How sober should a writer be?
yalereview.org
yalereview.org
So how sober has a simple answer if you care about your health : fully sober.
The way I see it / choose to live my life, not that it’s the “right” way: I enjoy certain things, like wine, in moderation that may have some detrimental health effects. However, a glass of wine and a nice sunset is something that brings me a lot of joy. I’d argue that a certain degree of “ah, fuck it” is psychologically healthy which can improve overall health.
I also have a bourbon and cigar on Sunday nights, usually paired some Jazz or an old movie. Sometimes I put butter on my bread even though it’s “bad” for my arteries. Let the chips fall where they may.
Thanks for sharing.
I also see a lot of over indexing on minutia. For example, worrying about drinking a couple glasses of wine, but then never exercising and sitting at a desk for 18 hours/day.
There's also the mental health aspect that you spoke about.
I have a watch that measures HRV and have seen nothing that seems a signal linked to behavior.
A doctor told me that ~10% of people who drink become alcoholics.
That's too prevalent to say we " generally seem to handle it just fine"
It is perfectly valid to say “I’ve seen bad stuff with alcohol and chosen to not partake”, and it is also kind of deeply weird to say “I don’t engage in anything with a <90% success rate” and then not give any other examples.
My parent's formulation can be used with other drugs in cases that are still reasonable. For example:
1. Many smokers I know have lived to old age.
2. Therefore "I'm not particularly interested in theories about how my heath demands" not smoking cigarettes.
Alcohol abuse is can have a negative impact quality of life as well as the length of the life (this comes from mental and physical health effects). So you could live a very long life with alcohol induced depression/anxiety/diabetes etc.
The last part definitely applies as well to your own statement that we generally seem to handle it just fine. It's interesting to see what happens to communities who don't have thousands of years of history with alcohol when it's introduced. For example the Native American population, or the coloured population of south africa.
Europeans and other groups who have had much longer exposure to alcohol do seem to handle it better, but possibly just because the people who couldn't handle it were selected out of our respective gene pools. But, even then, not really. There's a very good documentary about drinking in the UK called Drinkers Like Me, that really shows the hidden cost of alcohol on the health of people in the UK [0].
There are many other things we've done okay with for long periods of time, like lead plumbing (which we used for about 2 thousand years!), which definitely had long term negative effects on us.
Survivors that do not drink: Valid, unbiased, should be counted
Like the survivors weren't the kinds of people who smoked a pack of cigarettes a day, were drunk most nights in their 40s, nor weighed 350 pounds for a majority of their lives... so they weren't doing the obviously very unhealthy things.
But at the same time they weren't health fad people.
People that declare themselves immune to death because they avoid [x substance] can have some insane ideas about diet, exercise, sleep, stress and [y substance]. Believing that the world is simple and controllable is a dangerous intoxicant.
If you care ONLY about your health
I recall reading an NYT article about the relative health risk of various drinking levels. It seems that light drinking does not have much of an effect on longevity:
> For those who have two drinks a week, that choice amounts to less than one week of lost life on average [1]
Could it reduce quality of living without reducing lifespan? I suppose. But I had been led to believe, by many news articles, that drinking even one drink a week was going to do me lots of harm.
My takeaway from this is that news outlets like to get clicks by telling people surprising and terrible things.
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/15/magazine/alcohol-health-r...
Show Mr. and Mrs. F. to Number—[1]
The Crack-Up[2]
[1] https://fitzgerald.narod.ru/zelda/shownumber.html
[2] https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/f-scott-fitzgerald-...
Adderall: at one point in time I think half the engineers in the bay were popping these. They were practically free and available everywhere during the dot com bubble recovery.
Weed: A good number of JS engineers I know are just miserable people to work with till they smoke a joint.
Drinking: From casual to alcoholics, drinking culture used to be huge in many bay area offices. This has died down... still there but more discrete.
LSD: there is a shocking amount of this, your average dev team likely has someone who micro-doses if not more...
Cocaine and MDMA have gone the way of the dodo: fent made them mostly non starters.
For me, it's early morning workouts. If I have time to do jiujitsu at 7am, then my entire day is super charged. I've tried with other sorts of workouts, but I think there's something about being put under that much stress first thing in the morning that makes the rest of the day feel like easy mode.
A lot of us are drinking less, but I’m not sure we’ve really come up with a suitable replacement yet - socially speaking. I would be more interested to explore that.
Edit: To be clear, some of my favorite writers were very heavy into drugs and alcohol: Kerouac, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, etc. I’m not criticizing their work - which again are some of my personal favorites - but if you read their biographies they often don’t end well. My thinking is what would these novels look like if written in 2025 and not set against the backdrop of substance abuse.
I have had interesting experiences with low (but not micro) doses of LSD. It felt way more interesting than alcohol and way more safe and you can be much more functional than with alcohol while having a great time.
