In the past week I've had about three bottles of gin in various cocktails, assorted craft beers of the IPA or imperial stout variety, a couple of whiskeys, and an aperitif most days. I've been drinking mostly while sitting in front of my TV with my iPad out, doing some light programming, working on photo editing, or playing games. Normally I'd spend more time at bars with friends, but it's not exactly a great time for that.

I don't drink before or during work hours, but most hours after work I've either got a drink or I'm making one.

I'm 30ish, I make decent money doing devops, and I like to think the quality of my work exceeds that of most of my peers -- I've certainly gotten feedback saying as much from line managers.

I don't want to be too specific about anything, but I am happy to answer questions, if anyone has any.

I appreciate the response. Mostly I hate throwaways but this is an appropriate use.

As I’ve gotten older (I’m 40ish) hangovers have gotten worse and worse. It’s now to the point if I have 4-5 medium beers on Friday night I can write off Saturday. Has your subjective experience of hangovers gotten easier over time?

I've have never had much in the way of hangovers in my life, with the exception of the few times that I have gotten nearly blackout drunk and spent the next day curled up around a toilet bowl.

I tend to drink more on Friday and Saturday nights, and I will wake up the next morning feeling seedy and in need of a big greasy breakfast.

Weekday mornings, if I have had more than usual (by my own standards) to drink the previous night, I will wake up feeling like I slept poorly, but no more than that. It'll take me an hour to get up to speed, and then I'm likely to go to bed earlier than usual that night.

None of this has changed noticeably over the past decade.

It may or may not make a difference that I am meticulous about getting 8.5 hours in bed each night, I don't know, and it may make a difference that I've always had a fairly high tolerance for alcohol's effects.

In my 20s-30s, a few beers or cocktails before dinner. Then a few bottles of wine (with friend, co-workers). Then scotch, or the like. At late 40s, I could write off the next day.

Now, a cocktail (lockdown has turned my wife in to master bartender). Glass of wine with dinner. Maybe a whiskey after. All good.

Have friends over, turns into a bit to much and write off next morning.

If you drink 4-5 medium beers everyday, you'd need to drink at least 10 to induce a hangover.

hangover's get worse when you are older, or when you are older you drink less regularly so you get a worse hangover?

The "hangovers get worse when you are older" tripe is a miscorrelation. Any ageing alcoholic can attest to that.

The majority drink hardest when they're in their 20s, start slowing down in their 30s, and all but teetotal as they progress through their 40s. Hangovers are all just a product of your tolerance.

Not OP, but I drink quite a bit too. I discovered ZBiotics and it's made a very large difference in my experience with hangovers. I was also starting to feel worse hangovers as I aged (from being practically immune in my late teens / early twenties), but using ZB has taken me back to those levels. They're a YC startup, and the product is a GMO probiotic that produces the enzyme to break down acetaldehyde in your digestive system helping you cope with a much larger amount of alcohol than your body would naturally be able to do.

Important disclosure: I'm an investor in ZB. I use the product at least every other day and have done so for a few years.

If nothing else, it’s a clever idea. I put in an order and we’ll see how it goes.

Alternately there's NAC, which anecdotally I can say is a miracle if you're expecting to do a lot of drinking, and has some generally good reputation for this purpose and others (including, generically, as a nootropic).

It's a key ingredient in a lot of those commercial pre-drinking drinks. Cycteine itself is used as a combatant against Tylenol poisoning and it accelerates metabolism of acetaldehyde (at least in rats).

It seems like calories would add up pretty quick, especially when you throw beer into the mix. Do you have any trouble with weight? Or is that you eat a lot less food to compensate? I suppose to some extent a cocktail in hand on the couch substitutes for snacks.

All of the above.

I eat less than the average bear, I am overweight (although not absurdly so), and don't snack while drinking. I will occasionally go a week or two in which I only have one or two beers, total, and I have noticed that my appetite is significantly larger on latter half of those weeks.

Weight is one of the primary reasons I am considering drinking less, although there would have to be quite the associated and significant lifestyle change for it to stick.

You see the trap you're setting yourself up for, right? Getting back in shape is a lot harder to do then just keeping in shape and it doesn't get easy when you get older. I just don't think that one naturally drinks less when they get older, and things just balance out in the end. You may be in a world of hurt. I am a little jaded as I've seen family members die of alcoholism that no one - not even in their immediate family, were aware they had. Their decline was surprisingly swift and sudden. I'm not drink free, but it seems you drink more in one week than I do in a year. I couldn't imagine writing off even half a day (anymore) because I drank too much the night before. Life is not that long. Anyways, off my soap box.

Beer has typically less calories than Wine at least for light beers which are the most common.

https://www.livestrong.com/article/138115-beer-vs-wine-calor...

IMHO the real problem is that beer makes you want eat something.

That compares a can of beer to a .. at least large-side-of-medium (for home consumption, not charge-by-the-glass regulated sizes perhaps) glass of wine.

And even then the wine comes in pretty much in the middle of the beer range, you've just unilaterally decided that the less calorific beers are more common and drawn your conclusion on that basis..

Maybe that is true in the US, certainly causes a problem with ordering an IPA in the UK - I don't like the light fruity style of the American version, which is typically what you get from anything that would self-describe as 'craft', so it's a bit of a game of judging the branding for modern start-uppy craftiness vs.. imperialness (!) if not already familiar. (I digress..)

Not only they add up, alcoholic drinks tend to stimulate your appetite and often the only thing around is some ghastly fast food joint.

I was a rather hesitant drinker, having two to three glasses of wine a week. When I stopped drinking even that (on Apr 30), I lost several pounds over just five weeks. And they went off my midsection, the belt does not lie and neither does the mirror.

Even this relatively small amount of alcohol did something.

3 fifths of gin in a week would destroy me for that same week, I would be worthless.

I learned recently that the booze industry would go bankrupt overnight if it weren't for the heaviest drinkers, those who consume the best part of a fifth of whiskey every day. See e.g. https://www.newsweek.com/americas-heaviest-drinkers-consume-...

Makes you realize the hypocrisy of "drink responsibly".

Drink responsibly is just for legal purposes. Every company owner wants their end users to consume more of what they make.

I think the US is a land of "extreme" personalities so I would guess that across a broad range of metrics (alcohol consumption, wealth, number of text messages sent per month), the ratio of the Top 1% to the median is probably higher in the US than in most other countries that the US considers "peers" (i.e. Western Europe, Australia, and Canada).

Statistics as detailed as "alcohol consumption by percentile" are hard to come by, but the data doesn't point to armchair just-so psychology like this.

Using some proxies for level of extreme drinking: The US isn't in the top 15 for binge drinking and is below the OECD average[1], and is ranked 50th globally for alcohol deaths (with far fewer than all 3 of OP's mentioned countries). This is despite a healthcare system with more gaps _and_ much higher risks from drunk driving due to being sparse and more car-oriented.

[1] www.statista.com/chart/amp/5357/the-worlds-worst-countries-for-binge-drinking/

> Note that the median US alcohol drinker consumes less than 1 drink per week.

The article says something else:

>> the median consumption among those who do drink is just three beverages per week.

You might get less than 1 / week by including non-drinkers, who are (according to the article) at least 30% of American adults. But they're 0% of American alcohol drinkers.

And yet one year later we learn that 18% of Americans are binge drinkers:

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/americans-are-dri...

If approximately one in five people are doing it then either it needs to lose the stigma or the definition needs to change.

Stigma doesn’t exist simply based on how many people do something.

Honest question: Why?

Isn't that up to those who hold the stigma?

I'd have a stigma against dog walkers who left their dog crap at the park, even if I found it was most dog walkers. (I don't think it is)

I think the difference there is that even if most people left dog crap we might still have a consensus that that was a bad thing and that people shouldn’t do it.

It’s because the stigma is based on the “binge drinker” label and its implication of irresponsible levels of drinking, while the official definition of the label itself specifies a level of drinking that many would otherwise not deem an issue. eg. three restaurant-pour glasses of wine during a three course meal.

Would you say the same about cigarettes? Or about drunk driving?

that chart does not make sense to me unless >10% of Americans are AA. I can't think of anyone, besides non-drinking Alcoholics, that have less than 1 drink/wk

Is it really that hard to imagine some people just don't have much of a desire to drink? I go pretty long stretches without drinking.

I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them. Quoted by Israel Shenker, "Critics Here Focus on Films As Language Conference Opens," The New York Times (1972-12-28)

Often quoted as "How could Nixon have won? Nobody I know voted for him"; referring to George McGovern's loss to Richard Nixon in in the 1972 presidential election.

> I can't think of anyone, besides non-drinking Alcoholics, that have less than 1 drink/wk

Most people I associate with don’t drink anything on an average week.

It’s likely that you’re in a bit of a bubble if you can’t think of anyone who doesn’t drink in an average week.

Yeah, that's an odd statement to me. I don't not drink, but I also don't go out of my way to drink that often. Even considering the mean rather than median, I'm pretty sure that I fall short of 52 drinks/year.

I wouldn't necessarily assume that I'm in the majority, but it's not as though my behavior in this area is particularly abnormal.

I get how one could pretty easily fall into a group of people who drink on a weekly (or more frequent) basis.

That being said, of people I'm close to, my parents are a good counter-example. They split one beer every month or so.

Out of interest. What do people do at social occasions? What would you do if you met a friend after work on a Friday night? I think we need better options for this in the Uk... most cafes shut and not drinking in a pub still feels weird (and soft drinks are so sweet)

Pole here. I only drink when I go out with someone, or have a party. Mostly wine, once a couple years vodka. Occasionally, when I have company during lunch, we drink one glass of wine to it. Oftentimes though, when I invite someone over, we don't drink alcohol, I make lemonade or tea. Lemonade with matcha and ice cubes is a great replacement. Maybe more places should offer lemonade?

PS. It's not uncommon for me to drink 3 glasses of wine a year. Although recently I've been more social, so it's been 1-2 glasses of wine every 1-2 weeks. I don't go out of my way to drink alcohol, but I also don't avoid it.

I've never had much trouble getting alcohol-free drinks at pubs/bars in Canada. More hip places usually have alcohol-free options (alcohol-free beer/cocktails, kombucha, etc.), and less hip places will at least have some kind of bagged herbal tea if you're avoiding caffeine. Bars/pubs will pretty much always have coffee too, even if it's not especially good.

I do pretty demanding sport as a hobby. Even one drink during the week greatly impacts recovery and ability to perform and lessens my enjoyment considerably. It’s rather commons in my circles for people to probably average a handful of drinks per year at most.

If one drink/wk is noticeably affecting you then you're either a professional athlete who's got world class people monitoring their performance or you need to see a doctor.

Edit: Assuming the standard definition of drink that's roughly equivalent to one light beer or one shot

Why? I do a minimal amount of exercise and I can feel the difference if I had one drink the night before. Forget exercise, it’s obvious I had a drink the night before from how I feel as soon as I wake up, just from the degree to which alcohol negatively effects quality of sleep.

It’s not like I suddenly break down or something. There are a few factors in my sport. BJJ is mostly cardio so I sweat a lot. I train at or close to my limits most of the time. Recovery isn’t as easy at 41. Alcohol depletes just enough from my body and impedes recovery just enough that the next day, I won’t be 100%, and I’ll feel it. Even one drink in the evening is massively disruptive to sleep processes like REM sleep. It depletes key nutrients from muscles, etc. so maybe I’m just a little slower.

Then there is the cramping. Replenishing electrolytes when you leak as much of them as I do is hard. There is a really good chance I will get a moderate to severe cramp if I drank the night before. I think you are underestimating how significant a drink can be to someone training hard. Especially someone older, such as myself. You have to make a very large number of assumptions to arrive at your conclusion that is obviously incorrect for many athletes hobbyist or otherwise. Some guys can pull it off, and there are a few in my gym who can drink hard, come in hungover and survive a hard training session. That isn’t me or most people I know (anecdotally).

You might be overtraining. When I trained in BJJ and also tried to weight train as well as cardio I felt the difference between drinking or not. But that largely went away when I stopped trying to do so much. Other health markers improved as well (sleep, RHR, etc.)

Just a thought if you're noticing a single drink that much.

I have been doing it for a number of years now. My limit is what I can do while maintaining great deep sleep, etc. I can occasionally push harder, but then sleep and overtraining creeps in. So, I am staying somewhere comfortably under that overtraining threshold. Even minimal alcohol consumption starts really messing things up :)

OT: Training close to your limits all the time is counter productive. Read up on block periodization for how you get more from your training.

Good point. I don’t periodize my BJJ training, but when I am tired and sore I go light. I like an undulating periodization model for both cardio and strength work. Rest and knowing what the precursors to overtraining are like are huge. My “limit” training is what I can maintain year round. Base training as it were with smart full breaks here and there. I have read way too many books on strength training and running, used to run ultras and lift a lot before embracing martial arts. Undulating periodization basically works out to a few different training intensities and modalities that are cycled through carefully to promote stimulus and avoid overtraining. It’s similar to block periodization in concept to block periodization but the blocks are more flexible and at my age much shorter before I have hit the max benefit of a block and moved on to the next one. The cool thing about undulating periodization is you pick up where you left off in a block.

I feel hung over whether I drink one beer or six, it doesn't really change. I don't even feel any 'buzz' if I drink one beer, mixed drink or glass of wine, but will just feel bad for the next 12-hours.

I am 42, so close in age to the OP, and I, too, notice that recovery from workouts is easier when I have zero alcohol in a week then, well, not one, but three drinks a week. And better sleep might be the explanation.

That substance is not exactly harmless.

You get used to it (playing a sport hungover, even). If you’re not a competitive athlete on a high level (it’s just a hobby), you’re missing out by not drinking because of your sport. If you enjoy drinking, that is.

Plenty of people compete as a hobby. You might also say if they were drinking, they'd be missing out on performance. If they enjoy performing better, that is.

I have many friends (and family) most of whom are in no way an alcoholic in AA, that hardly ever (or never) drink. Some just don't enjoy the effects, some prefer not to for health reasons, some just honestly prefer to smoke a joint. The fact that you can't think of a single person like that is equally surprising to me.

Hi! Nice to meet you. There are weeks when I have 0 drinks per week, and then others where I have lots more. It all depends on mood and activities. Specifically if the smoker is running.

I'm with you brother. Life is too short.

My neighbors and I have been doing Friday night happy hours for almost a year, always outside. Many with a fire going and outside movies shown on the side of my RV. The 6 of us look forward to these.

Personally, I couldn't care less what others think of this or how "sustainable" this is.

Some might argue life is too short to drink. I personally arrived at that conclusion. To each his own.

Well for starters you've got all the Muslims and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints sometimes know as Mormons. That's two big ole' swathes of people who probably don't drink at all.

Then you have pregnant women, and women who are trying to conceive, and sometimes their partners will also give up drinking in solidarity....

My wife asked me to stop drinking while she was pregnant, and I complied. I think it backfired though, because I drank more after she gave birth than I ever did before.

A lot of people don't like alcoholic beverages at all.

I have member of my family that despise the taste of alcohol.

Then, we have people like myself, and my father, whom self medicate.

(I hate the taste of all alcohol. I only drink it for the effect. To the problem drinkers out there, don't even think about going to hard alcohol. Stick to low alcohol beer, and wine. Box wine can have as little as 9% alcohol. Naltrexone seems to help with the cravings if you need to stop.)

Kratom is a great replacement for alcohol for such use. It has its abuse potential as well, but is zero calorie and hangover-free and doesn't damage your liver. Of course everybody responds differently, but it's been incredibly valuable to me for this need.

May be an instance of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_bias

I drink but don't have one drink a week. The vast majority of weeks I have 0 drinks. Once in a great while I might have a couple of drinks (if I'm in the mood) but it's not a regular thing at all.

I'm not morally opposed to it and I'm certainly not an alcoholic, I just don't care much for or about it. It's kind of a low level toxin and it feels like it.

Is this really that strange? I know a lot of people that very rarely drink and certainly don't habitually, but will have a drink on occasion.

I'm not a non-drinker but I would say I have less than one drink in a typical 4 month period.

I am a drinker. I am very fond of beer, whiskey, and wine. I love the taste of all three. I have a well-stocked liquor cabinet and always have a few beers in the fridge and bottle or wine or two in the kitchen.

Even so, in the past few years, I typically consume less than one drink per week. I used to have a nightcap or a beer with dinner pretty frequently. The dinner beer tapered off because I found it made me too sleepy to be on the ball with the evening routine with the kids. The nightcaps started to feel like pointless calories.

So these days, I might have a beer or whiskey on the weekend when I watch a movie with my wife. But I rarely drink during the week, and often don't on the weekend.

Granted, part of that is from having no ability to socialize the past year. I imagine my consumption will tick up soon. But I still don't expect it to get to more than one or two drinks per week.

Older people drink significantly less than the young. By age 65, more than half Americans are teetotalers.

This is partly why alcohol epidemiology is so hard. People drink less in ways correlated with their general health.

By age 65, most heavy drinkers are dead.

I once used to visit my friend in a rehab (he pulled it off and now is sober). There were no people over 55 actually, though some 40-somethings looked seventy on the outside. "Oh, either you get sober or you die way, way earlier than the general population," said the nurse when I asked her where the old-timers are.

To fit the pattern, my grandpa, a functional alcoholic, died at 57. His brother, who was much more careful with his drink, lived to 87.

I wouldn't hazard a guess about the general population based on the people I know. I can, though, talk about my experience.

I grew up in what's called the "Bible Belt", so that may have something to do with my not drinking. I had what might be a common experience--as a child expressing curiosity about a beer a relative was drinking, being offered a sip, and spitting it out in disgust, with no interest in a second taste.

Much later, a friend invited me and other friends over to a very nice dinner with appropriate wine served with each course. It was good, and all seemed well... until I noticed that I was singing Tom Lehrer's "Masochism Tango" at high volume. The next day what freaked me out was that at every stage I thought myself under control, but clearly I had lost it. I did not want a repetition.

Since then I found that there is good tasting beer; I tried a little at a restaurant where they brewed it themselves--but I only tried it the once and didn't finish it. Later I heard that occasional red wine was supposedly good for one's health, and for a while ordered a glass periodically, but I couldn't make myself finish it. Haven't had any for a long time, and now the prescriptions I take preclude further drinking. (Maybe aging baby boomers on prescription drugs bend the curve?)

> It's hard to reduce the US to a single culture. Alcohol consumption habits vary greatly from region to region, or even city to city depending on where you live.

This is also true of Europe. What the parent said about France/Croatia/Germany does not reflect the drinking culture in other places.

Many have gone California sober [0] - moving away from alcohol to cannabis and psychedlics as a way to be more healthy and sustainable

[0] https://www.addictionresource.net/blog/california-sober/

Cannabis is in no way healthier than alcohol. It's hard to quantify the damages done by one vs. the other; but there are very serious social and psychological downsides to regular cannabis use.

Pretty sure alcohol is way harder on your body than edibles or vaping cannabis. Alcoholism has a huge blast radius.

I feel like it's likely a larger proportion of weed-users have it affect their productivity and motivation to grow in life than the proportion of drinkers who become dangerous alcoholics or end up with cirrhosis. I don't have data to back this up though.

I've seen more lives around me hampered by marijuana than by alcohol, despite having a very large amount of heavy drinkers in my circles.

I agree and I've seen the same.

However as far as actual physical health (rather then mental or social) I believe cannabis to be far less detrimental.

It might demotivate a person but it doesn't flat out kill them.

Is it also possible that alcohol is the lubricant for a society with dysfunctional social and environmental principles? Perhaps what we sometimes describe as motivation or personal growth isn’t actually that valuable when directed at goals that destroy the planet and isolate us from other humans.

Don't have any facts to back the assumption up, but I'd agree that alcohol is harder on the body.

Apart from the effects on the brain, there is also the weight issue when drinking both beer and wine.

It's amazing to me how much difference just 6-7 kg less weight makes.

UK expert disagrees —- marijuana does less damage to the user, and much less to friends and family, than alcohol does: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-11660210

That article is about the harm to society as a whole. Pulling a single line from the article to summarize:

> Prof Nutt told the BBC: "Overall, alcohol is the most harmful drug because it's so widely used.

There are lots of ways to measure the harm of drugs. But pretty much all of them result in cannabis being among the least harmful.

Another way to measure is the therapuetic index. It's the ratio of the lethal dose divided by the effective dose. It's about 10 for ethanol and 30,000 for cannabis. Larger is safer.

This means drinking ~10 times as much as your usual amount of alcohol has a 50% chance of killing you. For cannabis you would need to consume ~30,000 times as much (which is probably not even physically possible).

> Another way to measure is the therapuetic index. It's the ratio of the lethal dose divided by the effective dose. It's about 10 for ethanol and 30,000 for cannabis. Larger is safer.

That’s a pretty pointless indicator. By that measure marijuana is better for you than water.

That is technically correct if you were to consume abnormal amounts of either substance.

I have read of people dying from consuming too much water.

I have not read that of cannabis.

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna16614865

No, harms to user are also higher and the paper attempts to separate use rates from harms. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Cannabis is absolutely healthier then alcohol by the sheer fact that it can not kill you.

I don’t know why you’ve been downvoted. Yes there might be other metrics to use but this is a valid one

It can kill you though. It raises blood pressure and in some people this causes heart attacks.

Interesting, I didn't know that. Though I'd argue that's not quite the same as alcohol and/or alcohol withdrawal are active causes of death while this seems more like a side-effect/contributor. At least from what I'm getting from the article[1] I read.

Still, good point I'll keep that in mind.

[1]https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/what-you-should-kno...

I've had the misfortune of several alcoholic roommates, and it's disturbing. They'll yell at you, threaten you, get emotional, violent, cry, the whole works, and then deny it all the next morning.

In contrast, every regular marijuana user I've known long enough to form a judgement about their habit is very inoffensive to the people around them. It doesn't seem to bleed out into their work and emotional lives as much.

The evidence doesn't support marijuana being more dangerous than alcohol. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_harmfulness#/media/File:D... Alcohol is moderately more habit forming, and several orders of magnitude more dangerous.

Heavy marijuhana smokers can show some or all of that traits, too.

But in general if I would have to chooss between a heavy pot smoker and a heavy drinker as roommate, I probably would "prefer" the average marijuanna user

Citation please?

Expert opinion and evidence doesn’t agree with you. See David Nutts papers which quantify harms in various domains for different recreational drugs. Both harms to users and others are way higher for alcohol than cannabis.

This is the Lancet paper. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

You didn't even list any examples.

I'll say this for cannabis: it can slow my mind down a bit when I otherwise am thinking about the 500 things that are worrying me in my life, and it allows me to sit down and watch a movie when I sometimes find it very hard to get the focus to do so. Self-medicating? Sure. Will I overdose on it or suddenly act with appalling bravado, risk-taking and sometimes anger? No. It makes me want to eat junk food.

Alcohol, I believe, is much more dangerous (when used to get to the point of drunken-ness on a regular basis) for your body and behavior.

I don't like the appeal of "stoner" culture either, and I think that like any vice or substance, it can have a negative effect on abusers. Our experiences must be different.

Totally anecdotal, but from knowing heavy lifelong drinkers and heavy lifelong pot smokers, it seems to me that alcohol is worse for your body and marijuana is worse for your brain.

Neither are 'healthy' in any sense of the word.

My annectodical experience is, that lifelong heavy drinkers who drink the same as a heavy smoker, are long dead, before reaching the same brain damage as pot smokers.

Brain damage from pot is mostly reversible, though. Damage from alcohol less so.

In either case, Dosis sola facit venenum (only the dose makes the poison).

So a person who used to be a heavy drinker before, would be better off, with a occasional smoke. A heavy pot smoker, with the occasional beer. And the wors of both worlds, is to combine both in excess.

I think that’s a silly way to respond to this. If someone were to say “America has an opioid problem”, would we really sit around and play this game of pretending like that statement is incorrect, just because it’s possible to identify groups where that is not the case? No.

Something can be a problem in America without being a problem in every single instance. The point is not every single American culture is full of drunks, the point is that this is a problem that America is having.

Europe is exactly the same though. Majority of the countries/people don’t drink fancy wines for dinner but binge drink to party and forget about their troubles. Upper middle class in a few wine producing countries does not create a continental monoculture.

Anyone from Northern/Eastern Europe or UK will be shocked by US drinking culture in the opposite direction. My experience of Germany was also certainly not “wine for dinner” type of behavior

As for the US it depends on the social group. Definitely lower socioeconomic classes have quite different approaches and in some places a beer with lunch and then more beer in the evening to cope with hard labour is not unusual. And countries differ quite a bit, e.g. UK's binge drinking culture is very unusual in the rest of Europe. The Scandinavians and anything close to russia are known for hard liquor. Etc etc

> binge drink to party and forget about their troubles

Party, yes. Forget their troubles? Not in the context I’ve seen it happen in.

Drinking was always a strictly enjoyable activity in itself, not something you did to forget your troubles.

Hard liquor consumption is dropping everywhere in Europe and wine and beer are going up, especially in Eastern Europe, famous for hard liquor binging.

Only Northern Europe with its dreary weather is the outlier, somewhat.

My point being that raw alcohol consumption is going down across Europe.

Beer consumption in Germany is falling year after year consistently. Wine is growing, especially during Covid-19 time.

source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/575106/beer-consumption-...

> My experience of Germany was also certainly not “wine for dinner” type of behavior

Do you really suggest they drink hard liquor with dinner itself?

I grew up in northern Italy and spent years in Vienna for study, and did also a fair amount of travel around in Europe, what you seem to suggest just does not rings true for me.

For dinner and lunch it's normally one or a combination of:

* water, with or without CO2

* juice from self-made or store bought syrups (think from local berries or things like elder)

* soft drinks

* beer

* wine

Beer and wine are really not common on workday-lunch (at least if you don't work construction, or have a business dinner), but fairly normal on weekends or holidays, at least in my experience.

