1000 Days Without Drinking
andrew-quinn.me
andrew-quinn.me
Alcohol and its metabolites directly harm and kill nerve cells, contributing to a reduction in brain volume. Here it's particularly important to remember that neurons, if they grow back at all, don't do so anywhere near the rate of, say, your skin cells. But it's also true that alcohol use can damage blood vessels, including in the brain. It's not hard to suspect that causes less efficient neural activity over time even if no actual neurons are killed.
After reading the post: Yes, you get where I'm coming from exactly. I'm so glad there's someone else out there who recognizes the critical role of memory here, both as a catalyst and as something which needs to fall back into the soil.
Anyone know if I have a risk of becoming an alcoholic? I’m 50 and never really started drinking until my late 20s.
What should one look out for?
My two cents: addiction is about losing the ability to control how much of something that you do. I'd get worried once you start finding reasons to drink earlier and more of it during sessions. I also believe that alcoholism is a disease that runs in the family, so if you know someone close that had it, then assume that you're at risk. Lastly, after seven years of traveling for work as a consultant (and, now, as a sales engineer) and seeing loads of people slam down beers, wines and all sorts of other things at 9am, I firmly believe that alcoholism is much more prominent (and, to a degree, socio-normalized) than people talk about.
Not wanting to be an alarmist, but if you fear about your consumption being problematic, it probably is.
Talk to AA instead of strangers online
One month is long enough time so that if you are addicted, it will feel like forever. One month a year still leave you more than 90% days to enjoy a nice drink.
This is a major motivator for me for vices in general. When you say one thing then do another you shouldn’t be surprised when you don’t get any compliance.
I found this line thoughtprovoking.
From 5-20 I was severely depressed. Now it's been 10 years, and I'm not depressed anymore. In fact, those years feel like a factual moment in my life, not something whose emotional state I can really recall and bring in my present life -- unlike, for example, the grief of losing any pet in my life. That still comes back with raw power.
>Why, though, shouldn’t we just double-down on orthodox prohibitionist remedies? Because you wind up punishing a vastly larger number of innocent people, that’s why. [...] When you ban intoxicants, you conceivably reduce abuse, but you definitely end up punishing an enormous number of innocent hobbyists - as well as the professionals who supply them.
I linked that page because, when I was an alcoholic, I was also an asshole to the people around me. I mooched off my parents, deeply worried my brothers, and refused to pull my own weight even a little bit in the household economy.
But there are plenty of people who drink alcohol who are not assholes because of it. They should not be thrown under the bus because I personally become an asshole when exposed to the substance.
The war on drugs has been a failure, but giving addicts the death penalty (as opposed to helping them stop being addicts) isn't very good either.
If libertarianism was all of the world's beaches, a thimbleful of sand would be those who actually care about liberty.
That this approach doesn’t scale seems to be lost on them.
The linked post implies that most drinkers should continue drinking, and maybe even drink more precisely because they aren't the kinds of drinkers that give alcohol a bad name. If you feel like being edgy, try taking that as your soapbox instead. Much more interesting than saying "the optimal amount of X'ing is nonzero" given a large enough group of people X'ing.
Sorry for the confusion.
Sorry, TB. I can't give you a magic pass on being wrong just because you are also an asshole. That wouldn't be fair to all the correct assholes out there who suffer for their art.