Marc Andreessen on Pausing Alcohol

It's a tough demon. I've had a somewhat similar experience.

In my late thirties, I started drinking wine. A bottle a day on each of my days off. I could handle that, easily.

I never drank (and to this day maintain a personal policy) during the work week. With stress and anxiety I don't want to even tempt myself going down that road.

About 2 years ago in my early 40's, I discovered how to enjoy hard liquor. A year ago whiskey. I actually enjoy the taste "neat", provided I have a quality liquor. Be it rum, tequila or whiskey. I drink alone, so I could drink all I wanted to, and not worry about anyone else. The hard liquor, age and anxiety did me in. I never got wasted, never hung over fortunately, but enough that the next morning I realized I had blackout periods. I would eat something I'd prepared or watched a show I wanted to watch, but remember none of it.

I struggled with it for a few months. I hated that feeling. Every week I hated myself that next morning. It fed into my anxiety over time, having lost some.

I can't imagine how people can do it regularly.

I haven't cut out drinking, but fortunately I have learned the new limits. I can enjoy drinking still, and when I start to feel off, where I used to say "one more is ok, you'll be fine," I have managed to convince myself to stop at that point.

Things are so much better now that I've taught myself to enjoy and when to stop. I can only see cutting it out completely as when dieting cutting out certain foods - it leads to temptation and misery.

I can relate to that. I would drink a bit after a hard day. But then I got a stressful job and it was a daily thing (I was watching mad men too). It took a lot of time to understand that I was using it to mask my stress (shrink said that I was self medicatin). And much more to understand that I’m better without it. Life is not as colorful (and I still drink sometimes to get that joy) but I’m a better person for myself without it

What is interesting with these posts, is that you almost never see someone writing the opposite "I never drank for most of my life, then decided to pick up alcohol and it has the best decision I ever made and regret not making it sooner."

I too experienced the sensation that stopping alcohol makes the evenings drab. That sensation fades in time. It wasn’t that your evenings were colorful it was that alcohol blinded you to the fact that they weren’t.

The color comes back when you surround yourself with thoughtful, interesting people who you like. Alcohol was just numbing you to the banality of everyday life. The way through is to overcome it not to ignore it.

for those who don't use twitter:

"Always carry a flask of whiskey in case of snakebite, and furthermore always carry a small snake." -- W. C. Fields

About six months ago, I stopped drinking alcohol. I feel much better, and I’m mad as hell about it.

I never really drank through my 20s and 30s, but grew to really enjoy whiskey through my 40s, coincident with “Mad Men”, and roughly a thousand academic studies that proved that alcohol is actually good for you. Win/win!

I had read that the sure sign of an alcoholic is someone who drinks at night, by himself, at home, so I decided to only drink at night, by myself, at home.

I was even scurrilously quoted as saying “the perfect day is 10 hours of caffeine followed by 4 hours of alcohol”, which I did indeed say, and which is still indeed true.

Unfortunately, in recent years, it’s become clear that most or all — probably all — of the scientific studies on the benefits of alcohol are fake, the scientists unwitting or witting victims of selection effects. As Michael Crichton says, “wet streets cause rain”, or rather wet streets don’t cause rain. It turns out that sick people often don’t drink, or subjects just lie to researchers about their consumption outright. There go the studies.

It is now pretty definitively clear that no amount of alcohol is good for you. Andrew Huberman recently summed this conclusion up on his podcast; the topic made me so enraged I never listened to the episode, but I did read the notes.

Andrew says “the best amount of alcohol to drink is no alcohol” — imagine someone who both hates and loves humanity that much.

Since I stopped drinking, I feel much better. I don’t need as much sleep, but my sleep is better. I’m more alert through the day. I’m cogent and focused at all times. I have more energy when I exercise, and it’s easier to control my diet.

It’s great, and I am super mad about it.

I feel like the color has drained out of my evenings[]. Spending time with people is still fun, but now it’s hard to sit still and watch a movie or read a book and unwind at the end of a hard day. I’m more prone to just work until bedtime. Grump grump grump.

Frankly, I don’t know what Elon is doing farting around with cars and rockets and Twitter, why doesn’t he solve THIS problem[*].

And one of these days, I am going to get deeply, seriously, hammered.

But not today!

[] A lot of people I know are substituting cannabis or hallucinogens for alcohol. I’m not, I won’t touch any of those things — a topic for another time.

[*] I’ve been trying all the alcohol free whiskeys, wine, and beer. So far, no luck on the whiskeys. For wine, Sovi is pretty good. For beer, there are quite a few good choices; I’ve become partial to Hopwtr, which is zero calorie hop-flavored sparkling water. I’m still not drinking either at breakfast, though I am tempted.

wait wtf is this long form tweet bs?