And only after dinner, and not always, a single Grappa/Schnaps/Shot is consumed, and that normally only if either people are over, or one dines at a restaurant (especially if it's a more folksy place).

If I go out with my SO to dine it's almost always a combination of water and wine if it's in a restaurant, and soda or beer if it's more street-food like, but never ever did we, or any other people we saw, drank harder liquor to their meal...

>It's hard to reduce the US to a single culture.

The US had a very particular set of economic conditions in respect of infrastructure quality, volume of arable land for corn production, and corn vs corn mash distillate transport costs.

The result? "[In the 1790s], the settlement of the so-called “corn belt” in the Midwest created large new supplies of corn, which was cheaper and more profitable to convert into whiskey than it was to transport great distances without spoiling. Thus, as Rorabaugh notes: “Western farmers could make no profit shipping corn overland to eastern markets, so they distilled corn into ‘liquid assets.’ By the 1820s, whiskey sold for twenty-five cents a gallon, making it cheaper than beer, wine, coffee, tea, or milk.”

https://www.pastemagazine.com/drink/alcohol-history/the-1800...

Given the price, Americans drank an absurdly, mind-bendingly large amount of booze. While not uniform, the US has a consistently different relationship with alcohol than most other countries as a result of the impact of these events and responses to them upon it's food culture.

This is a very interesting point, however it does stand in contradiction to GP's claim that Europeans broadly drink more than Americans in absolute terms.

> Given the price, Americans drank an absurdly, mind-bendingly large amount of booze.

I once skimmed Prohibition-era academic text that described US drinking culture of the pre-Prohibition period in detail. It was fairly disturbing, as you suggest—whiskey in serving sizes that would work better with beer, and things like that.

But even though Prohibition failed to stop people from drinking, it apparently _did_ disrupt the earlier drinking culture in many ways. So I would be careful about using pre-Prohibition behavior to make inferences about post-Prohibition behavior.

(I'd love to find that book again, but sadly the library which had it got rid of a substantial number of rarely-used older books at some point.)

My statement isn't that Americans are still drowning in cheaper than milk corn-booze.

It's that there's a shared history regarding alcohol consumption which is uniquely American in nature.

Prohibition is part of that unique experience, and very much a part of the explanation for the compression of the consumption distribution.

A slight tangent but Hogarth's "Beer Street and Gin Lane" (1751) documents a similar example of low grain prices resulting in massive, country-wide alcohol consumption in England. The subsequent government reaction and legislation did not go as far as American prohibition though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Street_and_Gin_Lane

Great book to read about the history of American drinking is "Drink: A Social History of America" by Andrew Barr <https://www.amazon.com/Drink-History-America-Andrew-Barr/dp/...>. It covers the historical forces behind the current state of drinking, why the drinks are what they are, and more. Fascinating, and full of anecdotes. This is a parallel book to his "Drink: A Social History" which was about the British social history of alcohol. Also fascinating.

I visited a castle in Switzerland (Chateau de Chillon) and they had a presentation on medieval eating and drinking habits.

Apparently it was absolutely normal for everyone who could afford it to be drunk all of the time, from seamstresses to soldiers. I don't think our modern efficiency-conscious society can really understand what it was like back then.

Two key bits - how drunk and who could afford it.

Safe drinking water was a pain in the ass. So mild alcoholic drinks was the norm. That that'd give you a little buzz at best.

Very few people could have afforded to be truly shitfaced 24/7.

From what I understand, the "safe drinking water was a pain in the ass" thing is largely a myth. Some good information available in this r/AskHistorians Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1svj1q/how_d...

I believe it varies from region to region. In my country natural springs are all around so fresh water is not a problem. But I remember reading medieval era memoirs how people get surprised traveling when others don't have as much access to springs.

The article says that the bad water theory is unlikely because it's easier and cheaper to boil water than to make alcoholic beverages.

It’s actually very easy to reduce the us to a simple monoculture, compared to other regions of similar size. Compared with the EU or India, us culture is very similar across regions. Same language, same food, same religions, same work culture…

While the US has basically every current religion there are huge regional differences in which religions are common. Mormons for example are still extremely concentrated in Utah. New Jersey has a much larger Jewish community than most of the US etc.

Where are you from, and where have you lived, visited, and worked to come to this conclusion?

It's not at all what I've experienced as a US born after living on both coasts, a few different states, and a range of small rural and large urban cities.

Food sure, if you only consider culture as the corporate branded chains. That's missing out on a lot though.

Language, accents, nomenclatures, sayings, mannerisms, all widely varied.

Religions, there are dozens of Christian based sects all with widely varying spectrums of beliefs.

Work culture, still many good-ole boys clubs in certain geographies, pick yourself up by the bootstraps types in others, and anything you can imagine in between.

The OP specifically said compared to regions of similar size. You only talk about variations in the US, have you lived outside? The variations that you talk about, you can find in Germany alone which is the size of a medium size US state.

The variations across Europe (I can't speak for India) are on a completely different level. If you put a random person into two different states in the US and two different countries in Europe for an hour and ask them after which differ more, I would bet serious money they will always pick the two European countries.

> Europe for an hour and ask them after which differ more, I would bet serious money they will always pick the two European countries.

Only because of superficial things like language. When it comes to politics and the role of government, Europe is pretty consistent. Barring language and architecture, this makes cities all effectively the same pattern (high density, trains, buses, expensive per sq foot).

The gulf between life in the sprawl of Dallas and the density of NYC is far greater than the difference between Paris and Rome.

OP also conflated regions and countries. I read it as they were comparing US, EU, and India as a whole. Also curious where their perspective came from.

My point is that the presence or absence of cultural variation in one place does not equate to a lack thereof in another. Just because someone hasn't seen it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Culture isn't based on comparison, it's something in its own right

1 standard drink. Did you know that a US standard drink for beer is 12 ounces (a pint is 16) at 5% alcohol by volume? In the PNW Pints Are the standard size and definitely stronger than 5%.

Also the German standard drink size for beer is less than 12 fluid ounces. Similar differences exist for other beverage types.

These comparisons are not only difficult, but the survey takers vastly underreport their actual consumption (probably unknowingly).

I though the standard beer in Europe was always 500ml.

UK pint is 568ml, a US pint is less than 500ml (because their fl oz are different, and I think even a different number to a 'pint').

Rest of Europe (and Québec) uses 500ml or a litre metric in my experience, yes.

In the Netherlands the standard beer bottle is 330ml.

When going to a bar there are several types of glasses available for a beer from the tap ranging from 200ml to 570ml (English pint size). When you order a beer, by default you get a 250ml glass.

Nope.

In most restaurants and bars, 300ml is the standard size, sometimes even 250ml. 500ml is considered a big beer. 300ml is also the standard size at festivities, concerts and sports games.

In Colone, the standard size of the local beer (Kölsch) is 200ml, but 300ml is also common.

In the south of Germany, especially bavaria, 500ml is the standard size in restaurants, and 1L at festivities and in bars run by breweries. 500ml is also the standard size of wheat beers nearly everywhere.

In shops, you can get beers in bottles of 330ml and 500ml.

My idea originally comes from the fact that in eastern europe you have either a beer (500ml) or a "small beer" (330ml). Cans are 500ml and bottles vary. In france there is a pint (500ml) or a "half beer" (the usual size) which is 200-250ml. Cans are again 500ml but bottles are all over the place and mostly 330ml.

It depends a little, but in southern Germany (and parts of Austria) 500ml is absolutely the standard and small ones aren't even available in most restaurants (the more regional, the less likely).

I've never lived in the north, just visited very often, and there it could be different depending on the region, setting. Some also say they feel 500ml is the default, others are more in the 330ml range.

I also want to add that 1 standard drink is something defined by the government / health authorities. This isn't the typical drink Bavarians actually drink. It is used for calculation of blood alcohol level or for medical purposes.

Seems that most beers in Bavaria probably approximately equate to 2 standard drinks, meanwhile a small Pilsener commonly found in the North is about 1 standard drink.

Yes, I know (now). But we don't have this measurement of a "standard drink" at all. An Australian ex-coworker had to explain the term, much to my confusion. By "the standard" I simply meant what you will get if you go to a restaurant (or pub or bar) and order "one beer".

I don't think you can generalize this across Europe.

Cans and bottles have/had "preferred sizes" (hence 330mL, 250mL, 500mL being common), but there's no European standard for how much you get in a bar or restaurant.

In Iceland 500ml used to be the standard size of beers at bars maybe 10 years ago. Now 400ml is the most common size (although outside of Reykjavík 500ml is still common). 330ml is the most common size in restaurants and in the liqueur stores.

In the Northwest of Germany the default is either 200ml or 300ml (the latter being approximately the size of a typical bottle of beer). For Pilsener a big beer is 400ml. For Hefeweizen a big beer is usually 500ml.

In the Northwest you won't find beers larger than 500ml (< 1 pint)

Some of my most cherished memories are those where I was out drinking wine and having really good food with my wife and friends.

When people were telling stories about Jesus, the central figure of their religion, one of the miracles they told of was him turning water into wine. This is held up as one of the most important stories in their entire moral system.

When the pyramids were being built, the builders were paid in beer.

People have been drinking, and enjoying the effects of drinking, for thousands of years, and "do not drink to excess" is a lesson the Greeks told us with their own myths and stories.

Be cautious of over drinking, however perhaps also be cautious of under drinking as well. These are not new revelations.

The history of human's connection to alcohol extends even further.

One of the anthropological theories is that it was a core reason for humans to take up agriculture in the first place and to domesticate certain grains.

And, the genetic mutation that allows us to process it in the first place (an enzyme in the liver to break it down much more easily than before) that we received in our lineage millions of years ago allowed us to descend from the trees to the ground. It was a key enabler to our expansion where rotting, fermented fruit sitting on the ground became an enabling calorie source!

I agree, these articles are ridiculous. If you have alcoholism in your family -- dont drink. If you're overweight because drinking causes you to eat shitty food and not exercise -- stop drinking. If you have anxiety because of drinking -- stop drinking. If drinking makes you an asshole and is causing relationship problems (I know a lot of people in this category) -- stop drinking.

If you like to go out on the weeks and drink 8 beers with your friends, all the more power to you. People have been drinking since time immemorial, it's part of who we are as human.

Life is too short to "dot every i and cross every t".

You might be dead tomorrow.

>If you like to go out on the weeks and drink 8 beers with your friends, all the more power to you. People have been drinking since time immemorial, it's part of who we are as human.

This just isn't true at all and it's probably offensive to large groups of people who view alcohol drinking (with pretty good reason) as a vice.

Abstaining from alcohol is also a praised act since time immemorial. Trying to keep one's mind and body free from intoxicants is also a noble goal and is something that is part of us as human, AND it is what distinguishes us from animals (animals in general don't abstain from things out of sheer willpower, but human beings in general do, be it dieting, teetotaling, etc.).

Life is also too short for you to accelerate your end voluntarily by drinking 8 drinks in one night in rapid succession.

This is the only part of modern social life where it's okay to tell people to do risky and dangerous behaviors which endanger the public. Excessive drunkenness is a public health problem. This past year should have made us keen to the fact that many actions we take for granted have consequences on others

This just isn't the truth. "Free from intoxicants" might be noble for some, but on the other hand, different sorts of intoxicants have been used for religion for a very, very long time. Folks have used this stuff for a very long time - not just alcohol. Folks to this day espouse the benefits of things like LSD and MDMA: pot/hash can be used to good effect.

Not to mention that folks bond over such experiences. Drinking 8 drinks in a night isn't necessarily dangerous, depending on the strength of the alcohol - no one said it was rapid either, nor unsafe. Just like you an do LSD or mushrooms and not be unsafe.

And there is just no way to know if animals abstain from things out of sheer willpower: We simply cannot communicate with animals on a level to give us that understanding. Animals DO seem to partake of mind-altering substances, though. (catnip, anyone?).

We tell folks to drive every day, and driving is a risky and dangerous behavior which easily endangers the public, by teh way.

1) If I want to accelerate my end voluntarily, that is my prerogative.

2) You have no evidence that drinking 8 beers in one sitting once a week will cause (1). Send me lots of studies that link excessive alcohol consumption to esophageal cancer, I will send you lots of studies that show the opposite.

3) Not everyone drinks excessively and partakes in "risky and dangerous behaviors which endanger the public" (this is a ridiculous assumption you're making). I do not drink and drive. I live in a city where I can walk home. etc. 99% percent of the time I actually am at home with friends, even pre-covid.

Quote frankly... I don't even binge drink that often, but I will defend anyone's right to do so, without judgement.

quite*

noble is very subjective. I'm sure some religions(judio-christian) might see it as noble, but that is far from the only view point, before or since those religions

The article is about Americans increasingly binge drinking alone though? How is it ridiculous to talk about this problem?

Because as long as I am not breaking the law, my drinking habits don't affect your life!

Sadly many people's private drinking habits have affected my life, both directly and indirectly.

This is horrible advice.

Just because something has been done a certain way for a long time does not mean it's something we should continue. In a lot of cases it just means we didn't have the knowledge that it was so bad for you. And that's exactly where alcohol fits in. We know alcohol is bad for us in just about every way. So there's really no such thing as "under drinking".

Cigarettes. Cocaine. Tanning. Not wearing seat belts. Not wearing helmets. Beating kids as punishment. Bloodletting. X-rays. I mean the list is just endless.

Folks should do as they please. I'm not suggesting everyone needs to stop drinking or anything. But to suggest that "perhaps also be cautious of under drinking as well" is just downright wrong.

Seriously, the traditionalist argument is poor. You know what else humans have done for thousands of years? Slavery. And it also has many "religious" ties: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bible_and_slavery

A more charitable interpretation of what I wrote would be to understand that I was tying drinking to the happy memories I have with my wife. This was the first sentence of the post you are replying to.

So in this case “under drinking” could be interpreted as a metaphor for being overly cautious and missing out on something enjoyable. Life is dangerous. Snowboarding, going on a road trip, swimming in the ocean, petting a dog, eating street food, traveling. These are all dangerous things that kill people every year. I stand by the statement that we should be cautious of anything prescribing that we avoid these activities completely.

> When the pyramids were being built, the builders were paid in beer.

Yeah, because water used to be much harder to sanitize, and “beer” (thick, lumpy, mildly alcoholic – think fermented porridge) is basically liquid bread. Doing manual labor all day takes a lot of calories, and cereals are much cheaper than alternative foods. It’s hardly a healthy diet though.

Keeping peasants drunk enough to be pliable is a side benefit much appreciated by the lords of just about every feudal/plantation economy throughout history.

> because water used to be much harder to sanitize

They actually addressed this in the article, but sanitizing water is as simple as boiling it which is much less involved than the process of making beer.

I’m no expert on ancient Mesopotamian/Egyptian theories of disease, but my understanding is that people knew that water with even a bit of alcohol was significantly less likely to get you sick than river water, and drinking beer was (in part) an intentional countermeasure.

Beyond that, in an ancient context you can’t indefinitely store your boiled water and expect it to stay uncontaminated. If you are on a construction site, boiling all of your drinking water every day before use sounds a lot less convenient than just storing beer. Moreover, if laborers were all drinking water they would still need to eat something.

> sanitizing water is as simple as boiling It may be simple but it takes a lot of energy to boil & you can't store it. They didn't have the convenience of electric kettles.

> "do not drink to excess" is a lesson the Greeks told us with their own myths and stories.

Thank goodness the Roman's brought new light to Bacchus who shows us that excessive temperance is always punished more severally than excessive indulgence.

If anything your comment just reinforces how much of a problem it is, and how deeply it is engrained in society. If sugary processed foods had been developed 5000 years ago, would you be saying the same about those today?

You are associating alcohol == good times, which if you want to do so is fine (we are adults, we have free will), but know that you can have good times without alcohol as well. They aren't mutually inclusive.

There are a few other threads where people say similar things. If you need to have alcohol to have good times, then you do actually have a drinking problem. If you can't imagine going out with friends without drinking, then you do actually have a drinking problem. If you can't imagine eating a meal without drinking, then you do actually have a drinking problem.

I think the biggest problem the western societies have today is: Finding problems everywhere.

Ok, i am from germany, so i assume my views on alcohol probably differ a lot from the view most americans have. Here, it is totally fine for a 16 year old to buy and drink wine or beer. It is totally unproblematic if you enjoy a few beers with your friends in the park... and the alcohol ban in public some cities acted caused turmoil short of a full blown riots.

What i want to say is: Why do we allways need to find "the hair in the soup"?

Yes, it may be unhealthy... but so are other things, and i think a perfectly healthy life would be terrible boring.

I'm from The Netherlands. I won't throw a fit to get anyone to stop drinking. But it's pretty obvious that drinking, even one beer per day, on a societal scale leads to more obesity, more sickness, more violence etc. And the accompanying healthcare, police etc. spending.

Again, drink if you want. It's allowed. But don't pretend that it is unproblematic/healthy/natural/without consequences.

Just admit (or at least do not deny) that by drinking, you're making an (indirect) withdrawal from the community fund. Just like people who drive a car, people who hunt for fun, people who smoke etc.

That is what i want to say: Everything has consequeces! Nothing good comes without the bad, you will have to "pay a price" for everything... even when the "price" is a less enjoyed life ;-)

What really bothers me is that it seems that the western culture is (at least from my perspective) striving to become a totally clean, political correct, vegan, moral and abstinent society. Something like the society in "Demoliton Man". I really, really dont want to life in such an society...

It depends. Sure, we cannot be perfect. But not being racist has no downsides. Not drinking has no downsides. Same for several other of our vices.

So if there's no downside...why don't we stop?

That's where you're wrong : it does have downsides.

Alcohol is a social lubricant, and consuming alcohol with people is a great way to bond, and form communities.

It's not the only way to bond, but it does provide help regarding sociability, especially for shy/introvert people.

Our short life would be less interesting without the occasional glass of wine while overlooking a beautiful mountain vineyard.

I went my whole life not enjoying being social. Drinking allows me to be social when I want to be. I don't really see that as a problem. Socializing is just not something I have ever enjoyed sober.

I think you’re engaging in the exact sort of binary thinking that is the problem.

I’m saying: many people have enjoyed the effects of socializing and drinking alcohol for thousands of years. Perhaps we shouldn’t be so quick to demonize it since it seems to have demonstrated its utility.

You somehow read that as: “I need alcohol to have fun”.

Your reading is wrong.

I decided to give up alcohol for a year. That was three years ago and doubt I will ever go back.

Aside from having better sleep than at any other point as an adult, I truly enjoy the activities I partake in just as much, if not more, than when I still paired them with alcohol. It took about 6 months to stop feeling like I was missing out, and now I feel like everyone else is.

Anxiety in general is noticeably lower (this was a huge windfall for me when the pandemic started).

Enjoyment of conversation, food, setting, all seem richer and doesn't flag as quickly once the alcohol is metabolized.

The end of the drinking activities don't leave me sleepy or craving bad food. I can go home and read a book or get some work done.

General reduction in workout recovery time and aches and pains.

Holidays are way easier to get through.

The only drawbacks have been the situations you discover are entirely dedicated to consumption, e.g. dive bars, beer gardens, work holiday parties and happy hours. Without having dulled your senses adequately, some of these things tend to be only loud, smelly, or without much to offer besides booze and banter.

I got a drone pilot's license. 8 hour limitation after drinking basically obliterated my drinking over night because the nieces can immediately be like "Can we fly the drone?".

Not for everyone, because 13 year old nieces can be dangerous with drones.

Genuine question: what do you drink instead? Do you stick to water or do you order any kind of soda/lemonade (or something I’m not thinking about)

Club soda (or flavored seltzer) + bitters. There's alcohol there still but less than half a percent ABV. Not enough that it tastes boozy or impairs my judgement. Drinking one relatively low ABV beer impairs my judgement enough that a second drink sounds like a good idea, the soda and bitters never does that for me.

This (or similar) is my go-to. In a rocks glass, it also looks enough like a cocktail that no one makes a point of asking (if that matters to you).

>no one makes a point of asking (if that matters to you).

Actually it does kind of annoy me when I just drink water that people will ask all the time. My go to has been seltzer + lime + wedge because I do like to have some taste, and it does look cocktail-ish.

I've loved club soda - and dislike alcohol; however, never thought of adding bitters. I like this idea a lot.

How are bitters with plain seltzer? I have a sodastream and am looking for some good flavors. Can't figure out anything that tastes as good as flavored bubly or lacroix and that doesn't have lots of sugar.

I personally like it a lot. It's my go-to at a bar when I don't feel like drinking

That said I also like plain seltzer and bitter flavors generally (dark chocolate, black coffee, IPAs), so YMMV.

I love pairing bitters with my sodastream! A few of my favorite recipes are: 1) Grapefruit & Cherry, 2) Cardamom, and 3) Orange & Cranberry. Clearly it's all to taste, but a 3-4 dashes of each bitter is a good starting point for a ~16oz glass of seltzer.

Fee Brothers sells a 12 piece variety pack which is a great way to experiment. After that you have quite a rabbit hole of bitters brands and flavors to explore!

If you haven't tried them yet, Bubly makes drops for Sodastream.

Whoa, game-changing. When I got my sodastream they just had lousy syrups. If these are like the canned bubly drinks then that will be amazing.

I also gave up most drinking where I drink probably 5-6 times a year, usually with a dinner where I want a nice mixed cocktail or at a large holiday party/wedding, where again I can enjoy mixed cocktails. I personally drink soda as a replacement since I drink almost strictly water otherwise.

Tangentially related anecdote:

I went from always ordering a soft drink at restaurants to only drinking water. The swich occurred almost overnight, and I ended up losing about 25 lbs.

The reason I did this was entirely social, and it happened by accident. My parents didn't have soft drinks at home, except occasional leftovers after a party, so ordering a soft drink at a restaurant was sort of a "special treat," even if it was an infinitely refillable fountain drink. It turns out 3 glasses of soda have a metric fuckton of sugar.

Anyway, when I went to college, literally none of my friends would order soft drinks when we'd go out to eat. I'm not sure if it was because people were being thrifty, or for ease of splitting the bill, or maybe they just knew more about sugar than I did, but being the one person to order a soda felt so awkward that I just stopped and eventually never went back.

I lost five pounds or so switching from Coke to Diet Coke.

There is more weight loss to be had switching from Diet Coke to water. It's obviously not the calorie content, but the insulin response from sweet tasting things that will occur even with artificial sweeteners.

Does that apply to all artificial sweeteners such as sucralose or is it specific to aspartame?

I have yet to find a single study confirming any rumored ill effects of artificial sweeteners, including aspartame. At least in any reasonable consumption amounts since you need so little of the sweetener.

People (probably those with controlling interests in sugar cane/beet industry) have been trying unsuccessfully to find/prove any sort of real deleterious effect from aspartame specifically, and lower-calory sweeteners in general for about 50 years now, so I think we can say they're fine.

I don't think there is scientific evidence to back that up from what I could find: https://www.oatext.com/Blood-glucose-and-insulin-response-to...

Thanks! While that is a very small study, it seems pretty convincing.

I haven't read that it affects insulin response. But I have heard that it can cause you to crave more calories because it gives you the perception of consuming something but without the calories. I'm not sure what the mechanism is here or if maybe it is just psychological.

Do you have a link to a reputable source? I've heard this a lot, and have a company in the nutrition space, but I haven't seen anything conclusive

I'm not sure about insulin resistance, but sweet-craving builds a tolerance kind of like spicy foods. That is, the more you eat sweet things, the more sweetness your body craves.

I've been using erythritol and stevia as sweeteners for years, and even with those, I find myself craving sweet things after consuming them more than when I go relatively long periods of time without eating sugary things or using sweetener.

The end result, at least for me, is that I crave sweet food more even when I use artificial sweeteners, making it harder to say no to eating shitty food later on.

Similar: one day in 2012 I quit soda cold turkey. It was supposed to be for 4 days as a challenge (I was drinking probably 2L+ a day of full-sugar cola / red bull at that point). I just didn't restart, and haven't had a glass of cola since. Now if I have a sip of Coca-cola it tastes so nasty I'll feel like spitting it out. Originally started drinking it because family didn't, so it was a way of showing my independence (and of doing what schoolmates could).

I prefer to eat my calories rather than eat them. So I drink water and soda water 95% of the time.

If available, sparkling water with lemon. Another commenter mentioned bitters, I plan to add that. They’re fine as long as the incredibly tiny alcohol amount won’t cause any issues.

If that isn’t available, some sort of soda or tea or coffee. Or, just water. No one really cares, though to be polite to the bar you’re at it’s good to try to buy something.

I've also discovered that my favorite gin and tonic doesn't actually contain any gin. Tonic water and lime suits me just fine.

a lot of beer places near me carry lagunitas hop water. It's zero calorie sparking water with a hoppy flavor.

Dry kombucha is a really nice alternative at 50 - 100 calories a can. My go to this summer https://www.lionheartkombucha.com/flavors/

I'm also a fan of kombucha (and make it at home), but it's not quite a non-alcoholic beverage.

Commercial kombucha is generally < .5%, homebrew can be up to 10x that. It's a two step process - yeast ferments the sugar into alcohol, then bacteria digest the alcohol into acid. If the bacteria fall behind, the ABV goes up.

The yeast can work anaerobic, the bacteria need O2 to get the job done. Anything not pasteurized is likely going to increase in ABV some in the bottle, since the yeast are active and the bacteria aren't. This is also why I force carbonate my home-brew - when you build CO2 with a secondary ferment you're also building alcohol.

yup. I ferment craft soda in my cellar. root beer, ginger beer, cream soda, and I have to be careful or it starts to get a noticeable alcohol content. most of my friends drink when we get together and I am not fond of the flavor of beer. But home brew ginger beer seems to fill the space and I can drive home after as the sodas when done properly have like 1% or less abv. just have to pasteurize it at the right point or drink it soon enough.