But the effects are way too long (~8 to 10 hours at low doses) to be a good alcohol replacement at social settings.
In this dose range I can feel a little drunk but still have a conversation and be less impaired intellectually than with alcohol.
But it will last longer and, more importantly, I will not be able to sleep for hours which is the biggest blocker at using it at all for those situations.
I think a key part of freetime2's quoted excerpt is the part that relates to social acceptance.
Right now (well, not exactly now, but tomorrow-now) I can pop into any random over-21 bar near me and buy some drinks for myself and whoever else happens to be around.
And that will be perfectly OK, socially-speaking, according to anyone I'm buying a drink for, and the bartender, and anyone who sees me behave in this fashion.
Even leaving aside such notions as legality and length-of-trip: LSD is a long, long way from reaching that level of social acceptance, don't you think?
I was just saying that a short duration psychedelic could, chemically speaking, be a good replacement for alcohol with pretty much all the benefits without a lot of downsides.
But I agree we are far from there. And there is also the case for the taste of alcoholic beverages.
That being said, I do wish that psychedelics were more socially accepted as I do think positive outcomes are possible when used in moderation.
I like this reasoning. If a character in a book does drugs then the story isn’t interesting, if a character in a book doesn’t do drugs it is.
In particular, how do you feel when you do that? Mildly elated? Slightly cheesed-off but still cheery?
>Why would anyone with a brain poison themselves voluntarily?
Getting back to this, some people also hurt themselves, with the specific goal of hurting themselves, or to attain something by it, or to give expression to their feelings. Specifically, I'm meaning self-harm here. And substance abuse can be partly done for self-harming reasons. And therefore it's very bad taste to assert that people doing this "don't have a brain". That's denying part of human experience, which no good person ever did in human history.
Don't get me wrong, it's absolutely valid not to support people harming themselves, or to not understand, or relate as to why they are doing it. But since you see that many people are doing it, you can suppose that it's something you don't understand, rather than all of them being stupid.
I could agree that inebriated, fried brains are easier to control by the rich. Sale of alcohol was always a mean of controlling populace and extracting wealth from it.
> Alcohol, for example, lowers stress, and inhibitions in general, so it's easier to strike up a conversation, or to share a vulnerable secret and feel good about it, or to start dancing.
Ale those things are super easy, when the culture doesn't force you to drink first to allow you to do them.
> And substance abuse can be partly done for self-harming reasons. And therefore it's very bad taste to assert that people doing this "don't have a brain".
Self-harm is never smart.
I write my best code a little tipsy
Though both of them can combine for a very interesting experience, or so I've heard...
(Nerd snipe: cocethelyne is uniquely cardiotoxic, and is somehow even worse than cocaine. Even amphetamine salts are "healthier".)
Cocethelyne is the result of mixing cocaine with alcohol… should I be surprised that cocaine plus another substance is worse than cocaine?
The primary "risk" with polydrug abuse (especially uppers + downers) is that you end up taking much more than you would normally, and once the upper wears off, the downer depressed your breathing, pote being fatal.
But with coke + alcohol, even a "normal" quantity of both when combined is far worse. It's a bunch of heart signalling stuff that affects blood pressure and a few other things, in ways that really aren't good. Which is honestly pretty impressive because coke alone is an excellent way to fuck up your heart (credits, Rohin Francis/Medlife crisis, a cardiac surgeon on YouTube who posts way too less because presumably the stress of working for NHS isn't good for a doctor's health either.)
(Iirc alcohol and Tramadol are 2 things to typically never mix with other drugs; there's a matrix chart about drug interactions and these 2 are counter indicated with most other drugs. Weed, funnily and unsurprisingly, has one of the least interactions with other drugs.)
And no you shouldn't be surprised, mixing two harmful things is often worse than the sum of doing each alone and that should be the base assumption.
Btw there are also the 6 peaks in the Balmer Series, which is another reference if anyone wants to get into it
Haha...when I used to golf, 2 beers (American swill, no fancy high alcohol types) was the optimal amount. It was just enough to make me relax, which is so critical for a good golf swing.
But, it feels good.
I wouldn't trust logic I wrote with alcohol in my system, or any tests that I wrote with alcohol, but getting at the heart of "Why does this library need to exist? What should it actually allow?" is enhanced a tiny bit by a mildly-altered mental state.
Over time, I've decided that it is because I get chatty with wine, and designing a library interface feels like a conversation between me and future engineers who might use said library. And then I stash it away to read and reconsider while sober.
Standard ADHD meds often lead to playing Factorio for 17 hours in a row and forgetting to eat.
Ain't that the truth.
(It's almost like the birds can hear the loading screen, and that hearing this prepares them for their pre-dawn onslaught of particularly-profound singing.)