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Comment by asiachick | Hacker News Reader

Why I'm sticking with alcohol. Because the cultures I love embrace it. I love going to an izakaya with friends and co-workers. I love drinking under the cherry blossoms with 100k others. I love commiserating with friends about the heat at a rooftop beer garden. I love sitting on the edge of the Kamo river on a summer night mingling with my friends. I love going to a restaurant street with all the kinds of foods and crowds drinking together. I love finding the tiny bars in tiny alleys that hold 5 to 20 people max.

My experience of drinking in the USA sucked. My experience of drinking in Japan was pretty great. I wouldn't give up those experiences and I believe they wouldn't have happened or been as good without the social lubrication of alcohol.

I suspect many cultures have good (UK pubs?) and bad (death from vodka in Russia?)

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I'm sticking with it too. I love the way it makes me feel, I love the taste, I love the little head rush as it first hits your system. I love spending hours talking rubbish over a bar table with friends.

I love the science behind brewing, and the sense of achievement I get from making a good beer or cider, and I love enjoying those results with friends and family.

The UK has a very mixed culture on this (and I can only really speak for England, and southern england at that). The youth binge and go mad, it's loud and unsightly and the rest of us try to avoid their pukey drinking holes. The quieter pubs are a great place to have some decent food, a few local beers and a really chill time.

Alcohol is toxic, it's addictive, it's carcinogenic, it's all sorts of bad things, but it's also added a lot to my life. These days (I'm in my 40s and in Australia) I don't overdo it very often, I go to beer festivals and craft bars and enjoy the cameraderie and the silliness and the laughs.

I'd still like cannabis legalised though...

I do all of those things in Japan without alcohol and have just as much fun

Every sober night ends exactly the same. You get tired, you say goodbye to the people still staying out, you go home, drink water, and go to bed.

Drunken, joyful reverie without inhibition is living poetry. Sobriety is admirable, important, and just. But no, you did not 'do all of those things'.

I disagree that it's true for all people. When I was young and in college with mild social anxiety, yes, alcohol was an excellent social lubricant and made for much more enjoyable nights.

But now that I'm in my 30's and comfortable being open in just about any social situation, I don't find that alcohol adds much. I can lower my inhibitions on my own.

Anecdotally, we're on hacker news, none of us should be that removed from hackathons where mid 20 year olds stay up if not all night until 2am and start by 8.

Anecdotally, at 35 I still sometimes wake up at 2 and stay up until sunrise thinking of cool new ideas.

Some people are extroverts, get charged meeting new people, doing exciting things, get endorphin rushes dancing until the sun rises.

There are sober people at burning man.

Or staying late at a party and speaking with the last few people to leave, really opening up to them.

The way life turned out though, I'm not in touch with any of those people anymore. The idea of >"You get tired, you say goodbye to the people still staying out, you go home, drink water, and go to bed." sounds amazing, because I have energy to do personally rewarding things the next day without feeling wiped out and hungover.

Well if that is the standard, alcohol pales in comparison with MDMA.

Only if your sober friends are also boring homebodies

> You get tired, you say goodbye to the people still staying out, you go home, drink water, and go to bed.

Sounds like the perfect ending to a nice evening, where's the problem? Fear of missing out?

This is what I wanted to say but could never find the words

There are a lot of assumptions in this reply that are absolutely not true for plenty of folks. More of a summarization of your sober friends, maybe.

If no one had the drunken outlet, how might the inhibited baseline change?

You have as much fun as the poster you’re replying to? How do you know that?

It's unknowable, and in the absence of prior data, it's equally possible he had more fun than the poster he's replying to.

This is what I love about it too!

Though I rarely drink for any other reason

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