Flavored sparkling water

I've replaced the beer in my fridge with Athletic Brewing's non-alcoholic beer.

How do you like it? I like the taste of beer, and often want something more than water at night. But, I don't typically have alcohol except on the weekends (my wife and I joke about 2 beers and things are getting crazy lol). So during the week I often drink milk or a sugar free sports drink. Tea is also ok, but I try to avoid all caffeine late in the day.

It's not exactly the same taste as beer but they satisfy my cravings. They've completely replaced the occasional beer I have with dinner in the evening, and if I drink socially I often alternate between them and “real beer” so that I don't pay for it the next day.

There’s a couple of really good non-alcoholic beers here in Iceland. For want of a better explanation the flavour is really there but it lacks the edge or bite of real beer. I don’t know if it’s flavour or feel but it’s noticeable. That said due to recent medical stuff I’ve been drinking it and think I could stick with it long term.

I'm in a similar position, and lately I've been having flavored sparkling waters (Mmm Orange Bubly) and herbal (i.e. non-caffeinated) teas, depending if I want hot or cold. Obviously they don't taste like beer, but what I found was at least for me after doing it a while, it's not really the taste I wanted; that was just the association I had with the ritual I enjoyed of a nightcap, and now I'm happy with my new ones.

They're decent, and definitely towards the top of the pack of non-alcoholic beer brands. Clausthaler is also ok if you prefer a lager to an ale.

(I spent a couple months trying every variety of non-alcoholic "craft" beer that I could get my hands on earlier in the pandemic)

Hoplark Hoptea (sparkling hoppy tea) is another good alternative I have found, and is lower in calories and comes in varieties that are caffeinated or not. I'll note that I tried Athletic's hoppy sparkling water and Lagunita's and neither was nearly as good. Though I will say overall, all of them seem too expensive to be buying on a regular basis unless they can really cut out more expensive beer for you.

Not OP, but I've also stopped drinking entirely and my standard go-to is a lime soda. I've never been somewhere where this is not known and it's not overly sweet or expensive. It looks enough like a drink to be a drink, if you know what I mean.

Give quality sparkling water a go if you can, eg San Pellegrino, Castello, Harrogate (glass only), etc.

Usually seltzer, coffee, tea. Recently I discovered Hoplark “hop teas” which (to my tastebuds) separate the best parts of beer from the alcohol.

If you like hop-flavored beverages, definitely try Lagunitas Hoppy Refresher.

As another non-drinker, Kombucha and occasionally non-alcoholic beers.

Kombucha has a tiny bit of alcohol (<0.5%) and tastes a bit like a soda but has a tiny amount of sugar (usually only 8g / serving).

And as long as it hasn't been pasteurized, is a living probiotic too. (though I prefer milk kefir myself)

For reference, humans drank only water after weaning for several hundred thousand years. Today we act like only water is deprivation.

I found eating or drinking later has started to mess me up. (see e.g. the 3 hours before bed rule from the literature around circadian arrhythmia.)

Between that in particular, and all the intermittent fasting faddishness in the air, calories in drinks, especially outside mealtime, just began to feel weird. Water it is.

I live in Germany where beer is abundant and so are the non-alcoholic variants. My favorite is non-alcoholic Hefeweizen - unfiltered wheat beer: no spoiled taste, the only thing absent is alcohol.

Exactly the same experience. Gave it up after a concussion, substantially happier now. I notice the effects of even a single drink the next day.

> Anxiety in general is noticeably lower

you were more anxious when you were drinking ? that's a first

not to look naive, but there was a period of my life having a beer [0] was really the only way for me to exist outside my bedroom walls, i wasn't even tipsy.. I was just able to sit in a room without crippling dread.

[0] I didn't drink, but the few times I did at parties I realized how drinking a bit was lifting me up to ~people's normal

> you were more anxious when you were drinking ? that's a first

drinking habit increases baseline anxiety. it's not that having a drink will make you more anxious in next few hours.

Conditions like GERD where stomach acids come up into the esophagus can be mistaken for anxiety or panic attacks. Alcohol can make GERD type symptoms a lot worse.

it isn't necessary mistaken. The issues like GERD and some other around stomach/digestion affect how your muscles handle the diaphragm and that may strangle the breathing in various ways and also obstruct heart beating movements - that all limits the oxygen supply, and while sitting relaxed doing nothing the oxygenation may be sufficient it struggles to cover any additional increased requirements which spike due to increased body and/or brain activity, and that insufficient oxygen delivery naturally makes one feel anxious.

Interesting. If I get drunk two nights in a row, there are high chances that I’ll wake up the night with a panic attack.

I grew up with panic attacks, and they were random and I had no clue what was happening to me until college when I first learned of the phrase (prior to that I just referred to it as “the chaos”).

I can control and fight them off them now. But if I drink too much, then my mind and body are weakened and I can’t fight them off (while sleeping!).

Anyway, I’ll look up this GERD thing.

This is actually quite common because alcohol consumption effects GABA and serotonin levels in the brain, as well as the sensitization of GABAergic and serotonergic neurons, and both neurotransmitters are involved in anxiety and panic. It can also be the result of a very light kindling[1] effect.

The colloquial term seems to be "hangxiety" if you want a term to search for.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindling_(sedative%E2%80%93hyp...

I'm glad someone has mentioned this. After a night of drinking I always feel nauseous to the point that it ruins my whole day. Even after a moderate amount of alcohol or any kind of mixing.

I'm not certain I have GERD, but it's been my hypothesis. Anyone else have similar experiences? I can never go to a brunch/lunch after drinking in fear that my nausea will turn into something worse.

Just for another perspective I have GERD spurred on by a hiatal hernia and don’t experience nausea this way after drinking. I only really get nauseous if I drink to excess.

GERD made me quit Scotch (other spirits are probably forbidden but I love undiluted scotch) , red wine, dark beer, black and white tea and dark chocolate.

I used to have a glass (2oz) of undiluted high proof scotch a few times a week after a good workday but around 37y I had to stop.

I wish something could replicate the taste and the warmth of the Aberlour A'bunadh but alas I fear that replicating the feeling of +60% ABV without using something even more deleterious than ethanol is impossible.

There's a bit of a rebound effect. Alcohol can decrease anxiety while drunk, while increasing baseline sober anxiety.

This is, of course, in the absence of other factors that may influence an individual's anxiety

Alcohol can reduce anxiety in the short term, but it can bite you in the ass in the mid-to-long term by making you even more anxious the next day.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jan/27/hangxie...

aight, i see my shortcomings, indeed it's pretty unsurprising that it messes with your emotions long term.. i only saw the usual removal of inhibition on occasional drinking.

My anecdote here is, I quit drinking temporarily three years ago to lose weight. My blood pressure went through the roof (Hypertension II) and I had extreme general anxiety. My physiological response was so intense I started thinking I might be in danger level of addiction. As I researched this more, it turns out high blood pressure and anxiety are normal responses.

Most people I know would not think I had a problem because I was functional and I didn't day drink. I might have two or three strong (> 7%) IPAs in the evening daily before bed. I would also on occasion binge pretty hard on weekends with friends.

After some time of not drinking my anxiety actually got better and I decided to keep it that way. I'm not a teetotaler but I have completely stopped bringing alcohol home and binge drinking in general. I still find that 2 drinks is harder than none, however.

My own take away (which may be different for everyone) is that alcohol is a reasonable way to make uncomfortable social situations tolerable but when used to treat a more general anxiety, it will likely make it worse.

How much you used to drink before?

> The end of the drinking activities don't leave me sleepy or craving bad food. I can go home and read a book or get some work done.

This is one of my biggest motivations for reducing my drinking during the week. Even having just one or two beers after work, the probability that I read or work on a side project drops close to 0.

This is also why I very rarely day-drink. Couple beers in afternoon and if I even stop nothing productive happens for the rest of the day. Even if something productive did happen I would get tired and have to take a nap. Now my sleep schedule is even more wrecked.

Strictly a night drinker.

Same here. A drink at lunch and the rest of my day is pretty much shot, so it's only happening if I'm on vacation or my plan was to lie on the beach all day anyway.

> the probability that I read or work on a side project drops close to 0.

As someone who has done quite a few major projects on personal time and reads quite a lot as well: I personally have found the attitude that I must always be working on something or "improving myself" far more dangerous than excessive drinking.

Certainly there is balance, and I obviously don't advocate giving up all personal projects in order to drink. But the fact that many people on HN, myself included, feel bad if they're not working on some side project or improving some skill is its own kind of escapism.

I drink and smoke weed a lot more now then when I was younger. I still get many projects done, and read a ton, but there is a certain value to an evening spent stoned just getting lost in a video game or listening to music. Reflecting on it now, I also find that by any objective measure the output from my personal projects is always probably a bit higher now, though I have a lot more fun.

Oh yeah don't get me wrong, I have had my fair share of drunken/high video game time :)

FWIW this is a side project I _want_ to work on, I'm not trying to make money on it, purely a passion project. So I'm not feeling pressured to work on it, I'm just trying to keep the momentum going and I found that drinking will stop that momentum.

I go through waves of video games -> projects -> reading, it's always fluctuating.

When I'm drinking, the probability that I work on a side project is also much lower than when I'm sober. However when I do work on one, as long as I don't pass my Ballmer Peak, I work very hard on it. Sometimes I even do good work. Sometimes it's even good the next day.

I have been working on lowering my alcohol consumption, though. It's been working, slowly, over time.

Curious about your age? Does this get easier as you get older? I stopped drinking for 6 months and then a friend got a new job and my birthday rolled around. I felt like the situations called for celebratory drinking or that it was expected.

I really enjoyed my period of non-drinking and I feel exactly the same as you in regards to sleep, anxiety and well-being. But being in my late 20s I feel like people around my age just expect drinking and going out.

I'm sure that it feels like a real problem, but it really isn't. I haven't drank anything for my 39 years of life and I have found most people to be quite accepting of it and those that aren't aren't worth it.

In my experience: some people may take it as a personal reflection on them, if you stop drinking, and will react negatively.

(I don't recommend keeping those people in your life.)

Part age and part friends. As people get older many stop or cut back their drinking. Responsibilities means there's no time. Real friends support you if not drinking is something you want to do.

It also doesn't have to be a binary thing. I go months without drinking and then have a beer or wine because I want one.

I'm sure it just varies a ton from person to person. As much as some people (notably alcoholics) find it extremely difficult to stop drinking, I pretty much stopped without even trying. Got married, had kids, stopped hanging out so much with friends. I just didn't drink for months at a time and didn't really notice. I never consciously quit drinking, but I average maybe 2 drinks a month now and don't miss it. I also never really found that alcohol really relaxed me emotionally.

I went to a party the other night and didn't drink at all. Very unusual. I brought a bottle of tequila for the host and friends.

Strangely, I didn't feel anxious at all, despite having pretty high general anxiety. My energy levels were higher than usual, which I felt was connected to not drinking. I felt totally normal in my social interactions, didn't force anything, felt good. I kept my water bottle in hand and never felt out of place.

It was a good lesson that alcohol is not needed to have a good time.

I stopped drinking because I wasn't going out due to the pandemic. I've come to a similar conclusion, and intend to make this a long-term decision.

The last time I had a drink was a beer festival. I used to drink beer a lot in my early 20s and beer festivals were something I looked forward to. I slept terribly that night and felt awful the next day. It suddenly dawned on me that this happened every time and I realised alcohol does nothing good for me at all. It's expensive, unhealthy, slows my senses, makes me less funny, makes me worse at sex, makes me sleep worse and often ruins the next day.

I don't plan to ever drink again. It is necessary to have the confidence to order something non-alcoholic and be straight with people if they question it. I don't drink. If they ask why (which is exceedingly rare), I ask why they don't smoke. That usually gets the message across.

A eureka moment was required for you to realize that... alcohol induces hangovers?

I used to think there was some kind of intake threshold and hangovers were the result of surpassing that threshold. The "eureka" moment was realising that any amount alcohol made me feel worse.

I'm in a similar boat. I stopped, but without a timeframe for how long. I just knew I had to cut back, but that wasn't working well, so I just stopped, and when I was offered a drink, I'd say "I don't drink", because here in Australia, I find if you say no to a drink, it's mostly forced on you. The statement put an end to that.

However, I also internalized being an non-drinker. It became part of my identity.

I don't notice a measurable difference in my life, which is also part of the reason I didn't pick it up again. It wasn't enriching my life, but I'm also not a better person without it.

Having said all that, I am still looking for a replacement for what to drink when I do go to a bar. So far nobody has hit the right mixture of a drink that isn't defined by being non-alcoholic, but replaces the "I deserve this" attitude of having a drink .

My favorite non-alcoholic beverage is equal parts soda water and tonic water, a couple of splashes of orange juice and a few dashes of bitters. Tweak as necessary.

At the holidays I like non-alcoholic sparkling apple juice.

I also find soda water out of a can to be a good beer replacement on hot days. I think part of this is the sound of opening the can and the carbonation.

No idea if any of those will fit your needs.

Having tried many drinks, I try to trend away from acidic ones for the sake of my teeth.

Doesn't leave much though. Peppermint tea.

Yeah, it still feels like "soda", which is what I'm trying to get away from. I've been speaking to a friend about creating something new.

My requirements are: - not trying to be alcohol/imitation alcohol - not soda/juice/kombucha - has the "occasion" attitude of alcohol

I admit this is probably 90% branding and 10% the drink itself. As I was mentioning to my friend, you probably wouldn't feel strange ordering a redbull at a bar without the vodka, because of the marketing and how it isn't considered a soft-drink. I don't know anybody that drinks redbull every day (though I'm sure there are people that do).

Something more mature than a soft drink in flavor profile, something that I hopefully don't chug, so it lasts like a cocktail or beer.

Keen to hear others thoughts on that.

There's Lyres https://lyres.com/ - which pretends to be gin/wisky/etc And Non (https://non.world) - which is very juice, but at the price of wine.

I'm a regular drinker, but I do a dry month every year. I make it a point to not let it change my social life at all — which means still spending plenty of time at bars and socializing with people drinking. I typically drink non-alcoholic beers (there are good ones that taste like beer) or ciders when available. When not, I go for soda-bitters, sometimes with a splash of lime juice.

Lyres, Seedlip, and other non-alcoholic spirits just don't do it for me. They taste like water.

I drink a prodigious amount of decaf coffee. I buy quality, whole bean, Swiss Water Process stuff and make it in a French press. I drink it black, and the combination of good beans and a lot of effort in tuning my brew process makes for a palatable, sophisticated taste. The routine of making it in the morning makes drinking it through the day feel earned. As far as I can tell, it's a pretty healthy drink.

Another suggestion would be to get into quality teas. I particularly like Tie Guan Yin.

I drink coffee every day, unfortunately I can't stand tea, I can't stomach it at all!

I'm thinking more along the lines of how we "use" alcoholic drinks, and something to replace that. It doesn't need to be healthy. More about getting the right mood and taste, and likely not the typical every day drink.

I'm also in Australia, and though I do drink alcohol, I have wondered recently if it couldn't be a federal or state mandate that restaurants/bars/etc serving beer/wine/spirits must also have alcohol free equivalents - 0% beer, alcohol free wine, etc. If not a directive, maybe something strongly encouraged.

> when I was offered a drink, I'd say "I don't drink", because here in Australia, I find if you say no to a drink, it's mostly forced on you

I just avoid it as much as I can, but for me saying I don’t drink wouldn’t always work. People would just insist “just one drink”.

Friend of mine said, as joke, I should start telling people that I am an alcoholic (which I am not) so they leave me alone. I actually tried this and it works every time.

The sound rule in the matter would appear to be like many other sound rules—a paradox. Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable. Never drink when you are wretched without it, or you will be like the grey-faced gin-drinker in the slum; but drink when you would be happy without it, and you will be like the laughing peasant of Italy. Never drink because you need it, for this is rational drinking, and the way to death and hell. But drink because you do not need it, for this is irrational drinking, and the ancient health of the world.

G.K. Chesterton, from Heretics

I’ve never been much of a drinker, generally preferring soda, sports drinks, or sweet tea to stay hydrated. In my experience, this is unusual.

My friends, relatives, etc. all exclusively drink beer when doing yard work, home improvement projects, or hobbies like working on cars. When I’m at the marina, I’m the only one not drinking beer while working on their boat. Maybe all of these people stick exclusively to water in private, but I doubt it.

Given that, I can see how it’s quite easy for someone to consume 5-10 drinks per day. I’ll easily drink the equivalent of a six pack if I’m working outside, and if I were a beer drinker I don’t think I’d find it excessive to drink at least that much over the course of a day.

However, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the group drinking a six pack of 90-calorie light beer over the course of a day is healthier than people like me drinking a six pack of Dr. Pepper in the same timeframe. Cirrhosis on one hand, diabetes on the other. Pick your poison, I guess.

You're kind of like me, I simply do not enjoy doing any sort of work in a "buzzed" state so I never day drink at all. Not once have I been working on something in the middle of the day and thought "a beer would make this better" because I find the state to be distracting and the opposite of what coffee does for me in terms of motivation and focus. I spent years in co-working spaces with beer on tap and simply didn't indulge, it's not a will power thing or discipline I just don't want it. I'm not an alcohol hater either I'll still "go wild" with friends once in a while at a bar or club to make myself extroverted.

This is similar to my experience. I enjoy the state of being drunk so I would get drunk for its own sake, not to make work bearable or something; I could never focus whenever work had an in-office happy hour and went back to work. I actually also quit caffeine for similar reasons; I loved coffee but got distracted whenever I wasn't drinking coffee because I was just looking forward to having more.

There's non alcoholic fatty liver disease too.

> However, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the group drinking a six pack of 90-calorie light beer over the course of a day is healthier than people like me drinking a six pack of Dr. Pepper in the same timeframe. Cirrhosis on one hand, diabetes on the other. Pick your poison, I guess.

Most people choose neither option.

Drinking a 6-pack of beer every day and drinking a 6-pack of sugary sodas every day are not normal behaviors. We shouldn't try to normalize things like this when they're clearly unhealthy and definitely outlier behavior.

Unfortunately, it isn’t outlier behavior

TFA states that top 10% is at least equivalent 2 bottles/wine per day, which is more than your 6-pack, closer to a 12-pack.

10% is not outliers.

edit to avoid confusion: this wasn't an average, this was the bottom of the 10% decile. So clearly there are bigger drinkers out there, but 10% is a lot of minimum 10-drink-a-day people.

I think the error we're making here is that the top 10% doesn't all drink the same amount. The top 1% might drink 20 drinks per day, while someone in the 91st percentile might drink 7 or 8.

That claim was for the minimum of the top 10%, being 2 bottle wine equivalent per day, which is about 10 standard drinks.

Undoubtedly there are far heavier drinkers in the top end of that 10%; but 10 drinks is a lot, and 10% isn't outliers.

20 drinks/day sounds about right for the top 1% of alcohol drinkers, I’ve been at that level before.

a 6 pack a day of an addictive substance that the users quickly develop a tolerance to often develops to a 12 pack and eventually a 24 pack.

Why don't you drink water to stay hydrated?

Sodas are liquid candy. I don't think many people eat 6 Snickers instead of food to get calories while they work.

I think its about a long term tolerance thing that people build. Couple anecdotes:

I was invited to my friend's bachelor party weekend. We rented a cabin in a fairly remote area of our province for an extended weekend with plans to golf, fish, campfire, and...drink.

I think by the time the first day was over, the majority of my buddies had each done 12 beer plus several mixed drinks or shots. No mistaking, we were all drunk. But what sort of set things apart was the next day. I basically just nursed a few beers/drinks through the day, probably 6 max while the rest of the guys were easily 12+ a piece, I know one of them had cleaned off his first 24pack by that night.

By the next day I was miserable. We were golfing in 30+ weather and I had 1 beer for the entire 18 holes, they were 6+ each. The heat, the hangover, I don't know how they do it. But it slowly dawned on me that they do this frequently. Most of their weekends are getting tankered at the lake or going through a case of beer in the yard doing chores and having impromptu bbq with the neighbors/buds while I pretty much only drank while at social outings (once a week top) and even then I never had more than 2 or 3 drinks.

When lockdown started a couple of the same buds got laid off from their jobs and mentioned how much they were drinking in isolation. Again, the quantities they drank were fucking astounding while I pretty much stopped drinking entirely due to the social outings coming to an end.

I've tried the "grab some beer and do the oilchange" type work myself but I find by the end my beer is warm, half drank and I was too involved in the work to think about stopping to drink. Even when I did stop, it was because I was thirsty so I'd be seeking water, not alcohol.

After all the experience with this lifestyle from friends I can see where its left us (we're mid 30s now). They're overweight, a few of them struggle with health issues while I'm the same weight I was 10 years prior and healthy as ever. I just think centering your activities around having a beer is something that these people do long term and what seems wild to you or me is normal for them.

Dr. Pepper is tasty, but it and Coke are dependent on Phosphoric Acid to be able to deliver that much sugar to you. This along to caffeine mean it's dehydrating you and robbing you of nutrients, not hydrating you. It's really best if you can limit this to a single or find a replacement (Kroger has a seltzer with the Dr. flavor that satisfies my addiction nicely)

Ignoring the alcohol, the first near beer or light beer actually helps hydrate you and provides nutrients.

But the quantity of either is what quickly becomes the problem (2nd hand anecdote). Many alcoholics start with with the 1 beer a day after work which turns into a 12 pack a day after work (as suggested by this top 10%). And once an addict develops a tolerance to beer, they escalate in the top 10% rapidly; that vodka soda become an evening thing, then a morning an evening thing.

As an American who’s spent most of their adult life working outside the US (Europe and Asia) I find this pretty hilarious. I mean, it may be true…drinking damage is absolute, not relative. But if America has a drinking problem, a huge chunk of the rest of the world are outright alcoholics.

Of course I think all of this is alarmist. Alcohol is one of those great traditions that has transcended centuries and generations. If I live a few years less, so be it. I’d rather be happy.

I think this is missing the point a bit. In my experience, while some countries in Europe have a higher intake of alcohol on average, I have never met anyone who drink to cope with stress, work, etc. outside full-blown alcoholics. Americans do this a lot. In my opinion those are two different discussions: one about the effect of too much alcohol on your system and one of the tendency to drink in ways that is normally only seen in alcoholics (but in smaller quantities). While they might sound similar one is overconsumption (bad) and the other is normalisation of alcohol abuse (very risky, likely bad).

Edit: I didn't down vote your comment btw.

I live in London and pre-Covid, a good chunk of people I know have drinks after work 3 days a week. I’m not trying to nit pick (I like the UK drinking culture) but it just seemed like a very Ameri-centric view from someone who hasn’t spent much/any time outside the US.

>but it just seemed like a very Ameri-centric view from someone who hasn’t spent much/any time outside the US.

I live in Denmark, which has one of the highest rates of alcohol consumption among young people in the EU and almost the same overall as the UK but without the pub culture you guys have. Most of our social consumption is the unhealthy heavy drinking party kind. But this is raw amount consumed and you yourself said you like the drinking culture (I wish we had it here). I'm talking about people drinking to cope. Going to a pub 3 days a week and drinking alone at home after work to cope with stress etc. is very different.

Absolutely. With the pandemic and the social isolation, alcohol has kept me going. I know the judgemental people will label me, but honestly nothing else has helped. In the pandemic I tried many other coping mechanisms, exercise, social media, etc… but alcohol, strangely enough kept me grounded through this mayhem. I am pretty sure I’ll wean off it when the world gets it’s shit together.. pardon my French

Eh, I've spent a great deal of time in Norway, the UK and France. The UK and Norway are just as bad in terms of "problem" drinking in my experience. France seems to have it more under control but there are still plenty of drunk people roaming around in public after 6pm.

If anything I'd say we're quicker to label drinking "a problem" here in the US than elsewhere - even though the drink amounts and resulting behavior are the same. YMMV I guess, but this seems like a lot of other articles I've seen lately that "throw shade" at America while ignoring the same issues elsewhere.

I'm going to generalize, but the US is more diverse (rank #90 vs #151 for Germany, #169 for France, #111 for Croatia [0]) and we also have a very painful past and present that makes us acutely aware of our inability to socialize.

America also has a cultural obsession with self-reliance/liberty/frontier-as-a-virtue which makes "socializing" a bit of a taboo concept, in a weird way. It's a crutch to "need" to be around others, despite it being fundamentally human to feel this way.

When you combine these two things, I think you get a group of people who need to interact with one another, but also kind of hate one another, and refuse to admit the dichotomy. What we've discovered then, is by heavy drinking we can start to pick at those barriers, though maybe that is, itself, part of the problem.

    [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_ranked_by_ethnic_and_cultural_diversity_level

"we also have a very painful past and present"

I don't see why that is more true of the U.S. than say Germany, Japan, Russia, China etc.

We've both refused to own our past national transgressions the way Japan and Germany have, we have more diversity than all of those countries, and have also not scrubbed all mention of said painful past from our national history like Russia and China.

Germany I can see, but I thought Japan also refused to own many of their past national transgressions.

I can stretch your analysis even further, don't some in Japan turn to heavy drinking as a way to cope with societal distancing, alienation and isolation? I read about it, at least.

> we have more diversity than all of those countries

I'm sorry, but this is just bullshit. At least when it comes to Russia.

> we also have a very painful past and present that makes us acutely aware of our inability to socialize.

This is only a real problem for a small, but vocal part of the population. Most people don't think about these issues much at all.

Culture affects you even when you don't think you're thinking about it. In many ways, culture defines the channels that your thoughts flow through.

