On Alcohol

Here's an excerpt from an essay I wrote exactly 8 weeks into my sobriety:

> Sobriety sucks, but hck it feels incredible. The morning sun no longer sears my eye sockets. My esophagus isn’t eaten alive by acid every night. My heart doesn’t attempt to leap from my chest.*

I'm now 76 weeks in, and I can confirm sobriety was one of the best decisions of my life! Highly recommended.

I drink heavily. Sometimes it occurs to me that I need a break. These breaks are sometimes months long, but after just a few days I feel amazing. I haven't gone for eighteen months as the author describes, but it might be interesting to see whether the benefits begin to mount again. For me they seem to top out at about a month off.

Good for the author.

I took a year off because I agree it can be draining and time consuming ad expensive. I didn't take 18 months to adapt or anything so maybe the author was quite a serious alcoholic to begin with ?

Drinking is a huge part of the culture where I live and we start young. It’s the fuel for almost all social engagements and an overwhelmingly common way to cope with life in general.

This sounds like a problem I agree, one of the other reasons I took the year off was because I lived in a community like this and I wanted to show my fiends that having a break can be done. I think that once getting off the alcohol it's important to actually make those important life changes so not to slip back into depression and then start drinking again. It's hard to say what comes first, the life situation that makes people depressed, or the alcohol.

The fact that most people are given the choice between alcohol and nothing causes far more harm than it prevents in the Western world. Most people, if given the option, would seek out substances that work with their health and life and lifestyle. And many would choose nothing. But our alcohol-only system is the worst of all worlds. It creates a socially engineered critical mass of drinkers that exerts tremendous peer pressure to drink throughout all aspects of life. And it prevents people from exploring other substances, many of which are far less detrimental to personal and public health than alcohol, and many of which are better suited to purposes like stress relief.

Alcohol is hands down terrible for the body. I'm becoming more and more convinced from scientific studies and my own observations that no amount, not even one glass of wine a night, is physically beneficial.

It's the psychological benefits outlined here that are much harder to persuade away - mediator of anxiety, social lubricant, escape into a little bit of fun. Nonetheless, for me, the physical toll is just not worth it anymore.

Marijuana is even more difficult to dissuade. There is a physical toll to excessive smoking, but it's much less pronounced than alcohol, and seems largely non-existent when consumed in moderation, the equivalent of a glass of wine a day. The only inarguable cost is the time one isn't sober and able to be socially/economically/physically productive.

Nonetheless this loss of time, too, seems more and more valuable to me, and my marijuana intake is naturally declining.

As time goes on the statistics on alcohol consumption and substance addiction make more and more sense to me: a third of Americans don't drink AT ALL, most drink less than a glass a week, and most drug addicts naturally quit without intervention. Most of us come to the truth eventually, it seems.

The reality is that most people drink less with age and from what I gather it is often because alcohol simply loses its appeal with age.

One guy in some article said that in his youth, getting drunk was a lot of fun with relatively little in the way of negative consequence and now it's a short bit of fun followed by a bad hangover. It's just no longer got the same cost-benefit ratio.

I read this in CBT, that things like drinking alcohol are "safety behaviors" that allow us to not fully test our fears and anxieties.

After dropping my safety behaviors and progressively overloading my fears for almost a year (on and off), I can definitely say that it's crazy how far I've come. I couldn't have imagined being comfortable doing things I'm able to do now. I do have a long way to go still.

But the key really is consistency. Just like your physical muscles atrophy after leaving the gym, your fearlessness atrophies if you don't constantly target and stimulate your fear muscles (without resorting to safety behaviors). It does get easier though, once you reach maintenance mode. But you gotta keep doing it.

I enjoy drinking, both alone and with friends. I basically go by Hitchens rules, don't drink on an empty stomach, don't drink cheap booze, don't drink when you're depressed and if you have a hangover you're drinking too much.

I think alcohol is both incredibly enjoyable just as food and drink, Scotch, Wine, beer in many meals I wouldn't want to miss, and it's relaxing and pro-social. I stopped drinking for a few months a few years ago and I didn't really notice any change other than just being more bored and missing having a good glass of whiskey.

When I was a teenager every summer on the weekends we'd get a crate of beer with friends and go down to the lake, swim, grill and drink. (thankfully legal in Germany from 16 on), today's young generation seems to have replaced it with sitting at home in isolation. As far as I can tell, everywhere where drinking culture declines it pretty much gets replaced with nothing.

My personal rule is that I don’t drink alone.

As a social lubricant or a ritual, I love alcohol. The danger, as I’ve observed with people close to me, is when you numb or seek relief with it. That’s bad path.

But it’s up to you. I fear my genetics, ymmv.

For a contrarian view on the benefits of drinking (up to one drink a day) see this interesting thread: https://x.com/chrismasterjohn/status/1731863379902349781

"In the study widely claimed to show that there is no safe level of alcohol for the brain, going from zero to one alcohol unit (half a drink per day) was not associated with any harm in females, and was associated with slightly better brain markers in males."

There are some great non-alcoholic beers available now. I discovered a few flying friends around and not being able to drink but wanting to take them to a pub. Athletic is one, started by a hedge fund trader and is the fastest growing.

I have substituted liquid sativa weed drinks for alcohol. I am still able to have a “drink” in social settings.

I am convinced it is the future of partying for those still looking for the positives of alcohol, without as many of the harmful effects.

Not familiar with this author but I enjoy the format and font he chose for the site; it's calming.

After reading the "about" section, I think this and the other articles are more the author talking to himself, so I won't offer any critique just as I wouldn't with someone's diary. Good for him in recognizing he wanted to remember such things and starting to write them down.