Culture is to humans as water is to fish.

Socializing is a crutch in the US? That seems like an absurd claim. Maybe in big urban cities, but go outside of that and socialization is a key part of life and it’s view as weird if you don’t do it.

Oh boy I love to read pop psychology on Hacker News. Please continue!

>we also have a very painful past and present that makes us acutely aware of our inability to socialize.

What are you talking about?

This is hilarious. The US has a more painful past than Germany or France? That’s some pretty strange American exceptionalism.

When we are no longer restricted by resource limits as a society, everything quickly becomes an addiction. Food, alcohol, cigarettes, caffeine, sex, drugs, gambling, shopping, TV, video games, social media. I'm sure people a lot more qualified than me will be able to talk about it in scientific terms, but I feel like a certain category of species (maybe all of them?) simply never ran into limiting excesses as part of their evolution. There are animals that will literally eat themselves to death if given the chance.

Alcohol withdrawals are serious enough that they can be fatal. This isn't true for cigarettes, opiates, or cocaine.

Breaking habits is hard, but usually doesn't risk hospitalization or death.

Nitpicking, but though rare, people can die from opiate withdrawal [1].

The point of your comment still stands however.

[1] https://ndarc.med.unsw.edu.au/blog/yes-people-can-die-opiate...

My mother worked in a alcohol rehab center. People who drank up to 12L of wine a day (I still wonder how that works) would turn to window cleaning liquid on withdrawal.

She said no-one ever quit the alcohol addiction by choice, all of them were brought here by court, generally after killing people in an accident.

I sure hope people can quit alcohol addiction by choice. But you do need to rebuild all the friendships that only existed around drinking routines. I for one have quit a coworking space that revolved too much around beer. They were good business contacts and that is why it’s hard to walk away.

I'm suspicious of bold claims like that from people observing a selected subset of a population. An alcohol rehab center, particular the type that accepts people sentenced there by a court, is likely to get few to no voluntary patients. Therefore, somebody working there will only see the people who have a serious enough alcohol problem to get in enough alcohol-related legal trouble to get sentenced to go to rehab.

I've known some people who would probably qualify as functional alcoholics, and none of them have ever got into legal trouble for it. IME, you generally have to be a wildly out of control drunk to get into legal trouble from it regularly.

I've also known plenty of people who stopped or cut back alcohol consumption voluntarily, with no help from any organized programs. It's quite doable for many people, once you decide that you genuinely want to stop, though I acknowledge that some people genuinely can't. You may infact have to change friendships and routines if some of the old ones are too conductive to binge drinking, but do what you gotta do.

I have some similar thoughts about this. Take Internet media streaming: am I happier being able to watch any of 10,000 things with no effort, rather than having maybe a couple dozen at hand and the ability, with some time and effort, to acquire one or two more if I really want them enough? Or is the ability to select exactly a certain thing to watch with low effort just scratching an itch that only exists because I can do that, and I'd be exactly as happy watching whatever caught my eye on the public library movie shelf earlier that week? I suspect, for most people, it's the latter. Am I happier with Spotify or whatever, than I would be with a smallish but well-used record collection that I add another entry to only a couple times a year? I suspect not.

Am I better off with 2-day shipping and the easy ability to read the opinions of enthusiasts and experts for any product I have a small interest in, then order it immediately? Does the change in what I buy actually pay off given the extra time-cost of that research, the extra brain-clutter of knowing things about products I'd probably never have though much about otherwise, and the extra money I'm sure I'm spending because of those factors? I kinda doubt it, but it's so damn hard to resist finding out what's the best way to do [thing] or the best product for the best way to do [thing] when you can do that, even if the result is that your life-satisfaction meter doesn't budge versus some hypothetical alternate universe in which, for anything you're not an actual enthusiast about, you just buy whatever looks good out of the selection at a local non-specialty store.

[EDIT] and yes I'm aware I'm dangerously close to realizing that almost everything "good" in life is just removing an irritation that only exists in the first place because of how life is and is structured, and how I'm choosing to respond to life and its typical structure, and then abandoning the material world to become a Buddhist monk or something.

I like your comment because it pretty much answers itself in the edit.

Yeah, the universality and unoriginality of the observation isn't lost on me, but I do think there's some "the medium is the message" stuff going on with the sheer quantity and low-friction to selection of media and other options available to us now, with the Web and ubiquitous always-online computing devices turning into an outright engine for itch-generation and itch-scratching-of-same-itch. And that's before you factor in adversarial actors (marketers and such).

Packages show up on the lawn it is astonishing how they appear.

They are astonishing surprises.

It’s what I ordered the cat food the espresso machine the two new tables.

Ordering things and how they appear basically I am a small-scale sorcerer.

On the road I press the button and the music goes.

Air conditioning gas pedal restaurant take-out etc.

It is my will being perpetually sated.

Pretend we are writing a fable in which a sorcerer always gets what he wants.

Consider what happens to a soul which always gets what it wants.

- Emily Bludworth de Barios, from http://www.forkliftohio.com/index.php?page=freight-31

That last line unsettles me every time.

> "Consider what happens to a soul which always gets what it wants."

In a popular Alan Watts talk he imagines a dreamer:

"let’s suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time, or any length of time you wanted to have.

And you would, naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each you would say “Well that was pretty great. But now let’s have a surprise, let’s have a dream which isn’t under control, where something is gonna happen to me that I don’t know what it's gonna be."

And you would dig that and would come out of that and you would say “Wow that was a close shave, wasn’t it?”. Then you would get more and more adventurous and you would make further- and further-out gambles what you would dream. And finally, you would dream where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today."

https://genius.com/Alan-watts-the-dream-of-life-annotated

There was a book about this called the Paradox of Choice. Basically, that we want choices but they make us less happy.

There's a related phenomenon, I don't know a name for it, where given a choice between convenience and happiness people will almost always choose convenience, generally without even realizing they've made a choice. Our genes have a deep, deep preference for minimizing energy expenditure.

This happens with video games too. Players hate restrictions, but if they were removed, would get board and stop.

For a recent example, look at Valheim. They explicitly block you from using portals to move metal ore, which forces you to use a cart or a boat to move it. Suddenly I was a highway engineer for a few hours and pay more attention to harbour than before and had a blast.

Yet there are mods which remove this restriction, which removes this experience. Why build a highway if I can just drop a portal down?

World of Warcraft classic is another example. It's a beautiful world thats a pain to get around, but forces you to enjoy it.

I occasionally play Minecraft with my young son. I feel that eventual boredom arrives in creative mode. With no constraints, the charm can disappear.

I think constraints generally in a creative process (design, for example) are almost necessary. Graphic designers get it in print budgets, colour selections, quality of photographs, etc.

I remember once having to pitch to build a web site. The client stated they literally had no budget limitation. I honestly didn't know what to do, having spent my entire career fitting a solution to a budget!

Making each even insignificant choice uses your mental energy and each day we have limited amount of these. Consumer capitalism prays on that...

https://youtu.be/hZ7lFV9Z2hk?t=32

Two of my favourite TED Talks are Barry Schwartz and the Paradox of Choice, where he says "in the past, you went to the store and there was one jar of peanut butter or one pair of jeans, and you bought them. If they weren't good, well, you had no choice. You demand choice. Now you go to the store and there's 30 jars of peanut butter or pairs of jeans - chunky, smooth, sweet, plain, large, small, organic, popular brand, niche brand, imported brand, etc. Now whatever you choose, you will have doubts, and if it isn't good, well there were so many choices it must be your fault, so you feel bad".

And Dan Gilbert on Happiness, demonstrating with studies that no, you are not happier with more choice, you are objectively, measurably, unquestionably, happier with no choice. 10,000 films that you can stop watching and change for another as soon as you are unhappy -> unhappiness. 1 film you have to watch all the way through and have no other -> you'll grow to like it. You become happier with things you're stuck with, and that even applies to people who are disabled, missed out on fortunes, got imprisoned for crimes they did commit, and for crimes they didn't commit, as well as for everyday people who bought something they can't return vs something they can return.

Via PJ Eby, you care about what you care for. People have it the other way round - "I'm not maintaining my car, but if I had a Lambo then I would care about my car". Noooo, if you start cleaning and maintaining your car, then you will care about your car because you're investing time and effort into it.

I personally love choice. But maybe for people like you, a service that curates some of the top choices and offers that as limited pool could be a useful.

On the subject of addiction I highly recommend this comic on the rat park experiment: http://utw10426.utweb.utexas.edu/quest/Q3/ratpark.html

It starts with the famous experiments where rats would prefer drugs to food and water but goes on to further study that lead to not so bleak conclusions.

“ In his 1979 history, The Alcoholic Republic, the historian W. J. Rorabaugh painstakingly calculated the stunning amount of alcohol early Americans drank on a daily basis. In 1830, when American liquor consumption hit its all-time high, the average adult was going through more than nine gallons of spirits each year.”

I think I remember hearing a similar stat on the ken burns prohibition doc. I didn’t quite understand why it was supposed to be that much though. 9 gallons of liquor is 36 liters is roughly 100 bottles of wine equivalent per year so less than a third of a bottle of wine a day which is what 1 or 2 glasses per meal equivalent? So the question then is are people drinking liquor drinking wine on top plus cider apparently? Or is it just a lot because that’s the average and plenty of people aren’t drinking much at or at all and that makes for the right tail of the distribution to be really drinking a lot?

9 Gallon is 34 Liters, 11 drinks per Liter of Vokda/Liquor

9*11 = 374 drinks per year or 1 drink a day

Its probably that Average/mean drinking amount isn't a good statistical representation when almost all the consumption is done by the top 10% of drinkers.

Historical comparisons also are tricky because sizes and %'s aren't consistent to today. Beer/Cider weren't as strong and bottle's of wine were smaller than 750ml etc etc.

Where are you getting 11 drinks per liter of vodka? I'm getting twice that (1.5oz shots)

The joke being that "2 shots of vodka" is more like 4-5.

You're right, looks like I grabbed that too quickly. They were citing for standard drinks/pours.

Okrent had it calculated at equivalent to 7 US gallons of pure ethanol/yr (1830s) to normalize this.

So approx 17.5 gallons at today's standard of 40%. Which is about 2250 standard (1.5oz) drinks a year, or average of 6/day.

There are higher and lower estimates too, but anyway you work the calculations, it's a lot.

Wine isn’t a spirit (nor is beer). That number is about distilled alcohol. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquor:

“Liquor or spirit (also distilled alcohol) is an alcoholic drink produced by distillation of grains, fruits, or vegetables that have already gone through alcoholic fermentation.

[…]

Liquor generally has an alcohol concentration higher than 30%”

⇒ For a 10% alcohol wine, multiply that by a factor of (at least) 3. That makes it a bottle of wine a day.

Also, it was the average adult. Women likely consumed less alcohol. If so, the average adult male must have consumed more.

They already did that when they said 36 liters, which is 100 bottles of wine.

Article mirrors my experience. For context I'm German, my wife's French and we've got family in Croatia who own a vineyard so I'm used to being around alcohol and people drinking. My first impression when I spent time was in the US was indeed how bipolar drinking is compared to Europe.

We probably drink a hell of a lot more in raw terms than the average American does.Two glasses of wine for dinner, another one in the evening, maybe some cognac to wind down, and so on. But it's for the most part not about getting drunk or coping with stress. I've got no illusions about the physical effects but speaking about addiction or being dysfunctional I've seen very little of it despite some people I know drinking enough to stun a mule probably.

The things that I noted were different in the US is how solitary everyone is, overworked and how little time people take for preparing food and just sitting at a table having a drink over conversation. People seem to drink to cope more, use it as a medicine rather than for pleasure or to enhance meals, and I think that turns very badly very quick.

That said I don't think solitary drinking is necessarily as bad as the article makes it out to be all the time, but it takes a certain personality. When you take drugs alone, not just alcohol, you need to be more mindful about why you do it.

Noticed this when I was in Germany/Austria as well. In America, if you go out drinking then that's the primary activity. It's what you're doing. But in central Europe socializing and seeing friends is the activity and you just happen to drink because that's what you do when you see your friends.

This makes no sense. Do you think that Americans go out drinking to get drunk arounds friends, but not to socialize with them?

I’ve noticed that any bad habits or behaviors Americans have tend to be misunderstood when they aren’t being misrepresented or exaggerated in order to pile on.

From my (not op) experiences, oh yes. Just last night I was talking to a potential bar investor and one of the huuuuge talking points was " how do we cater for the americans?"

I think Americans just aren't used to saying we're out to socialize. It's what's happening, but we're bad at it and we're not used to being explicit about it.

As a member of this target demographic, I would say that catering to American drinkers would be to provide a pretext to be at your establishment. You don't have to actually provide all that much, but if you provide a reason for being there that isn't, "Socialize with others" I bet you'd attract more Americans. In America we do "brewery tours" for example, but it doesn't even have to be related to alcohol itself ("good" music, board games, axe throwing, bumper cars, pub quiz, karaoke, etc.). What matters is that you're plausibly not there to "socialize", even though that's actually why you're there.

By that statement these are Americans outside America? Seems like an unrepresentative slice of the country?

It definitely depends on the type of bar/club you’re at but a lot of them have music so loud it’s impossible to hold a conversation.

We went out to get drunk and socializing happened. Without the going out to get drunk part the socializing doesn't happen.

Getting beer was always the event.

Like going to a weekly bowling game. Socializing happens but you go there for bowling.

Anecdote: we've had curfews/restrictions that prevented the American military from drinking alcohol at establishments in the local community, sometimes for over a year. Almost all of my peers at the time would rather sit at the Officers' Clubs on base and get drunk, as if it was their only option for socializing.

My take (granted, I had quit drinking years prior): I know you guys can't drink off-base, but....that's where all the WOMEN are (the military officer ranks in our Service is ~94% males). I would expect your desire to get laid to exceed your desire to hide inside your alcohol-infused comfort zone....

My peers: Nah....if I can't drink alcohol I don't wanna go out to meet anyone.

The people I hang out with (even to this day) go out to get laid, and if they get DRUNK that's just a side-effect. Most guys I know go out to get drunk, and if they get LAID, that's just a side-effect.

> I would expect your desire to get laid to exceed your desire to hide inside your alcohol-infused comfort zone....

Honest question: what is his realistic chance to get laid with non-prostitute? How much money would it cost to pay sex worker? I also suspect that going around bars while not drinking looking for girl to have sex with might involve a lot of rejection and a lot of effort.

> The people I hang out with (even to this day) go out to get laid,

I honestly never socialized with people like that. I had always stable relationships and most my friends tended to form those too. Not everyone is for quick hookups.

>>>Honest question: what is his realistic chance to get laid with non-prostitute?

At the time, pretty high. The clubs and bars were very active, and "gaijin-hunter" Japanese women are notoriously easy. If you are halfway-attractive and at least a LITTLE charismatic, you should be able to snag a one-night stand or two, and then a girlfriend in.....6 weeks? That's assuming going out Friday/Saturday every weekend. If you aren't drinking alcohol, it's not that expensive either. If you end up with a relationship that lasts a few months or more, I consider that a pretty good ROI.

>>>How much money would it cost to pay sex worker?

Depending on service (incall/outcall) and location...$100-$300+.

>>>I also suspect that going around bars while not drinking looking for girl to have sex with might involve a lot of rejection and a lot of effort.

It does put you "not on the wavelength" of people when they are drunk, doubly so if they are kinda dumb too. You can overcome these hurdles by being attractive, and knowing the right conversational hooks to say in their native language to build rapport quickly and lazily. Building that skillset does take time, and brings other risks (PUA's call it "calibration"....in my experience, "calibrating" for Japanese women can over-fit your social skills for a small dataset, and then your Game suffers when you engage with women from different cultures).

>>>I honestly never socialized with people like that. I had always stable relationships and most my friends tended to form those too. Not everyone is for quick hookups.

90% of my wingmen have been in stable relationships. That's never stopped any of us from adding to our harems. If you have a wife, get a mistress. If you have a mistress, get a side-chick. If you have a side-chick, get a fuck-buddy. If you have all four of those, bang all of them during the week, so on the weekend you can get some head in your car in the parking lot from a new girl, who might be a suitable replacement for any of the last 3 of your regulars (I don't recommend replacing your wife with a club-rat...).

I had a roommate that kept his accountant side-chick for over 5 years, even after his wife found out. She paid his $20,000 bail when he was getting kicked out of the country, no questions asked. That said....those kind of reliable women are rarely found in bars/clubs, but if you never venture outside of your fortified American enclave because you can't consume alcohol in town, how would a guy ever find out either way?

Thanks for answer. The prostitution sounds more expensive then I assumed (but I guess it factors in risk and periods without customers).

To the ending, your friends are kind of guys I really dont want to meet. I kind of assumed it was all about single guys having causual fun, now I feel sorry for their wifes. I honestly think better about guys that are not getting laid at the base.

I disagree with this. Americans go out drinking with friends because alcohol helps you cut through the bullshit small talk and get to the real talk that everyone is afraid to initiate but eager to take part in. If we could all have perfectly candid conversations surrounding sensitive topics without alcohol, there would be no need for most bars to exist.

It’s kind of amusing when you think about it like a philosopher. I’m a bit older than the average HNer, probably, at 41 this year. It’s all the same fears and doubts. The human condition. Finding love, acceptance, belonging. Not facing down the human condition alone. That is what “big talk” is about to me.

I don't drink but I agree it's the social drug. It makes you want to interact with others. Drinking alone makes you want to go out and tell people what's on your mind.

I used to drink with friends and in that country there was a custom that bars close at a given time at night, and then we would go to someone's apartment to drink more. I remember on one occasion we were sitting around in someone's kitchen maybe 8 people. And at one point I realize everyone was talking at the same time. Everyone was talking so no-one was listening. Everyone wanted to get their point across.

There are lots of philosophical debates about this. “Is your drunk self closer to the ‘real you’ than your sober self?”

People defend both sides of this thesis often.

Where in Germany? I find this surprising. As an American expat who has spent a lot of time in Germany, I’d agree that the German relationship with alcohol is less taboo, but Germany/UK have pretty big binging cultures. The Mediterraneans definitely do it more responsibly though.

Yes. Think about Octoberfest. It's all about drinking

Yet, the Oktoberfest is such a small and insignificant detail of our culture. It’s a big party, mostly for tourists. After those two weeks, many people I know take a monthlong abstinence, and life carries on. Binge drinking happens, but it’s definitely nothing regular.

> to enhance meals

Can you clarify what you mean here? I was under the impression european habits of alcohol pairing takes much more space under this umbrella than, say, whether an american associates junk foods (pizza, wings) with beer.

What I got out of this was that you were around well-adjusted people in Europe and were around less well-adjusted people in the US.

How do you even know about solitary drinking in the US? Why are you unaware of solitary drinking in France/Germany/Croatia?

I have no way of quantifying any of your observations.

I am aware of people with drinking problems in France, Germany and Croatia. It is easy for alcohol to periodically become a problem in people's lives.

I'm not trying to defend American culture at all. These observations read kind of comically though.

Alcohol is a harmful drug much worse than some of the other banned drugs on the market.

This is a common refrain but at the same time it seems to be the one substance commonly used across most of the world since ancient times. None of the other supposedly less harmful, banned drugs are so ubiquitous. Perhaps there's a good reason for this (besides varying availability of other substances)?

It's a really interesting question. Maybe the benefits of having something to drink that has alcohol to kill of pathogens outweigh the negatives?

I'm sorry, which pathogens are killed by imbibing alcohol? I've never heard of such a thing, even historically.

Edit: Next time I'll do a cursory googling before commenting. This is apparently an existing hypothesis for common types of bacteria such as e coli, salmonella, etc in the drink itself, not in the body.

I wonder if they meant killing pathogens in the drink, before you drank it. Clean water is a modern thing.

Bingo. Edited my comment above.

Pathogens have a harder time living in alcoholic beverages, making the drink itself safer.

One good reason is because alcoholic beverages could be stored for long periods of time and be safe for drinking. Water can become contaminated over time if bacteria is allowed to grow while it’s being stored, so it has to be relatively fresh to drink. Other options like milk would spoil quickly. Alcohol generally didn’t have these issues, giving it some utility that outweighed its advantages.

In an age where other beverages are as easily accessible for people living in the modern world, it’s utility isn’t there any more and you are left with all the downsides.

is it plausible humans initially hated the taste of alcohol and suffered worse hangovers, but in a manner of a few thousand years descend from ancestors who selected for high euphoria and strong livers.... all because alcohol was healthier than water?

Delivery method is an important factor. Nothing that works through injection had a chance to become popular until quite recently, for instance.

Nope, I'm quite convinced it's the varying availability of the other substances.

Coffee, tea, and tobacco, became at least as widespread once global trade made that possible. Coca was late to the party because it doesn't grow well outside of its native region.

Cannabis is an odd one, in that it was extremely widespread and making solid inroads in Europe and North America, when it became a weapon for United States racial policy, and a jobs program for federal police after the repeal of Prohibition. Coca and cocaine got caught up in the same dragnet.

Opium and its derivatives are genuinely pernicious and attempts to normalize their use outside of medicine have been resisted repeatedly throughout history.

Which leaves psychedelics, which are... weird, and also were largely unknown until some anthropologists in the 40s and 50s drew attention to them.

The history of 'modern' drug prohibition owes more to politics than the inherent properties of the substances in question.

Alcohol can be easily brewed from many foods without global trade, unlike other drugs

You left out refined sugar in its many forms. In total deaths and disease as well as cost to society dwarfs everything. The combination of being legal, advertised, and by some measures as addictive as any others is tough to beat.

What are you talking about? Cannabis, psilocybin, and mescaline consumption have a very old history as well.

Fermentation is a great way to store excess food, which is why there's a ton of fermented foods across cultures. For civilizations centered around cereal crops, it makes sense that you'd see a lot of fermented cereal crops such as beer.

You can definitely see the benefit for an ancient civilization, since you're able to store many more calories which allows you to grow a much larger population base. But like many things associated with the move to agrarian civilizations, being good for the civilization doesn't necessarilly correlate with being good for the individual.

> None of the other supposedly less harmful, banned drugs are so ubiquitous

You get alcohol when fruit spoils. Our experience with it is quite literally as old as foraging. This doesn't tell us anything about how harmful or not harmful alcohol is.

As far as ubiquity, plant-based substances had to follow migration or trade routes to gain use outside of their native habitats. Alcohol was coextensive with any food .

The fact that alcohol has been a part of human existence for so long might support my hypothesis, if you believe that humans physiology is at least partly shaped by human dietary habits over many thousands of years.

Alcohol is more dangerous than all other drugs, in my experience (been addicted to alcohol and heroin in the past, and have abused every common drug) and in my opinion.

The addiction rate for cocaine/heroin/meth may be higher, but the negative effects of those drugs mostly stem from the high cost (theft) and insane profit margins (murder). If a heroin addict could get their supply for $5/day (and have it be pure heroin w no fentanyl) then nearly all of the negatives would disappear.

Isn't meth just plain destructive, what it does to your body, and brain?

It's somewhat more subtle, pure medical grade methamphetamine (desoxyn) taken orally is theoretically the best ADD medicine available but it's almost never prescribed for political reasons.

Meth has lot less sympathetic side effects than dextroamphetamine per unit of dopaminergic stimulation, this simple difference enables abuser to consume ridiculously large dose and those high doses are destructive.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/know-your-amphetamines

Amphetamine-like drugs are used as pills or capsules, powder, or fluid, and can be ingested orally, smoked, insufflated, or injected intravenously. They cause euphoria but tolerance develops rapidly. Clinically evident effects of the two drugs are nearly indistinguishable, but methamphetamine appears to be a more potent stimulant. Amphetamine and methamphetamine induce euphoria, increased energy, alertness and libido, agitation and anxiety, increased locomotor activity and stereotypical movements, as well as hyperthermia, increased heart rate and blood pressure, vasoconstriction, bronchodilatation, hyperglycemia, and suppress appetite. Psychosis, hyperkinesia, seizures, and coma have been described in emergency patients. Chronic users may develop behavioral disorders, impulsivity, punding (non-goal directed repetitive activities), hallucinations, tremor, choreoathetosis, dystonias, ataxia, and gait disturbances (41–43). Stereotyped involuntary choreoathetotic hyperkinesias are characteristic in arms, neck and head, and usually disappear during sleep, while teeth grinding (bruxism) may occur during day and night. Movement disorders may develop during abuse or abstinence, and though they a usually resolve within few days, they may remain for a long time in some cases, even after the abuse of amphetamines is stopped. Treatment with benzodiazepines or neuroleptics may be of benefit (43–45). Choreiform movements have developed as an adverse effect in the therapeutic setting of amphetamine used in the treatment of ADHD in adult and pediatric patients (46, 47).

[41] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23688691/

[43] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3355623/

[45] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7299411/

[46] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22883290/

[47] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15254949/

Yes, the dose makes the poison and yes medicl amphetamines are sometimes abused but the literature you cited¹ isn't really about the medical use of amphetamines. Those papers are about the abuse of amphetamines.

From my experience with Vyvanse I find that amphetamines have a dose response function with linear and exponential steps. 15mg is barely perceptible, 30mg is like a coffee without the anxiety but it last 8 hours. 45mg is like 30mg but a little longer. 60mg in 2 doses (first pill at 7am and next one at 9am) is a perfect treatment against my ADD. Once I tried 90mg and it was terrible, I experienced bruxism, anxiety and hyperacidity for 18 hours. I am sure that I would develop the problems you listed if I were to take 90mg a day but 90mg of Vyvanse is supratherapeutic...

1: Link 41 is about abuse (supratherapeutic and frequent doses). Link 43 I can't comment as I don't have acces but it's an old paper from 1988... Link 45 is about abuse again. Link 46 is about accidental ingestion by a baby. (a therapeutic dose for a teenager is clearly supratherapeutic in a 8months infant) Link 47 is probably about abuse (the abstract talk of reversible consequences of dose escalation) but I don't have acces to the paper.

You can't avoid capillary vasoconstriction at any dose and that's what makes your teeth rot and gums go bad. Nothing you can do about that. I've used Adderall and Vyvanse many many years ago for "ADHD" as well. Bad breath and increased gum issues made me stop well before any damage occurred.

I was prescribed desoxyn for adhd - didn't seem particularly hard to get...

I remember seeing a study a few years ago that showed a lot of the negatives from Meth weren't inherent in the drug but from behaviors it encourages; like not sleeping.

I don't think I would say it "encourages" not sleeping. Rather it makes sleeping impossible. And that has bad effects. Drug causes something which causes something else, so you could say it is not the drug but its effects, but I would say that means it is the drug that causes it all. Don't take it if you don't want those "side-effects".

I'm German, and I'd consider drinking 2-3 glasses of wine plus a glass cognac a day quite much.

But I'd consider drinking daily or even weekly much.

> That said I don't think solitary drinking is necessarily as bad as the article makes it out to be all the time

One of my great bugaboos is these cultural definitions of alcoholism that are independent from the actual amount of alcohol consumed. You know “you’re only an alcoholic if you drink alone” or “you’re only an alcoholic if you pour your own drinks” (apparently this is a meme in Japan?). Every culture that consumes alcohol seems to have these, and they’re all laughably naive and easily gamed. Alcoholics can and do drink heavily together, and they can pour each other drinks if that’s what it takes to sidestep some silly taboo. The only definition of this that’s meaningful is how much alcohol you drink and how often, nothing else.

> "you’re only an alcoholic if you pour your own drinks” (apparently this is a meme in Japan?)

(source: I've got family in Japan). It's polite in Japan to serve others and then let someone serve you. Otherwise it's "tejaku" (pooring oneself's drink). In, say, France/Belgium it's different: the one who serves from the bottle serves everybody and ends up serving himself.

Now, obviously, when you're drinking alone there's nobody to serve you...

Just to be extra precise; I’m not trying to imply that there’s anything wrong with customs around how a good friend or polite host serves other people. I’m just railing against the “you’re only an alcoholic if you <behavior unrelated to amount consumed>“ tropes.

I’ve never been to Japan, but I’d heard that “you’re only an alcoholic if you pour your own drinks” is a trope there. The question mark in my original post was to underscore my uncertainty.

This trope needs to die. Europe doesn't have drinking "problems" because it mostly draws the line for "problems" in what would solidly be "functional alcoholic" territory in the US.

Wait, what?

From the WHO:

https://www.euro.who.int/en/health-topics/disease-prevention...

"The WHO European Region has the highest proportion in the world of total ill health and premature death due to alcohol."

Exactly. The numbers don't back up the narrative unless you do mental gymnastics to redefine Europe. HN often seems to forget that Europe extends south beyond the Alps and east beyond the Oder.

> HN often seems to forget that Europe extends south beyond the Alps

Unclear what this is supposed to mean. Italy[0], Portugal[1] and Spain[2] all have lower prevalence of heavy episodic drinking than the EU average.

Both Portugal ("south of the Alps") and France[3] ("north of the Alps") have higher alcohol consumption per capita than the EU average, which is largely due to a culture of moderate wine drinking with meals that has nothing to do with "functional alcoholism".

[0] https://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0016/402190/... [1] https://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/402198/... [2] https://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/402202/... [3] https://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0020/402185/...

For what its worth it I looked up the data to disprove you but it actually backs you up. The data says that Germans drink more than Americans but have lower rates of alcoholism and liver disease.

German data: https://www.who.int/substance_abuse/publications/global_alco...

US data: https://www.who.int/substance_abuse/publications/global_alco...

When factoring in the alcohol-attributable fractions, it looks like German males have slightly higher rates of liver failure because of alcohol than American males, while German females have slightly less than American females. An this is with the U.S. population demographically being much more susceptible to alcohol liver disease than Germany[1].

Looking at the numbers, I think there's a real possibility that Germans and other Europeans have a problem with alcohol that's just as bad if not worse, but are possibly less willing to admit it. Just like how 70 years ago few in America would be willing to admit America's problems with alcohol and tobacco.

[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150220190741.h...

I'm surprised this is the top comment, what's the deal with Europeans tending to talk like they're the authoritative source on American culture based on a few people they've met and a few websites they've read? This seems like an absurd reductionist view of both European and American cultures. It honestly seems like the type of anecdotal content I would expect from a Reddit thread.

It's not just Europeans. Getting a taste of less than 1% of a country and becoming a total boor of a know-it-all any time the topic comes up is universal, AFAIK.

Spain would disagree. Many parts of Europe absolutely have binge drinking problems on par with the US or UK. Let's not even get started on Eastern Europe. You don't need to go far from Germany to find these problems.

I would probably say that Germany isn't indicative of the Eurozone at all.

In Eastern Europe it's lowly and indecent to get drunk, whereas in the "Binge Belt" it's a goal for the night for some.

I'd sat the Binge Belt is US, UK, AU, DK, NO, IS, JP, KR

Germany has a drinking problem[1].

[1] https://movendi.ngo/news/2019/04/18/study-germany-has-an-alc...

I’ve lived in the US for 30-some years and could really only tell you the drinking habits of myself, my wife, and a few close friends with any kind of accuracy.

Do you do research on drinking habits? How can you assume to know so much about the US’ drinking habits in general terms?

I am an American. I drink 2 glasses at wine at dinner, maybe a cocktail before, and a whiskey or the like after. Dinner is an event for the family. We talk about the day. We take time to cook it for the most part. The other day we had the new neighbors over, cheese, meat and fish board, and lots of wine. Eating and drinking with friends and family is joy and happiness.

> My first impression when I spent time was in the US was indeed how bipolar drinking is compared to Europe.

There are two possible relationships a person can have with alcohol - it is either primarily a food, or primarily a drug.

Americans have a hard time treating it as food, although thankfully that seems to be changing.

Why do we perpetuate these myths about European drinkers? If you’re not drinking to get intoxicated why are you drinking? I’ve seen addiction papered over with this nonsense on more occasions than not.

It's my understanding the U.S. drinking culture is more similar to Iceland/Scandinavia/Japan/Korea/China.

It seems that continental Europe is the outlier.

As an American, I find that most people drink much less than that. The alcoholics are often around people who drink so much that they aren't aware that drinking multiple drinks a day is uncommon.

I honestly get sick when I drink more than three drinks within three hours.

Ah, the European's old trope of knowing how to Enjoy Life more than the Americans.

Funny, whenever I visit W Europe I find it pretty sad and people look pretty grumbling. America is a lot more lively.

I think of this Eurostory as a EU coping mechanism.

When I moved to Canada, what really shocked me if that people would drink alone, or be the only one drinking at a table. Alcohol is something social in France.

I agree with you. It's not that Germans don't drink a lot - but it's just not as much in a single session and generally not for the purpose of getting drunk.

Most people don't understand the concept of standard drink sizes (for medical purposes or blood alcohol calculation). Firstly the standard drink size in the US is larger than in the US, but even so it's still smaller than the typical size drink people actually receive. If there were more awareness around standard drink sizes we might discover that Americans drink more than statistics capture by a lot (though probably not more than Germans)! In Germany most of my friends in the US would be considered alcoholics.

- shots are typically much larger in the US - about 2x-3x

- the standard beer size (for beer on tap) is usually a pint in the US. In Germany it's about a half pint! (That's why Germans can have a lunch beer)

- Canned wine is fairly popular in the US, but nobody realizes that this is essentially half of bottle of wine.

On a related note: most people definitely drive under the influence (legally drunk) in the US! :(

I grew up in Germany in the restaurant business (family business) and was a bar tender from a young age (albeit in a fancy restaurant with a few locals who'd sit at the bar). The most shots I've ever seen someone drink in an evening was 9 shots - my staff and I thought that person was a crazy alcoholic. Those shots are 2cl. When you compare that to the typical tequila shots in US bars it's basically ~3 shots (a little more), which people in their 20s and 30s tend to drink like it's no big deal.

I have lived several places in the Midwest, in SF, Chicago and of course traveled lots of places in the US for business and vacation.

Disclaimer: German in the US for 15+ years.

I'm writing this right now whilst drinking my German Import Pilsener to wind down from work :D

I've been to Europe many times. It's no better there than here. In the USA it's a bit of a regional thing as well, some states are much worse than others, but I don't think Europeans should feel like they have "superior drinking practices", they're just as bad.

I don’t think France has a particularly healthy drinking culture. It’s worth pointing out that France has a far higher rate of alcohol deaths than the US, France has around 41K/year and the US 95K/year, which is shocking given the 5x population difference. Even if we assume there are accounting differences, France has a way higher rate of abuse at the extreme end (and thus likely indicates a higher rate of abuse more broadly)

I think it is necessary to distinguish between generations, at least in Italy, but I’ve seen similar patterns in other countries I’ve lived.

My generation in Italy (millennials) tends to drink a lot more and with the precise purpose of getting drunk. The way they/we do it resembles much more the American way than the way our parents used to drink.

Of course, this is based on personal experience, but I’ve seen this pattern across different social classes and it seems to be mainly linked to age, more than education or economic condition.

One thing that comes to mind is the 21 year age restriction on the US, which seems to actually be enforced. Where I grew up in Europe there was an 18 year limit officially but not really, and you could get all the booze you wanted as an teenager. Cannabis too.

I went to an international school, so we'd get American kids coming in and realising that they could drink before graduating into a dry university. At least one of my friends got his stomach pumped after a massive binge.

I wonder whether the culture in the US encourages people to guzzle it all down at once to minimise the risk of getting caught.

I noticed something similar in the UK, where they do seem to somewhat enforce the drinking age of 18, and so when I got to uni here my new friends would act like they'd just discovered alcohol and get incredibly drunk.

Now it's not like kids in Europe never get drunk, but it's always available so not really seen as an alluring thing. On much of the continent it's also the kind of thing you might consume with your parents around, which is the ultimate excitement killer.

I do see Americans as having stunted growth regarding some vices

The night life hours being so few exacerbate that too

I for one drink two bottles of wine while playing some slowly paced video game every Sunday night in anticipation of great new week in my hellscape of a project.

Since the linked article mentions Glaser’s now-discredited 2015 article which falsely claims AA is not helpful: The latest science shows that Alcoholics Anonymous is a very helpful resource for many alcoholics, and that AA increases sobriety by 7% compared to other treatments.

Some references:

- https://www.thecut.com/2015/03/why-alcoholics-anonymous-work...

- https://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2020/03/11/medical-science...

- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7065341/

All three links don't seem to conclusively support your comment and AA continues to be controversial for many reasons (e.g. adopting "alcoholic" as your identity). Quoting link #2:

"Mostly it [the new review] looks like studies of either sending people to AA or frequent counseling, and that yields similar results to other kinds of alcohol use disorder psychotherapies. That's what their main finding is," Saitz said. "And I, unfortunately, I don't think that tells us so much about AA effectiveness."

As an aside the average AA member attends 2.5 meetings a week and membership is 89% white[1], I had no idea. Where do non-white people get help in America?

[1] https://www.aa.org/assets/en_US/p-48_membershipsurvey.pdf

Earlier in the article, it states that “The review found 42% of AA participants were completely abstinent one year later, compared with 35% of participants who underwent other treatments like CBT.”

Cochrane reviews are considered the gold standard for meta-reviews. If the data, which does show AA [1] helps some alcoholics become abstinent, wasn’t scientifically sound, it wouldn’t had become part of the review.

Saitz either thinks a 7% improvement is a “similar result”, or he wasn’t familiar with the study when interviewed.

Obviously, people are free to think the science doesn’t “conclusively support” a given theory. Using this line of thinking, some people think radiocarbon dating doesn’t “conclusively support” the idea of the earth being older than 6,000 years -- but that’s hardly an evidence-based scientific line of reasoning.

[1] Since it’s not practical to use randomization to compare AA per se to non-AA recovery because of “contaminated control” issues, modern studies compare twelve-step facilitation (TSF) treatment with non-TSF treatment.

Whenever I explain the "USA" to (Eastern) Europeans, I always simply state the notion: "diverse country of the extremes".

Yes, widespread obesity, but health obsessions also run deep in that country, gym memberships, elite universities with sports programs full of money. How many weird diet fads start basically in the US? Self-help books, alternative gurus, etc.

Bad education? Yes, pretty much. But also some of the best research institutions and universities in the world. Some companies with the highest R&D spending anywhere. Many of the foremost intellectuals end up living there once they enter the international stage.

Backwards, conservative, patriotic? Yes, but also extreme progressive bubbles and widespread leftist sentiments.

"American elitism"? Largely yes in many ways, but also very friendly, welcoming to strangers (even though they are just hyperbole with excitement in many contexts compared to us).

When I read the comment section here it seems like it fits my narrative. The US, country of the extremes. Drinkers, and puritans. Now fight! By the way: The article is so speculative, how can you discuss this in such earnestness? My problem with The Atlantic in general. Many articles are kind of "grand theories based on wild speculation, and creating a narrative out of that", which then has this "intellectual" appearance about it, but says very little. Not convincing at all.

The US is like a social experiment. Deal with your racism, alcohol, health, drug legalization, gender debates, sjw/pc culture, and all that, and please ship the solutions to us, not the movements and the fight (though sadly that doesn't always work out it seems). And before I get angry responses: It's written somewhat tongue in cheek, extend me the courtesy of not assuming the worst about my person.

Interesting conflation of "patriotic" and "conservative" with "backwards".

My comment is not about giving the most nuanced picture of the US, but about the caricatures that seem to exist within, sometimes in stark contrast to one another.

"USA USA USA" chants, american flag on the lawn, big pickup trucks, the possession of firearms, monster trucks, american football, people who attend WWE events, "Trump voters" and MAGA hats (let's throw it in there, because it's tied into that), there's a certain stereotype there, and it's not exactly tied to those people being the cultural or intellectual elite of the country.

I would say that "nationalist" is the more accurate term for this behavior. There's nothing patriotic about it.

"Conservative" and "backwards" are definitely the same thing though.

Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? Your account has done a lot of that and we're trying for a different sort of site.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. That would also include not calling names or being snarky in comments here.

Policymakers don't really have to deal with the realities of what you mention. Like the bad education, for instance. That isn't really "your problem". The externalities of an awful public education system are borne by the unfortunates. Not you, who did things right, and not the people like you, who it is important you identify with. And so you're not going to give that issue anything more than lip service.

^ also written somewhat tongue in cheek

The fundamental moral basis of the US is that some people are born better than others.

If you have money, you're one of the chosen ones. The more money the better, without end. The losers who don't have money are not your problem. If they were as superior as you are they'd sort themselves out and have money too. But they don't, and of course that just proves how inferior they are.

It's absolutely an 18th century aristocracy with Internet.

If it were the case, we would not have had 1st post illegal immigrant generation do better than those whose parents were born in the United States.

This simply doesn't match the facts. For example, the United States ranks near the top of the World Giving Index, which certainly wouldn't happen if "the losers who don't have money are not your problem". Importantly, this is a man-on-the-street level index, not a government spending index, meaning it more or less assesses the charitable attitudes of the people in various countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Giving_Index

Other countries have more functional social safety networks, so lesser emphasis is put on individual charity to compensate for environmental failings. To give you an anecdotal example, where I’m from American way of going about charity is often perceived as a form of virtue signalling/paying off your sins.

It does match the facts. It is not uncommon for Americans to need GoFundMes for major medical procedures.

> health obsessions also run deep in that country, gym memberships, elite universities with sports programs full of money

Doing elite sport in those competitive teams is not all that much healthy. It is tangential to your main point, but top level leagues are not in opposition to un-health. The healthy thing is moderate amount of sport, where you get yourself to improve performance, but don't push yourself to limit. Cheap casual sport that dont require gym membership but provides some social outlet would be better for average person health.

> How many weird diet fads start basically in the US? Self-help books, alternative gurus, etc.

None of that is healthy and a lot of that contributes to obesity issue. Fad diets lead to yoyo-ing and to weight gain in the long term. It also causes proper health issues on its own.

Neither of the things you've listed sounds like diversity, it sounds like inequality. Why is half the country without proper education while the other ones are in the best research institutions in the world? And what does the people are those institutions spend their time on, if it's not helping the other half reaching the same position as themselves?

The social experiment seems to be about how extreme you can really make inequality before people starts to riot. Wages are so low in some places that people simply walk out of their work because they can't survive on it, while it's so high in other places that you barely have to do anything and still pull in enough to put you in the 1% of the world population when it comes to income.

Inequality does create diversity as it gives people a vastly different life experiences.

While that is technically true, it doesn't create the type of diversity you can really tap into since some folks are too poor to realistically participate in society, and a lot of society is too segregated for different viewpoints to be in the same place.

Just wow... I guess you would have different sentiment if you would be on the poor side of the inequality scale. Sentiment about poverty being good because it gives 'vastly different life experiences'?

One of the things we can be actually proud here in Europe (mainly western part though), a rather strong middle class and tons of help to the poor (maybe too much according to some).

I know its nice to find cheap poor folks desperate to work for peanuts, and you can pat yourself in the back how the environment gives everybody a chance to thrive, but that's not an American reality, just a self-perpetuating pipe dream.

US is great for the ultra-rich, good for the rich, not-so-good for middle class and outright shit for the poor. But good luck trying to get this accepted in the US where folks are spoon-fed from the childhood how US is best in everything, rather than some healthy amount of critical thinking.

Generally everybody, but in my humble experience Americans (and French) especially, profit greatly when (have been) living abroad for some time. Then we can have actual conversations what is great here and there and what outright sucks.

People love to make excuses for shitty behavior, such as calling the US an experiment

The claim that the US is an experiment has a long precedent.

>No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues to truth.

-Thomas Jefferson, 1804

Jefferson really did write beautifully. I’m not a US citizen, but I do find his writing to be very uplifting and inspiring.

Okay so someone said it in a time when the "experiment" was slavery. I'm not sure what your point is.

While your response is entirely predictable, it’s obvious why such a reaction misses the point because the scope is much wider than one issue.

Yes, it was said during a time when slavery was the norm. But the “experiment” also included allowing systems that challenged that notion rather than maintaining the status quo. That’s the point.

I don't think this really addresses the core issue, being that experimentation is used as an excuse to not apply the results of the experiments after they've been performed.

I don't think the idea is that experimentation is de facto bad. It's the use of experimentation as a tool to avoid implementation following experimentation that's being decried.

I think you are correct, but also think that’s why Jefferson deliberately rooted the virtue of experimentation in our ability to use reason to interpret the results.

If someone is acting in bad faith, the fault is not in the experimental process but rather their faculty in interpreting the results. We wouldn’t throw out experimentation in science just because a researcher was biased in their result. The OP seems to be throwing out the baby with the bath water.

You are correct, however my point was that when we see bad faith acting people will continue to use the same descriptive language of it being an "experiment" when there are active, known harms

Too right. What’s the alternative? Living in a stagnant dictatorship governed by caprice and bllsht? Making sure your citizens remain ignorant and downtrodden? Jefferson is undeniably problematic by our standards and judged by the standards of his time, but he had a way with words (and was pretty handy at some other stuff too!). He tried to do some good in the world from his position of privilege, through the lens of the world as he saw it… There are many ideas and actions of his that I disagree strongly with, but I can allow that he got some stuff very right and expressed his thoughts and ideas extremely eloquently.

I don’t think the grandparent comment mean that this type of diversity is good, per se. I read it more as semantic pedantry.

I think you are just repeating things you have read about.

People walking out of their jobs because wages are so low is obvious bullshit.

The people I know in this situation are the hardest working people I have ever met and it is insulting to them to say such things.

I have no idea about your walk of life, but people leaving low paying jobs doesn’t feel irrational or lazy, or bullshitty in general. Why shouldn’t they ?

"Walking out" of a job implies leaving the employer without warning in the middle of a workday, something many people in the US pride themselves on not doing (despite largely having the legal right to do so).

It's related to strong senses of personal responsibility and pride in reliability and dependability, in my experience.

Let’s not split hairs about the manner in which some folks leave their jobs. “Walking out” can imply leaving without warning, or might better represent the worker’s state of mind when they make the decision to give notice.

The underlying problem is that wages are so low in some places that it’s not possible to survive without:

- multiple incomes in the household

- multiple jobs

- going into debt

- living in a dangerous place

Etc.

These conditions leave the person without much choice but to leave.

Anecdotally, I remember multiple instances of coworkers walking out in the middle of a shift when I worked as a cook in a chain restaurant due to the combination of high stress (including abuse from customers and management) and low wages.

I wasn't at all trying to say this doesn't happen.

I was trying to explain some of the common attitudes that might be related to the OP's response.

The reason it sounds bulshitty is that in order to leave a low paying job in which you are truly on the cusp you have to have another job lined up. There isn't a lot of savings to manage time to find another job if you just get up and go. If they didn't have another job lined up chances are they wouldn't walk out on the job. Not agreeing or disagreeing just adding some perspective on why it sounds a bit odd of a statement.

Leaving one job for a better one doesn't make you less hard working.

No one has ever quit a job because they can’t survive on it. If you’re really working paycheck to paycheck and barely scraping by, you don’t have the luxury of quitting. You would be homeless very quickly.

It's a little more nuanced than that. Crappy "barely survive" paying jobs tend to have high turnover and that's a two way street. You lose your job being janitor at the airport for pissing hot and you might not even lose a day's wage because you could be sweeping floors at the hospital that night if you play your cards right. Jiffy Lube gives you crap jobs for the 3rd straight week and you're rolling your toolbox into Midas the next Monday maybe without a single working hour lost if the new employer sends someone to help you get your stuff and get set up. Unskilled and barely skilled onboarding is nowhere near as drawn out and cumbersome as the white collar onboarding most of HN takes for granted.

I did stuff like that a few times back in the day (this century) when I was working those kinds of jobs.

That’s hilarious that people are downvoting this. I imagine they don’t even know that daywork is a thing or that getting paid by the hour isn’t just a metric used for billing different clients.

Because the lag from starting new positions to getting paid is, for people without savings, extremely problematic, and the assumption you can obtain unskilled or low skilled employment rapidly is fairly optimistic in general, ignores potential travel issues, and is pretty city centric and much less plausible in rural areas.

Yeah the lag is tough but going without or being late on payments is part of life when you’re on minimum wage. It sucks, I’ve been there. It’s probably a lot worse if you have a family or live far out of town but that doesn’t mean people don’t quit shitty jobs. I’m not saying people don’t stay in shitty jobs either, they do, it just all depends on the person and the situation but most people I’ve known have walked out of jobs that were unbearable at one point or another.

https://www.businessinsider.com/dollar-general-employees-eli...

Freedom creates inequality. The freedom to excel comes with the freedom to do poorly at the game. Why should everyone be in the same position? They didn't put in the same effort.

We do give away a lot of welfare to people who are doing poorly. It might be more effective to stop giving people money and use it instead to create programs to provide better jobs and skill training.

> It might be more effective to stop giving people money and use it instead to create programs to provide better jobs and skill training.

That's a false dichotomy. There's no actual lever for "provide better jobs and skill training."

In reality, it's either more money directed at the poors, or more directed towards the rich. And that's how people vote.

"Better jobs and skill training" means "give it to the rich so they can make the poors think they're doing something for them."

Maybe this is true but I hope not. I'm specifically thinking of trade schools etc where people can prepare for a career without the frills and cost of university.

Honestly maybe a marketing campaign would be effective in letting people know that blue color work is honorable and needed and they can be productive and get a job that will support them and their family without having to go to Yale. I really like what Mike Rowe has to say about this issue.

> blue color work is honorable and needed and they can be productive and get a job that will support them and their family

Honorable? Maybe.

Able to support a family? Not without a secondary income from a spouse. And who's looking after the kids at that point? I hope you also have extended family that are willing and able to help, otherwise that's not much of a family.

> > blue color work is honorable and needed and they can be productive and get a job that will support them and their family

> Able to support a family? Not without a secondary income from a spouse.

now i suspect that you simply don't know anyone who does blue collar work.

can all blue collar work support a family easily? no, but neither can all white collar work.

> now i suspect that you simply don't know anyone who does blue collar work.

Incorrect.

HVAC, plumbing, elevator repair, landscaping, painting... These are all careers in my family. My dad was the only white collar of four brothers. Grandpa was AC/Refrigerator repairman.

>>Why should everyone be in the same position? They didn't put in the same effort.

For a simple reason - because we know, empirically, through decades of studies(some of which were done by the very US of A!), that it produces better results for the entire society. I've learnt long ago that it doesn't matter how I feel about benefits system personally - yeah I hate that some people get money for doing nothing. But it's literally irrelevant - we know through hard data that it works and produces good results. So the whole question of "how much effort has someone put in" is amusing to debate online, but it should be worth exactly zero when deciding policy.

>>The freedom to excel comes with the freedom to do poorly at the game.

Is it freedom though? How many of Americans can't get into these best education programs because they can't afford it? Yes, I am aware that there are grants and funds available if you really are poor - but you still have to apply. What if the chances were really equal - all higher education completely free to attend like it is in some other countries? Both the best university in the country and the worst both have the exact same cost of admission = zero. Isn't that what freedom is?

> For a simple reason - because we know, empirically, through decades of studies(some of which were done by the very US of A!), that it produces better results for the entire society

Is that why America's per capita GDP is higher than that of the EU? Why the US, not the EU, is the world's center of innovation and the strongest magnet for talent?

I don't think that trying to make everyone the same is good for society or conducive to high levels of human accomplishment. Striving for excellence will inevitably produce winners and losers, but if you don't do it, you just end up with mediocrity stew. I'm not going to cut off the right side of the distribution of human accomplishment on the say-so of people who have some weird ideological commitment to human sameness.

>>Is that why America's per capita GDP is higher than that of the EU?

No, but it's exactly why US is far behind EU in healthcare, education, equality, social mobility and a number of other social metrics that matter to you know - normal people on the street, not traders on wall street. GDP doesn't tell the whole story.

>>Why the US, not the EU, is the world's center of innovation and the strongest magnet for talent

Because US is home to companies that pay ridiculous salaries which make it worth moving to the US for, despite all the other downsides. You're going to get just as good education at many world class universities around the world, but if your goal is extreme salary then US education system gives you a leg up at the start - that's why. Not because there's anything unique or super special about US.

>>I don't think that trying to make everyone the same is good for society or conducive to high levels of human accomplishment.

That's absolutely not the idea, I think you misunderstood me. The point is to give everyone the same chances. In many other countries it doesn't matter if you're from a rich family or a poor one - it doesn't give you any extra leverage when applying to universities. There is no educational debt to deal with. A medical condition will not put you in any debt whatsoever.

Look at it as a gift to the society, to every child and every adult in the country - if they do nothing with it, that is their choice. But if they take these opportunities they can achieve incredible things, exactly that pinnacle of human accomplishment that you're talking about. That's freedom, not the American freedom that's tied to worship of money.

In America, everyone has the same chance already, at least to a close approximation. It's just not logically valid to look at unequal outcomes and conclude that not everyone had the same chance, but that's what half this thread is doing. Whatever the US is doing, it works for producing prosperity and innovation. Whatever the EU is doing doesn't work to produce that. Sure, people there are comfortable, but should comfort alone be the goal of human society? I don't think so.

>> Whatever the US is doing, it works for producing prosperity and innovation.

For some, at the expense of others.

That is simply not true. One person's success does not take away opportunity from others.

No one is attacking personal success here - it's important and should be celebrated. But the opportunities in the US are absolutely not equal, far from it.

Any person in the US can improve their lot in life. Nobody said it is easy. Success is hard work with a measure of luck. But, it is absolutely possible to go from living on the streets to living in a mansion in a lifetime. How is that not equal opportunity?

I cannot stop myself but flip this around - how can you possibly call this an equal opportunity?

It's like having a race where some people start 100m behind others and saying "well if they try hard enough, they can still win! The race itself is fair after all!"

>>Success is hard work with a measure of luck.

Of course ,but the American system is 1) ignoring that some people started at a much worse position in life and expecting them to "just work harder" 2) assuming that any problem you might encounter in your life is of your own doing, after all if you get into an accident and end up in lifetime medical debt.....well you shouldn't have gotten into an accident, right? Or again - just work hard to pay it back and you're fine?

After all it is possible. Yes, and winning lottery is technically possible but I don't think buying Lotto tickets is a valid way of living your life either.

Yes, everybody has a different starting point. That is life. Some families have the benefit of their ancestors working their asses off to pass something on to their heirs. That doesn't mean you cry foul and try to destroy the track or rig the race in your favor. You do the same as those people's ancestors. You work your ass off to pass something on to your heirs.

Everybody can do this. That is equal opportunity.

There is no promise in the rights granted to you that you will have 18 houses, a private jet, a yacht, and maybe an island or two. You are promised the ability to do as you wish to try to achieve your goals in life.

Yes, we should fix economic issues so people do not get destroyed by an accident. That is a separate issue and has no bearing on equality of opportunity.

It strikes me as similar to the approach displayed by American conservatives - the belief that there is a natural order to the society, and that's just how life is. Some people inherit insane amount of wealth, and that's fine, their ancestors worked really hard so they clearly deserve it. Poor people are poor because they don't work hard enough, or simply because they don't deserve anything else.

But hey. As long as we tell each other that with enough willpower they could just work extra hard and achieve all of those things that some other people get for free? It's all good.

And I'm not even against personal wealth. I'm not even against inheritance. I'm advocating for making sure everyone has equal opportunity through education, through safety in healthcare, through social policies that don't put you in crippling poverty if you fall on bad times. I don't believe in this whole "just work harder" adage, because I know sometimes working hard is not enough, especially not when facing institutionalised discrimination and lack of opportunities through no fault of your own.

>>Yes, we should fix economic issues so people do not get destroyed by an accident. That is a separate issue and has no bearing on equality of opportunity.

That's a social policy, not economic issue. And of course it affects your opportunities, if you get into medical debt due to an accident you don't have a whole bunch of opportunities that people without debt have, at no fault of your own. That is not a problem of economics to fix, it's a problem of the society to decide that maybe medical debt just shouldn't be a thing at all, which will put all citizens on an equal footing straight away. Or we can pretend everyone is 100% responsible for what happens to them and carry on as normal.

It is not a belief that there is a natural order in society. It is a belief that even if you are starting at 0 you can still reap the rewards of your own hard work. Starting from 0 does mean you are less likely to end up a billionaire. But, you can build your personal wealth and pass it on to make your "familial starting point" higher the next generation.

You are arguing that all these things are in the way of equal opportunity. I am arguing that they are issues on their own. Equal opportunity already exists.

High medical cost is an economic issue that is exacerbated by social policy. Insurance requirements and hidden medical care price both played into climbing medical care cost. Insurance companies and medical providers do not care about the high cost as both benefit from higher cost. There is no market feedback from the actual receivers of services.

> In America, everyone has the same chance already, at least to a close approximation.

Really? When your mother has to hold down two jobs to pay the rent and put food on the table? Or when your mother doesn't need to work because she inherited millions from her parents? Which mother will have a child who goes on to a good university?

The income share of the poorest ten percent of the population is 1.8% in the US, in Norway it is almost 3.5%. In Norway university education is also free. In which one do you think a child from a low income household would have the best chance of having a better income than their parents?

See https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$model$markers$bubble$encod...

Some people do badly in life. That's not an indictment of the system!

They specifically gave an example of someone being born in a family where the parent has to work 2 jobs to make ends meet. How is that "doing badly in life"??? I swear we're like 2 comments away from someone seriously saying "just get richer parents, duh".

And yes, not making sure that everyone has equal opportunities(not equal outcomes!!!!) is a failing of the system.

I was pretty poor. My mom worked part-time and call centers and did medical studies to earn extra money while my dad worked full-time. I made some bad choices, but then got a 2-year degree at a community college and yes, I did use some grants which I'm very thankful for.

Not to be pedantic but there's really no such thing as free is there? Someone is paying for that college. Personally I don't want to subsidize these quote unquote elite universities but if people choose to use their money to go there that's great.

To your final point, no that is emphatically not what freedom is. I once heard that freedom is the ability to choose wrongly but at the core it's really freedom to choose. If everything is the same then there's really no choice.

>>Not to be pedantic but there's really no such thing as free is there? Someone is paying for that college.

That is pedantic - literally no one with an ounce of intelligence would think that money for those services comes from the moon. Of course it comes from out taxes. I'm happy to pay my taxes to make sure everyone has the same opportunities.

>>Personally I don't want to subsidize these quote unquote elite universities but if people choose to use their money to go there that's great.

That's an incredibly individualistic approach that I don't agree with.

>>I once heard that freedom is the ability to choose wrongly but at the core it's really freedom to choose. If everything is the same then there's really no choice.

But that's exactly what other countries do! I said this in another comment - want to be a doctor? Go ahead, no debt. Want to be a lawyer? No debt. But also want to be a map historian? No debt. Art PhD? No debt. Marketing and Business studies? No debt.

That's exactly what freedom is. You are free to chose what you want to learn. If you choose poorly and there is no job waiting for you on the other end, well you just wasted 3 years of your life. But we as a society made it possible for you to take that leap and have a choice.

How is that "everything is the same"???

How about free online programs like Stanford and MIT Open courseware? Or public libraries? The education is waiting there to be had even without a college tuition or degree.

What about them?

I'm not denying there is free education out there. My point is in other countries you have freedom to chose and don't incur debt for your choices. Want to be an IT professional with a 4 year collage degree? No debt. Want to be a doctor with 8 years of education? No debt. Want to be a stylist? No debt. Study ancient history? No debt.

Yes, there is free education available in the US - but it's what other people have decided is "worth it", not what you want. That's where I see freedom.

You have to pass difficult standardized tests to qualify for these spots though. It's not like 50,000 people can just decide they want to be doctors. It depends on ability as measured by testing ability which generally still relates to economic ability in aggregate.

> Freedom creates inequality. The freedom to excel comes with the freedom to do poorly at the game. Why should everyone be in the same position? They didn't put in the same effort.

I really dont think the difference is just in "effort". If I inherit money I did not put in effort, but I am getting super ahead. The luck plays role too. Plus, how much additional advantage I can get from being already little bit ahead is what creates a lot of inequality.

America is not known for a lot of welfare either. It is not country where it is comfortable or easy to be poor.

Not sure if you grew up in the US, but a lot of people in the US make a conscious decision it's not worth it to work hard earlier in life to have a better outcome later in life.

I grew up in Massachusetts, one of the most educated states, but I grew up around a lot of the kids in my town and surrounding towns who were "on the wrong side of the tracks" and I had many conversations with peers around middle school where they clearly indicated they had already decided it was not going to be worth it to work hard in high school and that there was little point in going to college. All of that was too much hard work and there was little point of it for them, their perception was that it was just too much easier to just go towards menial and low paying jobs just because it was easier today. Working hard in high school would just be too much of a detriment to enjoying a carefree teenage experience.

Now is that the fault of early education and/or parents for not making them understand the value of work today for a better outcome down the road? Who knows. But this is a prevalent mindset for a lot of people who grow up in the US.

This was such a pervasive thing my parents had to intervene and send me to a Catholic school. That mindset was completely absent at that school and it snapped me out of things just about instantaneously because the mindset there was 100% that hard work now is worth it.

To put it in context of the article a lot of that carefree teenage experience would have been going to parties and getting drunk.

> We do give away a lot of welfare to people who are doing poorly. It might be more effective to stop giving people money and use it instead to create programs to provide better jobs and skill training.

Giving people money gives them better jobs by increasing their negotiating power. Also, it lets them be your customer, which is important if you want to sell things to them!

"Skill training" doesn't work, it was bad economics from the people who mismanaged the 2010 recession recovery. They just claimed people "didn't have skills" as the reason we didn't recover fast enough and unemployment was too high.

Why do you suppose that under conditions of perfect fairness we would see perfect equality? That's just not the case. Human talent is not sprinkled in the proportion in each person. You can achieve equality only through Harrison Bergeron measures. I'd rather have freedom.

You are more right about your former point then you realize. Even in a perfectly fair economy where all the players are equally skilled, statistically the wealth will gather in fewer and fewer hands after each fair and equal transaction.

I disagree with your conclusion though “choose freedom”. In an unequal society, those that have will have control over those that have not. Meaning the freedom you speak of is only available to those that are lucky in their earlier transaction (or more realistically those that inherit the most).

>Why do you suppose that under conditions of perfect fairness we would see perfect equality? That's just not the case. Human talent is not sprinkled in the proportion in each person. You can achieve equality only through Harrison Bergeron measures. I'd rather have freedom.

The assumption here that perfect fairness is a perfect information meritocracy is an intellectual leap, and even if true belies the fact that what constitutes merit is defined by those who have power.

Is this perfect fairness outcome or opportunity based? Is the equality measured purely in terms of economic outcome or in terms of individual value maximization?

There's too much swept under the rug to generalize a model about the direction of society.

If you want inequality to be based on talent, you need "Harrison Bergeron" levels of redistribution, since you can't have generational wealth.

> And what does the people are those institutions spend their time on, if it's not helping the other half reaching the same position as themselves?

Elite universities are supposed to advance elite science - stuff like math, physics, technology, sociology, history. They also train people for work that requires such training.

But, they dont create public education policy nor should they. They are not subject of public elections nor are they responsible for budget.

FWIW, I disagree with this in principle.

I think institutions of higher ed should serve humanity; knowledge is beneficial to all people for the sake of knowledge itself.

I am saddened that many take their intellect and direct their energy solely towards making as much money as possible.

Think of all we could do if our best and brightest weren't so damn distracted with status and money

> Think of all we could do if our best and brightest weren't so damn distracted with status and money

Working at university does not bring you much money nor all that much status. And who is the best depends on your definition of the "best".

In any case "serving humanity" and "being in charge of public education, social system and economy" are massively different tasks. And the latter is currently settled through political system and activism, not through science or universities.

> Why is half the country without proper education

Some of it is inequality, but some of it is willful diversity. There is a strong undercurrent that education is bad - a counterculture of ignorance. It is something that bewilders me, and that has only become clear to me in the past 5 years or so. It isn't that some people lack access to education that they want, but rather do not want access to that education because they believe that if you can figure things out without relying on the knowledge humanity has built up over the years. I see it in my own father, who one day told me, "I've been thinking about climate change recently, and I just don't think it's a problem." He didn't research on it, he didn't read on it, he didn't perform experimentations, he just thought about it and came to his ironclad conclusion.

Likewise I see it in plenty of people, even people that are friends that I consider intelligent. They do not understand something, want to understand it, yet will do nothing to actually understand it. I had a friend that didn't understand an aspect of general relativity (he loves physics), which is totally understandable, it is complex stuff. He complained and argued with me about it for years. Finally I literally did a 1 minute search on youtube, found the first video on that specific topic and made him watch it. Then he finally got it.

Ok, I'm on a weird tangent ;) Back to the topic.

These people want to know and yet, for some reason, don't find the motivation to learn using the vast ocean of resources we have now. With the subculture of people in the US that think learning is offensive, an insult to their intellect, an assault on their freedom and independence, you have a problem of a whole other category.

I don't know how prevalent it is in other countries, but I think it occurs in the US because of this new "independent thinker" attitude that is a warped version of the skeptic. They take great pride in believing something other than what they are told.

As a skeptic and someone that likes to work things out for myself and who generally likes to examine the nuance of situations, I find this greatly frustrating.

> Some of it is inequality, but some of it is willful diversity. There is a strong undercurrent that education is bad - a counterculture of ignorance.

This is, of course, self-fulfilling. In a society where education is poor, people will extrapolate from their own experience to conclude that all education is equally poor.

Source: grew up in the rural South, attending public school, surrounded by people who (correctly) viewed their education as nearly useless.

I think you have the symptoms right but I disagree with your premise:

> These people want to know and yet, for some reason, don't find the motivation to learn using the vast ocean of resources we have now. With the subculture of people in the US that think learning is offensive, an insult to their intellect, an assault on their freedom and independence, you have a problem of a whole other category.

While this may come off as a bit pedantic I think it's important to recognize that no one actually thinks "learning things" is offensive or insulting. While it's convenient to package the behaviors of people you don't understand into a single box I think it spawns an unproductive and even unhealthy attitude towards others.

Rather than packing it all into one root issue, I think it's better to try and match the set of symptoms with a set of (possible) causes. Here is my own personal take on the situation:

|== American Culture Has Failed To Adapt To The Internet's Style Of Trust & Reputation

1. Before television a person's world was often restricted to those in their local community, this meant that reputation was everything and as a consequence, people tended to be naturally very trusting, naive even (since betraying someones trust would hurt your local reputation). If your town's doctor or priest told you something, you would believe them.

2. After television become a household staple in the 50s, this perspective changed a bit. Sure you could always /read/ about people outside of town, or even listen to them on the radio, but with TV they were practically right there in front of you. As a consequence this culture of trusting people within the community naturally extended towards those on TV as well. In fact people started to trust people on TV even more than the people within their local community! If the TV said it it must be true! (it often wasn't but then again, how would they know?)

3. Then the internet happened. It was slow, it took a lot of time to saturate into the lives of most people, but I'd say around 2010, the vast majority of people considered it more reliable than TV. It had now taken the throne of truth from TV and as a consequence: three generations of people who were conditioned to believe EVERYTHING they heard on TV without questioning things suddenly got exposed to a platform that was completely unmoderated and without consensus.

4. It used to be that people would just pick favored news channel and believe everything it told them. They thought that being a "skeptic" was doubting the handful of news channels that other people watched, but obviously /their/ news channel got everything right. These beliefs carried over to the internet, especially in the older generations (but not exclusively by any means). To them the only thing that changed is instead of there being 100 or 1000 channels, there are now infinite. But unfortunately they often fail to realize that their culture of trust is incompatible with a platform where that "local" reputation is near meaningless.

|== The Incompetence Of Mainstream Authorities, After Generations Of Public Trust, Has Lost It's Footing

* It's becoming increasingly obvious how incompetent and outright deceitful some of the most trusted news organizations have become without shame. They have of course almost always been this way but atleast local newspapers at a certain degree of accountability. By over optimizing for the web's engagement driven monetization strategies, news orgs drunk on the trust television provided them, have stopped doing their due diligence and pretty much everyone can see this now thanks to (ironically) the web.

* Coastal Elites over-estimating their intelligence and under-estimating the rest keep getting caught trying to play mind games with the public. This applies to many domains but the best example, while repeated ad nauseam at this point, would be health officials saying masks weren't effective against the virus at first so they could avoid a shortage. This created a very large gaping wound in public trust that will take a very long time to heal. While maybe in the days of television this would have been swept under the rug before long, that's not how things work anymore.

* Recent years have simply had too many cases where the mainstream opinion, paraded as absolute, turned out to be naked from the start. Trump was elected (2016), Brexit happened, and the Corona Virus is not just the flu (the was a conspiracy theory back in January 2020). Honestly even a bunch of little things on the side like CNBC saying the hedgefunds closed their position on those GME shorts have also added to this.

|= People Don't Actually Know How To Do Research

* Regardless of generation or exposure to television, people at large straight up do not even know how to do the most basic of research. A shocking amount of people think typing something into google and looking at the first result is something to be proud of. It's not as you suggest where they are proud not to go any deeper, its that the dunning kruger effect has caused many of the populace to believe that there isn't anything deeper to be looked at.

* People fail to understand the value primary sources. Even most programmers which one might assume trend a bit higher on the bell curve, fail to even look at the original documentation or specification for things that they are trying to learn about. When trying to learn about HTTP for example, rather than just looking at Wikipedia to find the RFC numbers and reading the RFCs themselves. They will instead opt to only look at the summary Wikipedia provides, or worse, rely on a bunch of SEO "optimized" tutorial sites that often get things wrong.

> There is a strong undercurrent that education is bad - a counterculture of ignorance.

My experience has been with people who don't think that education is bad, but modern universities. I know many people who are smart, self-driven, industrious people who like learning things - who aren't interested in going to a public university. (they're more than happy to avail themselves of YouTube videos, Coursera courses, GitHub projects, work on things with friends, and so on)

Given the state of modern universities, with so many of them pushing the murderous ideology that is neo-Marxism, I can't blame them. A few more generations of this and we'll have our own Cultural Revolution, except with even more than the tens of millions of deaths that China did with theirs.

>The social experiment seems to be about how extreme you can really make inequality before people starts to riot.

Well, the answer to that is obvious: people have long since started to riot, just about almost anything except economic inequality and exploitation.

Divide and conquer.

That's because most people don't really care about those things. If you're poor and all your friends are poor you don't have greater expectations, nor is it really a problem since you can organize your society around it.

What starts revolutions is disappointed elites - like if you promise your children good jobs and then they don't get them. Another kind is "revolution of rising expectations" where they do start getting good jobs and it causes them to expect even better ones faster than they get them.

I think you'll find that all the people we see rioting (whatever side they're on) would cite economic inequality and exploitation as a source of their problem; their differences of opinion (and focuses) might be over who is getting exploited and by whom.

I think the media coverage has twisted your view of the US. As someone who immigrated to the US, if you travel the country it seems like any other country. Rich people and poor people. Left wing and right wing. Religious and the atheists.

I mean Americans could list a similar number of stereotypes about the British (for example), but if you’ve ever visited there you’d realize they’re not that different than anyone else.

What are the British stereotypes?

The only one I can think of is from watching BBC produced television series. It seems like the British response to any trouble, minor or large, is to put the kettle on.

Even as an American I know there are massive British stereotypes by class. For example, football hooligans with cockney accents.

People in the US often want things both ways too.

People want giant alcohol super markets with every type, size and price point of alcohol imaginable and then people want to bitch that other people have drinking problems to make a point about their a priori political beliefs.

Very American.

When I was in Japan, I met a guy who was a manager of a Japanese supermarket branch in Hawai’i for some time.

He said in Japan, people are usually about the same. But in America, people are either really smart or really stupid.

It's hard to generalize correctly about a population of three hundred million.

That's especially true when doing it based on personal experience.

Hawaii is a place where that might be fairly said, though. Setting aside island natives, Hawaii attracts a lot of people. The reasons for wanting to visit and preceding life situations vary quite a bit. The result is you do meet a lot of characters, at least on the big island.

I bet Hawaiians working in tourism meet a lot more people than I do. Maybe as many as two hundred a day (granted, only for a few minutes at those volumes).

If you manage to do that five days a week for thirty years, you meet 1.4 million people, or 0.4% of the US population.

Obviously in most cases you'd have no idea about how smart most of these people are. You'd probably remember the ones who did especially dumb or especially smart things in the three minutes you interacted with them, which doesn't actually tell you much about how smart they are. It's even worse for that than a puzzle-trivia interview.

I think my point stands, even for a Hawaiian in tourism.

I don’t suppose there is any scenario in which you would give human observation credit. Regarding sufficient sample size, a person in that scenario would achieve it in weeks, or perhaps a year, assuming variance in types of visitors over the seasons.

There are tons of scenarios in which I think human observations are all that matters.

I think trying to generalize about populations on this scale from personal interactions is worse than pointless.

I have plenty of value for a reduced statement, one that acknowledges explicitly that the speaker can only legitimately talk about his experiences, not the US or Japanese populations as a whole.

I don't think the difference between a country of 125 million and 300 million is very meaningful in that regard.

I don't think it's easy to generalize about Japan's population either.

Interesting comment. I'll say it another way: in America, people either agree or disagree with you. That's not my personal viewpoint but one that doesn't seem inconceivable to an outsider.

I think a lot of this is just because the USA is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to the USA:)

Plus, this is a country made up of a little piece of every other country in the world. "American identity" is an ex post facto rationalization. Not to mention that politically we often operate like 50 small-to-medium sized countries. And there's less of a push to homogenize the country since one of our political parties fights against federalization.

All that adds up to a country with a whole lot of variation. Describing what Americans are like is pretty useless. We're like everything.

Russia is bigger in terms of area, just two times smaller in terms of population, but 10 times more uniform, at least. You wouldn't be able to tell apart two typical provincial Russian towns from the opposite sides of the country.

So, no, just the size itself doesn't seem like a complete explanation for this.

While size isn't a complete explanation, its important to consider the population distribution as well. Russia may be geographically larger but the population is much more concentrated than it is in the US.

U.S. divisions at this point run largely rural versus urban. Russia has the same thing - folks in Moscow live completely different lives than those in a backwoods provincial town.

If anything, Russia and the U.S. are pretty similar in terms of regional and cultural tensions.

> folks in Moscow live completely different lives than those in a backwoods provincial town

Not really. I live in Moscow, and financially I have a very different life from someone in a small town. But in terms of the culture and people around, the difference is not that big.

Here's a random youtube vlog about a small russian town: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOwW5wdIt_w It's on the opposite edge of the country, and yet, I would only be able to tell it apart from Moscow's residential neighbourhoods by how tall the buildings, built from the same panels, in the same design series, are.

>U.S. divisions at this point run largely rural versus urban.

I think you're trying to point out actual points of cultural tension, which I'd argue are largely superficial and mostly political. But I think OP was trying to say that the US is culturally diverse based on geography. And I think OP is right, the culture of Atlanta is very different than the culture of NYC which is very different than the culture of San Francisco or LA.

Similarly the culture of Montana or Wyoming is very different than the culture of the rural south.

I grew up in what most people would consider the rural south (a small town in Kentucky), and even the difference between various regions in the south are pretty stark... Just take for example this article; Kentucky, know for their bourbon, and I grew up in a dry county (couldn't sell alcohol at all). Prohibition laws stuck around decades after federal prohibition ended for largely religious reasons.

The vast majority of Russia is taiga and tundra, no? Like Canada, the land is vast but the population clusters heavily to one side. https://i.redd.it/v9rdedhje4i31.png

Whereas the U.S. has two heavily populated coasts and much of its land is arable, at temperate latitudes (at least with irrigation—setting aside water issues).

The gulf coast may have a higher population than the west coast depending where the line is. So three heavily populated coasts. Supposedly something like 2/3 of the population lives in the 100 mile border zone.

This is both true and not.

Yes, overall diversity is smaller, it's all white and mostly Russian population, skewed to West, but also some very different minorities (and climate). Russian North and Caucasus are very different.

And two typical provincial towns in Russia can have more difference than two typical provincial towns in US. Both in population, demography, education, urbanization level.

I used to think mind-boggling big was a bunch of hyperbole until I drove from Georgia to Washington State. I’ve flown across the US a few times and it seemed big but not mind-boggling big. I can’t imagine how much bigger the US would be on horseback or on foot, and I’m ok with that.

"'grand theories based on wild speculation, and creating a narrative out of that', which then has this 'intellectual' appearance about it, but says very little."

Sounds like a lot of HN, TBH.

I would say it sounds a lot like social studies. But with those there is at least some scientific rigor (I hope).

Journalists often just spin speculation based on carefully selected theories into a narrative, put it into long form, sprinkle it with some writing skills, and sell it as profound. And 'The Atlantic' is especially guilty of that (according to my experience). And they're guilty of it with this one once more (imo).

The Atlantic: Pseudo-profound nonsense targeted at elites.

> please ship the solutions to us, not the movements and the fight

I'm glad this isn't completely tongue in cheek, because I consider this a huge compliment.

I'm extremely critical of the USA, where I do live. The name of the game for the last ~100 years has been to allow wild cultural experimentation so long as cash is always king and big business gets bigger. Both aspects have had worldwide repercussions and especially given US foreign policy everyone is allowed a seat at the table to love+hate the US.

The US is a social experiment and it's had some incredible fruit. It just feels so precarious with such incredible social and economic divisions.

Having lived in the UK and the US, I firmly disagree. I had never seen drinking at the extreme levels until I went to the UK.

I seriously doubt the entire articles premise that somehow alcohol binging is unique to the US. There are a lot of counties with a lot of forms of alcohol out there…

It's not unique to the US, but the US shares a culture with the UK in this regard. It's not similar to other countries I've been to (or lived in). In Greece, for example, it's not uncommon to see teenagers being served/sold alcohol, just because it's not a big deal. People go out, they have a drink or two, and they go home.

In the US and the UK, if you aren't drunk when you get home, it wasn't a good night. Nobody here "pregames", simply because getting drunk is mostly something to be avoided.

The UK is an outlier in western europe (I think this is your point), but having lived in both countries, they definitely binge drink more than Americans.

Agreed on both points.

The happy hour culture and early closing time force binge drinking.

Yeah, I've lived in both countries and UK is worse for sure.

Don't really get pubs outside the UK. A pub is basically a place where you can sit and enjoy yourself and chat with mates. Sometimes people can get outrageously drunk.

Also in UK you can buy alcohol from 18, (and if you go to the right places younger even...). It seems totally absurd that in the USA even a 20 YO can't buy himself a drink.

Bars exist elsewhere. It’s the same function, just positioned differently culturally. Yet many people across the US treat bars the same as they do in the UK.

That said, I see way more people absolutely trashed at night walking around cities in the UK than I do the US. I’m not saying no one is trashed in the US, I’m just saying the frequency, percentage of people, and “normalcy” was way higher in the UK.

I think the age thing in the US is part of the issue. Rather than teaching teens about social drinking in moderation, drinking is something that gets binged on when the adults are away.

As a Brit I was pretty shocked to arrive in Australia and see that binge drinking there is next level. The Melbourne Cup horse races is like a national drinking day, my employer took everyone out to get wasted (this was in Sydney, didn't even watch the races) and then it was understood that you'd probably take the next day off.

When I read your story, as an Aussie, I felt really proud that we'd "beaten" the Brits at getting pissed. Perhaps this is part of the problem.

My mother's Australian, and as a (partial) joke to rib some relatives of mine (I was born in the US; father is American), I used to sing this parody:

99 bottles of beer on the wall

99 bottles of beer

If you're an Aussie you'll drink them all down

99 bottles of beer on the ground

Not only is it a faster version of the song, I hadn't internalized quite how true it was. lol

How odd, I used to work with an Aussie (Sydney) expat and he was glowingly boasting how much better they are at anything because competition. It’s so much part of their culture he said, that they will out-do anyone, even at their core traits (and so concluded that Sydney pizza is better than anything I’ve ever eaten. Me. Italian from Rome :D)

To be fair, one of the best pizzerias in the world is in Melbourne (400 Gradi). And my Nonno lives in Adelaide!

I lived in Bermuda which is the crossroads for expats from all over the world. Not sure if it’s an expat thing but the Americans didn’t drink nearly as hard as the Brits, Canadians, Aussies, Kiwis and South Africans.

> I lived in Bermuda which is the crossroads for expats from all over the world. Not sure if it’s an expat thing but the Americans didn’t drink nearly as hard as the Brits, Canadians, Aussies, Kiwis and South Africans.

I'm South African[1]. You'd be an alcoholic too, if you lived here :-)

[1] To be honest though, I rarely have a drink. Had one in 2020, half in 2019, 4 in 2018. I really should drink more, seeing that I still have past b/day presents from my sisters that total about 5 bottles of single-malt scotch, and from my wife a 25 year old Glenfiddich - all unopened.

I am not a heavy drinker, but one thing I noticed having moved around to a few places is how much everyone in my age group drinks(30's to mid 40's). I have gotten to know many a neighbor and they are all working professionals like me and I am just shocked that having 8-10 drinks a night seems like it comes standard for a Friday/Saturday night. I thought that it was just one location, but I moved twice in the past 2 years and at each location the same behavior. It seems really unhealthy and is everywhere(CA North and South) and Colorado) which is worrisome.

I know you said they are neighbors and I assume you live in an apartment complex because you have met "many a neighbor". But how much of this is selection bias? You meet social people, social people drink because drinking helps socializing.

Strangely its not apartments, these are houses, the people in the neighborhood are usually in sales, and other professional areas, sometimes in tech but not engineers.

That's definitely just a certain personality type, I think. 8-10 drinks is pretty aggressive for a random Friday night among grown-ass adults - that's 2 full bottles of wine. At best, you won't be able to drive home and you'll feel beat up in the morning.

How long are they staying out? I'm in my thirties, and a drink every 45 minutes seems pretty standard among my peers that don't have kids and still go out. In college we'd swing for the fences, but eventually everyone (well, everyone without an actual drinking problem) figured out that keeping a nice social buzz is a more pleasant way to spend an evening with friends.

I worked with people who would finish off a 24 pack on a random Monday. It was lights out when they actually went out.

Heavy alcohol drinkers tend to cluster with each other. This leads to a self-reinforcing cycle wherein they see their peers consuming a lot of alcohol and assume that means it's normal and fine.

Likewise, non-drinkers tend to cluster with each other because after a while it's just not fun to hang out with people consuming copious amounts of alcohol all of the time while their health slowly declines. I had to stop inviting several friends to certain activities because they wanted to make everything revolve around consuming alcohol. It gets old.

Anecdotes aside, the statistics just don't support 10 drinks/night as being average. That's top 10-20% behavior.

Apparently 18% of Americans are binge drinkers:

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/americans-are-dri...

You've posted the same thing multiple times in this thread.

Yes, as did the person I responded to.

> who, like most Europeans of that time, preferred beer to water

Yes, the pilgrims preferred beer over water because the water kept killing them. Drinking tea or beer was a matter of safety, not mere preference or addiction. We now know that the combination of boiling, pH, and alcohol helped keep beer safer than drinking water of the time, but they were unaware of that and just knew that beer seemed safer.

Trying to draw a parallel between modern drinking habits and the pilgrims is just silly, because we’re drinking different things in different amounts for very different reasons.

> Yes, the pilgrims preferred beer over water because the water kept killing them. Drinking tea or beer was a matter of safety, not mere preference or addiction.

That's a myth.

[Citation needed]

AskHistorians on reddit has put this very question into their "very frequently asked questions" due to its popularity, and there's a decent number of answers describing why its a myth:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7b8jea/is_it...

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2bewpo/what_...

Ah, that is helpful. Thank you.

Something tangential and somewhat hard to quantify or even describe:

Are Americans on average in shields up / high alert / guarded / adversarial mode more often?

Every time I visit I always notice two things:

Americans are far more generous and polite than their reputation suggests.

Everyone always seems stressed and guarded and defensive.

Everyone seems to have security cameras everywhere. Fences. Locked everything. Guns. This general feel that everything is zero sum and you've got to guard your hoard, save your seat, not let drivers in, race to be first.

I just feel so exhausted being in high alert mode perpetually after a visit.

Now that I write all this I feel like it's probably confirmation bias or whatnot. But maybe others have thoughts.

I also suspect that regular cannabis use is more harmful than some of us would care to admit.

Probably, but American paternalism means that for someone to take a hurts-self/adds-enjoyment tradeoff means that they have to convince everyone that the thing can't hurt anyone.

Because you aren't allowed to hurt yourself through consumption of a substance, you have to perform bad science first to 'prove' that the substance is good for you.

If we would allow people to hurt themselves, we could be truthful. But that much liberty is terrifying to many.

Most of us would actually happily admit that regular cannabis use is harmful ... so are a bunch of other things, like potato chips.

Cannabis use is not even in the same order of magnitude as the harm alcohol does. Alcohol kills 10K people a year in the US just from drunk driving. I'm not sure why you are bringing this up?

The title is wrong imo because drinking is an intensely personal thing.

I don't drink for one year every four years and have been through this cycle multiple times. I have one year where I drink quite a bit and my current year is the weekends only drinking cycle.

Some observations: I don't miss alcohol at all when I don't drink, but in dry years I can get quite depressed.

As soon as I do have one drink my mind immediately goes to having more, plans change - I grew up in a binge drinking culture (UK) and that never seems to go away.

I body check myself socially to see if I've drunk too much even when I'm not drinking. I think a lot of social drinking is actually psychological.

Hangovers suck but are a great safeguard. If you don't have them be alarmed. The year when I drink a lot I get overtired, generally puffy skinned feeling and lacklustre.

Most important tip: don't drink pints of mineral water instead of beer: I got terrible kidney stones

Most of my male genetic relatives have/had a history of alcohol abuse, so I decided from an early age that the best approach was to not drink any alcohol at all, and I held to that until about nine years ago. Long research has indicated that one cup of red wine per day has measurable health benefits, so I started to drink one cup, like medicine, immediately before bed.

After doing that for a few weeks, I came home from work; my wife and son weren't home at the moment. I sat down at my computer and started working on my side project, as usual.

I was shocked to see that there was a large plastic container on my desk filled most of the way up with red wine, and I'd been gulping it down.

Honest to God, I had absolutely no recollection of getting that container, pouring the wine, and putting it on my desk.

That was very chilling, I poured the rest of it out and haven't had a drink since.

Just for clarification, no research (I'm aware of) has indicated that one cup of red wine has measurable health benefits above not drinking at all. The research suggests that if you must drink, then one cup of wine will have some positive impacts in addition to the negative impacts.

That said, I dunno if I'd be so strongly swayed either way by any single event without any real negative consequences such as you say here.

> (I'm aware of) has indicated that one cup of red wine has measurable health benefits above not drinking at all.

There are various studies floating about. The part that has me sceptical is that they don't seem to account for whether it's in a social setting. i.e. is it the wine or is the being with friends and having a laugh

Rather, they should account for the wine being consumed with food rather than alone, e.g., before bed like OP above.

Consuming with food had metabolic side affects and is broken down differently and so could have less negative impact than when drunk alone.

That can definitely happen when you're focussed on something else than what you're drinking (or eating!). It's gonna be even more pronounced if you're drinking, distracted and not particularly experienced with alcohol. If you enjoy what you're drinking you just need to be conscious of when you refill and you'll be fine. If you don't and you're just doing it as a sort of health thing, maybe you made the right choice. As someone who enjoys whisk[e]y, rum, gin, wine and beer, I think it's incredibly enjoyable if you're able to keep on top of it and I feel a little bit sad that there are some who won't enjoy things like making cocktails or tasting wine due to abstinence. I don't want at-risk people to descend into alcoholism against their will, mind.

> If you enjoy what you're drinking ...

That's the thing: I hate the taste of wine.

Yep that's why I included that :) If you're not into wine and you don't fancy anything else then fair enough, I hope nobody's pressuring you or making things weird.

It was chilling, because you ascertained that some latent genetic alcoholism made you pour a glass of wine subconsciously ?

I do this with tea and coffee all the time, so I guess I don't see the connection, but probably better to be safe

> some latent genetic alcoholism

That's my thinking. As I said in another comment, I really hate the taste of wine, so I wasn't drinking it for taste enjoyment.

> probably better to be safe

Yup!

When I worked in offices (sw dev and qa, especially executives), or at survival jobs that mixed with lots of people (security guard, shelf stocking, etc), I was very often surprised at how many people I could smell alcohol on.

We're all drunks.

I don't drink much anymore. I never went to work drunk, but I used to drink a fair amount. Now that I'm a truck driver, it's too inconvenient for me personally to manage drinking, so I just don't drink. Others' mileage definitely varies.

I was working at Salesforce when they finally got rid of the kegs and alcohol that were all over the engineering floors. IIRC Parker was subdued about it, it happened overnight, I'd guess in response to an alcohol-based HR issue. I laughed because compared to every other company I knew no one ever drank in the SFDC office and the kegerators were covered in dust. I have one drink 3-4 times a week, but never connected to work.

I was watching "Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist" with my wife the other day and I commented "These characters seem to all be alcoholics" because seriously they have a drink in hand nearly every scene taking place outside of the workplace. I think part of the problem is glorification of alcohol in pop culture. Heck, at certain times of the year we look forward to watching a bunch of back-to-back alcohol advertisements (Super Bowl).

I noticed something similar. I quit drinking ~4 months ago once I realized I was drinking way too much during quarantine.

Since then I can't stop noticing the prevalence of alcohol in nearly all aspects of pop culture. Even innocuous seeming sitcoms have episodes where the whacky, lovable characters drink to excess and have to deal with a hangover.

There was a time in American cinema and television when most major characters were using tobacco and alcohol on screen in a highly conspicuous manner. I don't recall the specific details, but I think I remember reading that tobacco and alcohol use was written into scenes by advertisers to promote smoking and drinking. There are certain decades of film and television production where you rarely see a scene without a lit cigarette or pipe and a glass of liquor.

They explain this in Lucifer by attributing Lucifer's higher tolerance to his demigod status, but it's... kind of a problem, especially for the not-deities who are seemingly always at his club, getting shitfaced.

I said the exact same thing with my partner, I was watching true detective season 1, not one scene where the lead pair is not in office is without smoking or beer in hand.

One of my older brothers was a heavy drinker. He died recently at the age of 50. He had an enlarged heart and liver, which they believe were the cause of his death. It's not really clear to me if he saw it coming. He was fine one day, and then the next he was found dead by his housekeeper. I often hear about how alcohol in moderation can possibly cause you to live longer, but I don't hear much about how too much can shorten your lifespan.

How much do you hear about hereditary hemochromatosis and iron overload? It disproportionately affects people named Pat, and the family of people with mysterious liver and heart issues. Get your ferritin checked if you haven't. It's the most common genetic disorder in the United States, and commonly dismissed as alcoholism after death (it does complicate it and produce some of the same symptoms). Sorry for your loss.

I found it pretty amusing to see how drunk our founding fathers were. I think being drunk played a huge role in the American revolution

I'd love to see a drunk history about drunken Washington infecting his drunken troops with cowpox (sober cows).

"When Britain taxed our TEA we got frisky/ Imagine what gon' happen when you try & tax our whiskey"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey_Rebellion

Going back further, I'd love to know the source of the claim that the Mayflower was diverted from the mouth of the Hudson to Plymouth Rock because the ship was running low on beer. It seems like the sort of thing that would be more widely known.

The framing is a bit dubious, at the very least... The statement about 'preferring beer to water' ignores cholera, and the general difficult of keeping water potable over months at sea. Fermentation was, believe it or not, a public health strategy for ship voyages.

Reminds me of the article "Were Early Modern People Perpetually Drunk? (2016)"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13535868

America is made of so many subcultures. People find theirs and that's their world. The author is in a set that drinks a lot. Most Americans do not. I think overall America is much more "prudish" than other countries, despite what movies and the news may lead us to believe. At the same time we've basically been genetically selecting for extreme personalities. We're all either descendants of Native Americans or people who left their home and crossed half the world for a new life. If you become an alcoholic here, you really have a problem.

In the UK you can be an alcoholic for decades and still hold down a respectable job. Nobody bats an eye at a few drinks at lunch. I remember feeling so weird the first time I was at a formal event in the UK for a lunch at noon where wine was being served. First time in my life I had felt buzzed and the sun was out and hot. I did not like it at all. But I imagine, with the frequency of these events in academic settings, that half the academics in the more prestigious universities are functioning alcoholics. Many students and young professionals in UK/Europe make it a point to go out and get wasted as much as possible. That happens in the US too, but it seems to be looked down upon more? I think the idea that drinking is more under control in Europe would fade pretty quickly if all alcohol was temporarily banned there for a week.

I'm curious as to what the movie/tv industry's role is in this increase in solitary drinking. I was an active 'solo' drinker as well, who recently stopped altogether. Since I stopped I've noticed something peculiar that I wonder if other people noticed as well: A lot of TV shows and movies contain scenes where alcohol is being positioned as a "fix" for something.

- Just had a tough situation? Have a drink!

- Feeling anxious? A drink takes the edge off!

- Feeling awkward at a social event? Drink!

Now, I have people working in the alcohol industry who insist that there is no direct product placement or company sponsoring going on. This seems believable, because oftentimes there are no specific brands mentioned in these scenes.

However, this did get me thinking: Is there any alcohol lobby that influences writers to include these types of "benefits of alcohol" scenes into their scripts? When you start to recognise them, you'll notice that a lof of these scenes are entirely unnecessary, to the point where you have to think that a script writer had to deliberately add the alcohol into the scene!

I suspect it might be just writers being lazy and following the easy tropes.

I think part of it is the character needs something to do with their hands, or something like that. I've cut back a lot in my drinking and noticed this a lot too. Lots of straight liquor drinking.

Worked at a startup with beer stocked in the fridge. I enjoyed a beer several times a week once it hit 4-5pm. This behavior started as an intern and I still got brought back for full time so apparently they didn't care.

A few beers cost almost nothing vs. paying overtime to have you in the office longer for those hours spent starting your night of drinking.

And if the employer is lucky, your coworkers become your drinking buddies in the process. Before you know it you're now spending all your waking hours with your coworkers. Makes quitting your post a lot more difficult.

> Distilled alcohol is recent—it became widespread in China in the 13th century

Go Ghengis!

That's quite interesting. Lots of Mongol rulers drank themselves to death. The timing had world historic consequences: they tended to cark it just after they nuked the entire muslim world from horseback, and just before they moved on to Europe. Maybe the invention of distilled spirits was the key to European domination.

As an Australian who worked in the US for a startup back in 2014/2015 pre-COVID, I can attest to the different attitude towards drinking. Australia is known for its drinking habits as well, but the US and, in particular, the tech industry is different. The startup I worked for had continually restocked beer kegs (three different types of craft beer) it was normal for people to drink during lunch, stay back late and write some code, have some more beer. Sometimes we'd go to a hip bar or restaurant, we'd order pitchers of craft beer. Drinking was just so constant and normal, it was like drinking coffee, a part of the startup routine.

It's the same story at companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter, drink fridges with soft drink, juices and then beer/cider/wine, it's such a strange thing when you think about it workplaces offering alcohol to their employees, allowing them to self-moderate their consumption. In Australia the concept of workplace provided drinks that are always there isn't a common thing, even in our startup scene. The closest I've witnessed is Friday drinks, which is where you and your coworkers finish a little early and have a drink to celebrate the week or milestone. Even then, people would have to go out and get the beer/wine to drink, it wasn't just there ready to go.

I wonder if any research has been done into the tech industry and its relationship with alcohol? Because I often saw the casual attitude to drinking as exclusive, especially to those who are recovering from addiction or have had complications with alcohol in the past. Imagine being an ex-alcoholic and getting a job for a modern day tech startup? Surrounded by young twenty-somethings who casually will down a few glasses of IPA and go home to hacking on their MacBook Pros until the early morning like it's nothing.

I don't see anything wrong with solitary drinking, unless you're doing it to deal with stress or problems. But, if you're like me (who works 100% remote now), I enjoy a good glass of scotch or a beer every now and then in the evening, even if my wife isn't drinking or we're not entertaining.

America has problems with drinking, opioids, meth, prescription abuse, vaping bizarre things, health care, mental health, domestic violence, domestic terrorism and violent crime, school shootings and suicides because America has a misery problem.

A few decades of bootstrap vs welfare paint don't fix the rotted and failing structure of a culture, if it can even be called that anymore, that had replaced well being with consumption and personal growth with work and public goods with privatized profits.

There is a pretty international audience here that can probably relate to seeing the difference between cases like the hard drinking work culture in many east Asian nations or the near constant casual drinking of much of Europe with the abject despair visible in the poorer parts of the US.

Naturally people have been crying for a social welfare system for basically the last 140 years with occasional fits and starts but mostly characterized by a complete failure to crib off the results of developed nations across the world that simply don't have constant ongoing crises about everything.

Was that supposed to be a backhanded way to call some large chunks of Europe "undeveloped" or did you just forget about Eastern Europe and all the economically less stable countries on the Mediteranean?

Alcoholism, poor mental health care, domestic violence, suicide, etc. etc. are all alive and well on the other side of the pond too. Just not in the "scandanavia plus rich parts of western Europe" parts that HN likes to idolize.

I'm not sure I understand your interpretation. I read it as mainly "the things people point out as problems are really just symptoms of a country in misery because all the things providing a stable base for people have been systematically removed or destroyed".

> a complete failure to crib off the results of developed nations across the world that simply don't have constant ongoing crises about everything.

And this I took to mean "there exist countries of a similar level to the United States that don't quite have this problem. Look at what they did and steal what works." I'm not sure how that implies anything about some countries being undeveloped.

That's a bizarre way to read two independent sentences. I don't know if any given eastern European nations counts as developed in your terms, but pretty much all of them with similar HDI or whatever other metric to the United States have their own problems, but not to anything like the degree seen in the US.

I haven't seen in the comments just what a horrible, cruel disease alcoholism is.

An ex-girlfriend's father was an alcoholic. He went out one day on a binge and came back with Korsakoff syndrome. Korsakoff syndrome causes apathy: it removes your emotions. He no longer spoke, except in monosyllables if spoken to. He wouldn't or couldn't feed himself. He sat all day at the kitchen table. His family took care of him. That's his life now! His daughter wonders sometimes what he thinks about her, if he does think.

Korsakoff syndrome is treatable, isn't it?

Reading Europeans' comments on threads like this leaves me wondering who is more ignorant about America, me (as an American...) or them.

I don't know anyone who goes out drinking to get drunk. I know people who socialize with friends and drink alcohol while doing it. I know some people who have a glass of wine or two with dinner. I myself drink a couple microbrews once a week with friends.

But what I'm getting from our European friends is that everyone they know from America is an alcoholic.

Selection bias, of where they stay. If you come as Tourist in the US, and stay in the center of any large city you are bound to see hordes of drunk people in the weekends... usually on their 20s.

But that's not what most of the US is though. 3rd ave in Manhattan, from Lower East Side, to Murray Hill turns like a zoo, (pre covid), around midnight, with drunken 20 something acting like it is spring break.

The rest of the areas of NYC are not like that, but tourists are more likely to stay near these places, rather lets say, somewhere sleepy in UES, UWS, Brooklyn, or Queens.

I knew people like that in our mutual early 20s a few years have gone by and now nope. I may drink once every other month or so on out D&D night. Much of that was because my mutual friend group were all from a background of strictly religious upbringings where alcohol was not considered acceptable so no one had a model of responsible drinking. all of us having gained independence around then I was the only one not getting hammered every weekend. (mostly because i don't like beer). but we have all aged and become more responsible and realized throwing up sucks.

"Media coverage, meanwhile, has swung from cheerfully overselling the (now disputed) health benefits of wine to screeching that no amount of alcohol is safe, ever; it might give you cancer and it will certainly make you die before your time."

This back and forth cycle in media coverage on any health topic is so predictable. At this point can any study be taken at face value, or is the only real answer "it varies?"

America has a loneliness and overwork problem - the alcohol is just a coping mechanism.

ADHD folks, I'm pretty sure (but I don't have hard science) that alcohol depletes your precious and limited store of dopamine. For normal people, the hangover is just "my head hurts" and such. For ADHD people, the hangover also includes "my willpower is reduced", potentially for days while the brain sloooowly replenishes dopamine.

I would highly recommend everyone to watch the documentary Prohibition by Ken Burns:

https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/prohibition/

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1950799/

Drunk Discord channels have re-created a lot of the missing "socialization" aspect of bar life I missed during the pandemic.

I'm... not sure it's a good thing, but it was an interesting/unanticipated development. I don't think the author should be so quick to dismiss "Zoom" drinking! UX matters in this space, in a weird way.

Since we're all talking about our drinking rates. I personally just drink with friends and occasionally go to a bar myself, so I am not drinking a lone. I can go a week without drinking, it means I didn't leave my house (and I was likely working on OSS for that week). I could drink three times in a week, it means I hung out with friends three times. Most of that is bike rides where we consume alcohol.

As an introvert, thankfully I have alcohol and bars. I don't give much thoughr to how much alcohol I consume. I don't care if Doctors say I'm an alcoholic because I consumed more 5 drinks in a sitting or whatever. I mostly listen to my body. If I am feeling shitty, I know I've been drinking too much, so I take a break. Today I feel shitty, it was memorial day weekend and I went to a baseball game with friends followed by bike rides and drinking with friends. Time to take a break for a few days.

I’m curious if there is a country which does not have a drinking problem (set aside those where alcohol is forbidden).

And even then, if prohibition showed one thing is that forbidding alcohol does not prevent alcohol drinking at all :D

True. As someone not familiar with contemporary societies where drinking is not allowed, I’m in fact curious about their drinking problems as well.

Allow me to offer a different perspective.

I'm 40 years old who is a muslim. I spent half of my life living in a muslim/arab country and the other hald in the west. Here is what I've seen:

1- Of all the people I know where I grew up in the arab country, probably only 2-3 drunk. This does correlate with the data [1]. But those 2-3 people did drink heavily.

2- Alcohol in the arab world has a different meaning. In the arab world it would be more like: "hey there is this poison, let's drink to forget about my issues and lets do that in hiding". While in the western world, it's more "let's meet for a drink and have a little fun".

3- There is no drinking culture in the arab world. This is because there are limited number of bars/pubs and people do not consume it openly. Not in weddings, gatherings or barbeques. A minority will come already drunk to a wedding (see point 1)

4- Islam is big on forbiding Alcohol. Not only that, but there is this idea that alcohol can stay up to 40 days in your body (never verfied this claim). Hence why a lot of people who actually drink, stop drinking 40 days before Ramadan starts. While a lot of muslims don't pray, the majority do fast and hold onto Ramadan. Bars and Pubs actually close a month before Ramadan too. The drinkers I knew, did actually follow this rule.

5- Yes, I know, you probably knew that guy in high school who was an arab and a heavy drinker. And that is correct. But the data and what I've seen in arab countries correlate more with point 1 above. Alcohol is so frowned upon, that even people who like to drink don't want to show it to their kids or neighbors. It's rare to have an arab family buy alcohol and put it in the fridge. Alcohol is also not available in supermarkets or anywhere except in bars. I lived in >1mil city and we had 3 bars.

6- There is a weird association in arab countries between Alcohol and Violance/Agression. WHich is some time true.

I never understood this obssession with Alcohol. Because I just wasn't used to it. It's so bizzare that I had to explain myself all the time on why I'm not drinking.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/alcohol-consumption

Thanks for sharing your perspective, I found this pretty insightful.

I do like to have a drink myself (cool if you don't drink) but it really feels like alcohol has become ubiquitous in society in that many business use the margins from alcohol sales to bring up their revenue.

The older I get the more people seem entrenched in their patterns and it seems like anywhere I go alcohol is available for sale.

Company events, family places for having drinks (i.e. pubs, parks etc). It seems that alcohol is everywhere and enabling a lifestyle. Not sure how I feel about it but it certainly feels very present in society much more so than 20 years ago.

I figure part of it is the rise of the local microbrewery/distillery, local job economy to promote specialist beverages and certainly the large corporates promoting alcohol throughout society.

Counter though is that the younger generation seem to avoid alcohol from what i've heard and some of the companies are concerned about the future. Sounds like big tobacco from the 90s.

Or is the drinking caused by a deeper problem?

Let's hope so. That way we can have two moral panics.

America's early history is mass drinking. Rum was 'invented' in Barbados in ~1650, but beer, wine, and brandy have been drunk in the Caribbean and Americas since it was first touched by colonizers.

Wayne Curtis reported that in the 1600/1700s the average person aged 15 years old and up drank 6 gallons of pure alcohol a year, equal to 75 fifths of 80 proof rum a year, or roughly 5 shots per day. Continental european emissaries who would visit towns in the new world would be shocked at the drunkenness of just countless near dead bodies laying in the streets, and from this British, and sometimes Irish, indentured workers got the reputation for being insane drunkards.

He posited that the main driver of heavy drinking was misery - in the colonies and early corporation towns back then, when the weather went bad and there was no work, you drank until things improved. Not too different from today imo.

Getting drunk is not a "colonizers" thing, it's a human thing. People have been getting drunk for tens of thousands of years, all around the globe.

Where did I say it was a colonizers thing?

> America's early history is mass drinking ... since it was first touched by colonizers.

Since as in time, not causative...

But that's not accurate either. http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2013/11/native-ameri...

the way i look at it, my chances of dying outside of my control are alot higher than the things i can control. So i just live life with the knowledge that when i drink i'm just borrowing fun from the next day perhaps even shaving off a few seconds of my life probabilistically. Is it worth it? Sometimes.

The data seems to indicate that half of American adults drink never or close to never.

My lived experience is much different; friends in their 20s/30s/40s drinking at every event and gathering. I live in an area full of very busy bars and restaurants with people drinking. Other wealthier areas are the same around the country. Traveling internationally, the story is the same. And even people like manual laborers drink a lot (I see construction workers regularly drinking on breaks, and I've known some personally), so it's not just a behavior amongst the college-educated professional crowd.

Maybe cities attract and sustain this behavior. People want to be around other people, to be around nightlife, etc. Characterization of this as a purely American problem (or a general problem America-wide) seems like a mistake given the numbers though.

What are we trying to escape?

Stress

The regulators and bureaucrats.

Our deeply unnatural existence staring into glowing rectangles 8+ hours per day.

We wake up and look at the small rectangle.

Go to work and stare at the medium rectangle.

Come home and watch the big rectangle.

> Come home and watch the big rectangle.

Come home and watch Black Mirror on our largest black mirror.

If that were the case you’d see lower alcohol consumption among manual labourers than among software engineers…

More likely loneliness, the article mentions solitary drinking long before we worked in cubicles.

Apparently 15% of our countrymen believe the QAnon pedophilia hoax/theory [0]. That gives me a certain thirst.

[0] https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/05/31/qanon-poll-americ...

Of all the downvotes I have received on HN, these puzzle me the most.

While your comment gave me a chuckle, I find it's (perhaps unintentional) flame bait which will steer the discussion into an unproductive crapfest instead of staying on the topic, which is alcoholism in America. That's to say, it won't foster any intelligent discussion. I bet this is why some have expressed disagreement.

Life.

A lack of community. Or, eachother.

Take your pick!

Emptiness, in some cases. Imagine living a life of poverty, or being trapped in a situation you realize you don't have the tools or privilege to escape (having to care for many dependents, no time to go to school, or can't afford to pay for it because you're trying to scrape enough for rent).

Having no direction or hope for a better future (perceived or real) has driven people I've known to alcoholism.

Not an excuse. Just a perspective.

The Wikipedia pages for most major religions provide a decent set of candidates for further investigation. Ditto a huge percentage of fiction that's considered "literature", if you're into that kind of thing.

Some of the more recent research on alcohol suggests that it isn't so much of an escape. Instead it creates a type of myopia for the mind, shifting focus from the long-term to the short-term.

For some people, it can really help live more in the moment, enjoy time with friends, and temporarily put aside all the stress and worries about the future.

I think a lot of people don’t realize how much alcohol they actually consume because their bodies are accustomed to it.

As a non-drinker apart from rare occasions (1-2x per year), here’s my anecdotal experience.

Over the course of an evening:

- 5-6oz of a 7% IPA and I’m feeling good. This is around my personal cutoff if I do happen to have a drink.

- 1 16oz IPA and I’d be feeling borderline drunk.

- 2 16oz IPAs would leave me right and properly drunk with a good chance of a hangover.

- 3 or more and I am feeling way too drunk, my stomach contents are no longer guaranteed to stay in place, and I’m guaranteed to wake up with a robust hangover.

I drank quite a bit up until about 6 years ago, and back then I could consume multiple times these amounts and feel fine.

I am a healthy, fit person in my mid-late 20s, and to my knowledge don’t have any genetic predisposition to alcohol intolerance.

Would you recommend it? I'm considering giving up drinking entirely and just smoking/vaping weed. A small amount of weed gives me the same sort of social buzz that the sweet spot of alchol (3-6 drinks) gives me, with no hangover and excess calories.

I do still partake in a small amount of weed, I find it to be a much more enjoyable and seemingly healthier experience (I mostly use edibles/oils to avoid lung effects). The worst thing about weed for me is the social stigma, especially among older people.

The primary reason I stopped drinking was that my partner had a habit of drinking too much and eventually it got excessive to the point we both decided to cut it out. We stopped associating with the people who we regularly drank around. Once the social pressure was gone, it was actually very easy for me to stop because I personally never really cared for it in the first place.

I think weed, in moderation, is a great replacement for alcohol if you want to continue socializing with others in “intoxicated scenarios”, but ideally I think it’s best to try associating with people who can have fun without drugs. I think conversations and bonding are so much richer and more meaningful when sober.

My 2¢, for what it’s worth.

"The Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock because, the crew feared, the Pilgrims were going through the beer too quickly. The ship had been headed for the mouth of the Hudson River, until its sailors (who, like most Europeans of that time, preferred beer to water) panicked at the possibility of running out before they got home, and threatened mutiny. And so the Pilgrims were kicked ashore, short of their intended destination and beerless."

Perhaps not. I'm a Brit who has designed souvenirs in Plymouth (the one in Devon.) That does not make me an historian but I am a bit interested.

"who, like most Europeans of that time, preferred beer to water" - no they preferred NOT (Colera OR diarrhea).

"And so the Pilgrims were kicked ashore" Please do tell.

I stopped drinking at 25, that was 30 years ago.

I just decided that there weren't any benefits but a lot of negatives, so I stopped.

When I tell people I stopped drinking they assume I had a problem. I laugh and say "No." Then I tell them I just did a pro's and con's evaluation and realized there were zero pro's and a whole lot of con's. I know 6 people that quit drinking after having a the pro's and con's discussion, they went off and did their own evaluation and realized that drinking wasn't providing anything positive. All the positives are imagined. The, "one or two drinks" have a positive effect is all nonsense.

I've gone through phases of drinking more and less, and I'd that say at least in my personal experience I notice a lot of my relationships suffer when I'm staying completely sober. Not because my friends who drink don't want to hang out with a non-drinker, but many activities lose their appeal, I often end up leaving before the night gets "interesting", and I don't have the same shared experiences or increased sense of vulnerability that forms bonds.

Some days the cons still outweigh the pros, but for me "all the positives are imagined" just doesn't ring true at all.

I am French and only drink very occasionally with friends or family. About a beer or two per month, and maybe a glass of wine or two a month as well.

I do not like alcohol in the long run. I like the first few sips and then it becomes a burden. Friends look at me as if I was crazy when I pour the remaining of my glass to the sink.

I learned to taste alcohol that way, for the taste and not the effects. My children are now teens and since they have seen me doing that a lot, they are not even drawn to alcohol. I let them taste in the past when they wanted to try but the taste was horrible for them and since they saw that I am not a big fan either they do not see it as a taboo thing.

I don’t really think america has that big of a problem with alcohol. If anything the stats indicate drinking is dying out among the youths compared to previous generations. Fentanyl on the other hand, that is a real problem.

As an American living in Russia, I’ve been thinking a lot about the 0.00% BAC limit for driving. Where I lived in America, it was 0.08%, and the general guidance was “two drinks over four hours”. Having such a clear “the DD doesn’t drink” has a lot of different effects I think, notably that there is always at least one person at every gathering that isn’t drinking. Russia certainly isn’t a model country when it comes to alcoholism, but this particular fact seems worth adopting in the USA to me.

How enforced is it in Russia? I live in Lithuania which has a limit of 0.4g/l (I don't know what that is in % BAC). The thing is most people don't care, and even if you are caught, if you know the right person you can get your license back. I'd imagine Russia is pretty similar in that regard, especially in smaller cities.

Why not let everyone do what they want?

I hate these moralizing articles, if we have a drunk driving problem then write an article about that. But if people want to drink in their own homes let them be.

Are you saying there aren't downsides inherent with drinking itself? I'm onboard with letting people do what they want, but if what they want to do has negative effects the least we should do is make them aware of that.

Doesn't society already tell everyone that alcohol abuse is bad?

There are downsides to eating Oreos, but we don't need articles which state obvious facts.

Much wrong has been done in this country by telling people their behavior is a moral. As long as you don't hurt me or anyone else do whatever you want, you're free to drink yourself silly every night

I would argue that benefits have also come from moralizing about certain practices. Consider smoking cigarettes, for instance, which has seen dramatic decreases in use over several decades in the US [1]. I suspect that the large amount of moralizing in schools, on TV and in movies, and other places had something to do with this given that it's still more common (perhaps because it's less taboo and still seen as "cool") in certain European countries [2], not to mention many other places around the world that weren't significantly different from the US some decades ago. This has public health benefits that everyone at least indirectly benefits from, without mentioning the more direct issues such as second-hand smoke or, in the case of alcohol, drunk driving or other crimes exacerbated by its use.

[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/237908/smoking-rate-hits-new-lo...

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/which-countries-smoke-most

These aren't so obvious facts, and we DO write articles and run campaigns about the harms of junk food and overeating.

None of this is "moralizing", its simply reiterating the harmful effects of behaviors so others can make balanced decisions. Nobody is born aware of the dangers of junk food and alcohol, and they're easy to forget too unless one has personal experience with it (by then the damage is already done).

So last week was cryptocurrencies, and this week it's alcoholism and next week...? Maybe America has another problem, which is continually crusading to find "problems".

In social situations people get really turned off when I tell them I don't drink. They always ask why and they look at me disapprovingly when I tell them it's because it's unhealthy.

I googled a whole bunch to try and find a survey that asks why people don't drink. I couldn't find one. I am guessing people's PERCEPTION is that non-drinkers are ex-alcoholics or devoutly mormon or muslim, and that's why I get the disapproving looks.

This article highlights how the pandemic accelerated the alcoholism of people who previously only “had an alcohol problem”, but that is only part of the story.

I am alcoholic Brit who has “not touched a drop” for nearly 5 years. I have also lived in America, Europe and Asia. My personal experience is still that America has way less of a drinking culture than UK.

Most people who drink alcohol do NOT become alcoholics. This is unlike smoking where almost everyone becomes addicted.

I heard this statistic (fwiw) here in the US: 10% of a liquor store's customers are responsible for 90% of the sales.

That doesn't mean some fraction are drinking 10X what everybody else is. It means some fraction are drinking 81X what a normal person does.

So yes it's a bipolar drinking culture in the US. Some folks drink, a lot, way too often. The rest drink occasionally or not at all (the liquor stores don't count those that never go into the store).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/If-by-whiskey

There's really no exceptionalism when it comes to America's so-called drinking problem. Having worked at an alcoholic beverage MNC, it's pretty clear that every country has its own subculture of getting hammered. I'd even hazard the hot take that America is rather middle-of-the-road when it comes to binge drinking (certainly by per capita consumption is not exceptional).

Some of the most interesting and illuminating words I have read on the subject of addiction (and specifically, alcohol addiction) were on the old "Dive Into Mark" blog by Mark Pilgrim.[1]

I still miss his blog and his writing from time to time ...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Pilgrim

America is diverse, people in North Dakota were consuming 45 gallons of beer, while in California 25.[1]

[1] https://www.statista.com/chart/1566/north-dakotans-are-ameri...

I wonder how much of the increase is due to ridesharing.

The US basically requires that you drive everywhere. The penalties for DUI are incredibly stiff. So, you are forced to choose and most people had to choose driving over drinking.

Now, with ridesharing, you can choose drinking over driving.

> "But there’s nothing moderate, or convivial, about the way many Americans drink today."

Today? Are Americans (and Canadians) actually drinking more than they used to? Seems to me there was much heavier drinking in the 70s and 80s and the stats seem to back it up.

Giving up drinking was one of the defining moments of my life. My job got better, my relationships got better, my mental health got better, and I lived more life. Nothing's perfect, but by far better than when alcohol compounded my existing issues.

I didn't drink since the pandemic hit.

Didn't miss it, because I only drank at parties and even then I didn't drink at every party.

I like being drunk sometimes, it can turn a boring event into a fun night. But I don't think, I need it more than a few times a year.

Is it just me or all of the (many) ads on this page about booze/liquor?? :')

Drugs, alcohol, food so readily available in our society --- I make up random rules to protect myself against society.

For example: - 3 drink limit, unless it's some kind of special occasion - don't eat, drink, smoke after 8pm

Of course it does. Even had an amendment trying to ban alcohol. You ban alcohol and you get people in hospitals with withdrawal symptoms.

It is like trying to ban other drugs, withdrawal symptoms.

They are addictions and hard to overcome.

I don't buy this for a second. As long as people have had homes and been able to store alcohol they've been drinking alone. Just read any piece of literature from the past 2000 years.

Joe Rogan raises this point a lot, but it’s amazing how hard weed has been fought against compared to alcohol. However we imbibe it seems that doing it socially is better than doing it alone.

I stopped drinking 30 years ago. Haven't missed it a bit.

The reason Eastern Europeans used to drink like fish was the lack of good prospects for the future. I wonder if a similar phenomenon is at play here.

Well, definitely not only America.

Had a perfect example in my family, so I know for sure what alcohol can do and don't touch this crap since very young age.

Wait, does Google really have a "whiskey room" stocked with "a blow-your-mind collection of single-malt Scotches"?

> Few things are more American than drinking heavily

This sounds like particularly weird Americentrism, but fine

Article title needs changing, "America has a Drinking Solution"

> During the Q&A, someone in the audience told him about the Ballmer Peak—the notion, named after the former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, that alcohol can affect programming ability. Drink a certain amount, and it gets better. Drink too much, and it goes to hell. Some programmers have been rumored to hook themselves up to alcohol-filled IV drips in hopes of hovering at the curve’s apex for an extended time.

This is almost certainly someone along the game of telephone taking the xkcd joke literally https://xkcd.com/323/

(the alt text says Apple uses schnapps IV’s - this is obviously not true in the comic context but someone along the way to printing this article “bit the Onion”)

[Australia]: "Hold my beer"

no we don't, we're just fond of a pint

Not as big as The Atlantic's relevance problem

From Russia this article seems saddening, and actually a reverse of what we have experienced in the past decade. Alcohol consumption dropped from historical top 18 L of pure spirit/year/person, to 9, which is lower than during Gorbachov's anti-aclohol campaign and at 1950-60s levels. [1][2]

My version of why it happened, is that

1) in the 2000s, Russians had an impression that everybody drank and had fun, and they tried to match the common standard. Same thing was revealed in sociological studies in Western universities: every student said he wasn't drinking much but others were drinknig, so he had to do the same. 2) In the USSR, propaganda condemned drinking and at the same time we had an impression we were the most drinking country (according to statistics, it was completely wrong in the 90s, but was almost true in the 2000s). The reasoning (to abstain or strictly limit drinking) was ready for anyone.

Alcohol consumption soared in 2000s, from 12 to 18 L/year. But when many tried drinking to have fun and discovered that it wasn't much finnier, but was definitely more painful, they decided to abstain and took the reasons from media/propaganda, which were bulletproof.

Another reason is that

3) Social fabric got denser, and you could find more and more ways to socialize and have fun: hobbyists groups, community meetings, debates and enlightment, etc. Grassroots socialization was moderately persecuted in the late USSR, while Communist party and trade union meetings were obligatory, hence until mid-2000s Russians were allergic to any collectivism.

So, many started having more social activities, and had less need to hang out with drinks, or drink at home.

Compared to 2000s,

* it's extremely rare now to make jokes, sketches or comedy shows around being drunk * people stopped having lots of drinks at office parties, stopped keeping alcohol -- nowadays nobody would care to bring wine or something else to the office in the first place

But generally, the culture is still quite restrictive towardrs drinking: student dorms strictly forbid alcohol, drinking is forbidden in most public spaces and in many cities it's enforced -- my friend got taken 5 times to police station to write a verbal, and then had to pay fines. (That said, in other cites one may walk down a street with a beer, nobody would care.)

[1] Road traffic mortality attributable to alcohol in Russia, Razvodovsky YE. DOI: 10.15761/MHAR.1000122 https://www.oatext.com/Road-traffic-mortality-attributable-t... alcohol consumption charts [2] Population Drinking and Homicide Rate in RussiaRazvodovsky YE*, DOI: 10.41 72/2167-0358.1000182 https://www.longdom.org/open-access/population-drinking-and-...

America needs alcohol control and a ban on high-capacity assault beverages.

I have probably the equivalent of a beer every two months lol. I'll be ok.

Alcohol is an extremely dangerous drug that is unfortunately normalized and expected by society. I wonder how much it is costing them in terms of healthcare, accidents, crimes, rape, etc.

Islam prohibited intoxicating drinks over 1400 years ago, and for good reason.

>Now some grocery stores have wine bars, beer on tap, signs inviting you to “shop ’n’ sip,” and carts with cup holders.

What the hell?! That's absurdly irresponsible and dangerous considering most people travel to the grocery store in a car. Why aren't local authorities stamping down on this?

Should suburban restaurants with parking lots and no pedestrian infrastructure be forbidden from serving alcohol?

What about one that is served by public transit, but still has a parking lot out back?

Where is the right place to draw the line?

At least at restaurants, alcohol is both more expensive and served with food - alcohol is dramatically less impairing when consumed with a meal.

I mean if you're asking me personally I'm happy with any extra alcohol restrictions, even acknowledging that many people would not be nearly as gun-happy as I and the social ills of prohibition. But my father is an alcoholic and I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

You can have a beer and still be well under the legal limit.

Obviously not not just the US. Drinking "culture" is too ingrained in our everyday lives. Alcohol addiction is totally normal, socially accepted and legally encouraged. I was appalled when our city allowed drinking alcohol in some of our parks as a Covid-19 measure to give people an alternative to drinking in restaurants or pubs. It makes me so sad that we realize we have a drinking problem and our solution is to give people spaces outside to indulge. In parks, right next to playgrounds. People here in Canada often point to Germany or Europe in general and say, well they're doing it and it works. No it doesn't work. Germany has a massive alcohol addiction problem, you can see it in families, at festivities but also in public. Sure it's nice as a young adult to be able to get alcohol 24/7 from a Kiosk or gas station but it's really is a symptom of a gigantic problem.

Lots of countries have an obesity problem, but the solution isn't to outlaw eating food in parks. If you are sitting outisde with friends having a beer shouldn't be a criminal activity. Addicts need help, and the justice system cannot offer that. Let the majority of the population who can control themselves live a normal life.

Can the majority of people control themselves though in the view of social normalisation of a poison like alcohol?

The very fact that you (as do most of us) consider it a "normal life" activity indicates a very skewed and unhealthy perspective has taken hold at a fundamental level.

> The very fact that you (as do most of us) consider it a "normal life" activity indicates a very skewed and unhealthy perspective has taken hold at a fundamental level.

I would argue it and the stats answers your own question. By in large yes they can. And personally I’m not one to judge peoples lifestyle decisions provided it’s not an epidemic of people doing things like b&E to hawk a motel microwave to get their next fix.

How do it and they answer the question in another way to mine given that it is a toxin and millions are using it to damage their health every day?

How many of those millions using could genuinely give up today forever easily if they wanted to?

Im not sure I follow. Or how you would quantify that. Im sure most could probably quit cold turkey without physical withdrawal if that is what you mean. It takes a lot more than 4-10 drinks/day to be at risk of DT or even tremors.

There are plenty of toxins that we freely ingest daily..Heck water in sufficient amounts is a toxin. Pretty much anything your liver has to process is a toxin in some form (i know thats simplifying it but still....).

It would be easy to argue its not even the most abused or greatest threat to our health. I would argue that would would be sugar, or more specifically HFCS. Thats in literally everything, from crackers to gatorade. It also abused by people ranging from young children, even toddlers to the elderly. And Obesity and related diseases kills at much higher rates. Congestive Hearth Failure alone kills around 500k people a year in the US..

And I would argue etOH isnt really even 2nd place in the list of normalized drugs we abuse readily. Caffeine is probably that one, and there are PLENTY that couldn't quit that cold turkey if they wanted (I am one of them, and have tried multiple times). Its also another one used by both kids and adults.

I'd agree with most of those (with the caveat they don't have the same direct link with misery, mental illness, violence, crime and general anti-social behaviour) but don't see how us accepting them is justification for accepting alcohol beyond a defeatist "it all sucks so why bother".

Neither was I talking about physical dependency particularly; I see enough people failing miserably on simple stuff like dry January ("ha ha I only lasted 3 days" and the like) to be extremely sceptical that it is as easy as you imply to walk away from, especially in a society which surrounds us with it and sells it as "social" and normal.

because for many...food is exactly that.

>with the caveat they don't have the same direct link with misery, mental illness, violence, crime and general anti-social behaviour

Many people use it exactly that way. Epecially with depression etc.

And ultimately I am not of the opinion that we need to manage other peoples vices, or sources of temporary happiness. Alcohol is a very social vice and 99% of people can manage it responsibly.

So provided they arent direct contributors to larger issues in society (such as meth/opiates directly causing crime etc.), I dont think the government needs to be in the business of restriciting people freedoms (which does include the freedom to self-destructive behavior).

Otherwise where do you stop? Mandating exercise? Banning burgers? Ultimately we cant nerf the world. Prohibition doesnt work, if the 20's doesnt show you just look at the drug war and marijuana.

99% of people can manage it responsibly.

This sounds like a made-up figure - even assuming you are being figurative, I suspect you are very optimistic.

So provided they arent direct contributors to larger issues in society

See previous comment. Alcohol clearly is.

I'm not suggesting outlawing. I'm suggesting no longer supporting. Looking back at the smoking problem, to me it seems that we managed to "fix" by doing exactly that, no advertising in public spaces, no smoking in public spaces. Make it less "normal", less convenient to do something that's objectively harmful to you and a burden on society.

> I'm not suggesting outlawing. I'm suggesting no longer supporting.

That sounds like doublespeak. Either you allow something or you don't. Not allowing drinking in parks falls firmly in the "outlawing" category.

I can't speak for other countries but in the USA smoking has always been allowed in open public spaces and still is. In fact most states don't even have laws banning it in indoors. Cigarette boxes have no graphic warnings. Yet the smoking rate in the USA has consistently been among the lowest in the world.

My example was of a municipality (Canada) that designated a place where it previously wasn't allowed to drink alcohol to be allowed. That's what I meant by "supporting". At least don't expand the options.

Due to COVID-19, people couldn't drink their healthy moderation where they usually do.

No amount of alcohol consumption is "healthy". There might be an amount up to which it's not considered harmful.

Not all countries have a binge drinking culture that they are introduced to in their teens like Canada, the UK, the US, Australia, etc. where it's celebrated for young people to get totally intoxicated.

In many countries, you have a couple of social drinks - even gasp at lunch or in public - and it's not a problem. Being falling down drunk isn't considered 'cool' - it's pathetic and embarrassing. Drinking isn't a competition to see how much you can consume before you either lose consciousness, make idiotic decisions, or start street fights.

That said, I absolutely see no problem with drinking in parks or in public and this works fine in Montreal. We have laws already for public drunkenness. We don't need a nanny state.

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