Mixed Feelings About Alcohol
0) for some people, alcohol is addictive and life-derailing, to the point where I feel bad writing a post called Mixed Feelings About Alcohol. It's very hard to say this without sounding corny but if you think there's any chance you're one of those people, please talk to someone instead of reading this blogpost. I've had friends who've had good experiences with AA and there's also a drug you can take. I don't know nearly enough about either of these but just, like, please stop reading this and text someone to get the conversation started, or email me and I'll help you figure it out.
1) I generally think that a lot of life is about trying to avoid ruts, and that more people should try to shake their mental snowglobes more often. Alcohol is famous for reducing inhibitions, and in many ways I think that's good. Sometimes you need a stimulus to throw off the bowlines and sail away from the safe harbor, and maybe most ideally that stimulus would be I listened to my small still inner voice and realized in a balanced way that I should ask out Jo, but since realistically that is hard for many of us, it's helpful that there's a substance that greatly increases the chances you will ask out Jo.
2) But shaking the snowglobe isn't risk-free. You really might do something stupid, or regrettable, and I don't think there's any way around that: we build up these protective shells for a reason, and breaking the shell will always be a risk, even if sometimes it's a risk worth taking. (E.g. I have mixed feelings about therapy in part because it seems obvious to me that any activity which can make you dump your boyfriend / quit your job / leave your hometown is obviously a high-risk, high-reward proposition. But that's for another day).
3) Even without great confessions, alcohol's inhibition-lowering has a useful social function as a kind of trust mechanism. I think this is (one reason) why business deals were historically sealed over raucous drinking sessions: if you get incredibly drunk with someone and the worst thing you discover is that they can't sing for s**t, you have some information that they're not hiding anything business-relevant from you. On the other hand, if the drinking causes their loose lips to say they can't believe you were willing to pay $— for this project, nobody else was willing to pay even one-fourth that, maybe you're ready to ghost the deal.
This function is useful, both in professional and personal settings! And it's hard to replace sans spirits: late nights? mutual friends? seeing what they do when things go wrong? None of these are exactly analogous.
4) One of my long-time hobby-horses is that we misunderstand history because successful moral revolutions (abolition, women's suffrage) are remembered as moral revolutions, but failed moral revolutions are remembered as.... weird historical quirks, or something, even though they would have been remembered as moral revolutions if they'd succeeded.
As a result, we think of moral revolutions as more "inevitable" than they really are, and more likely to abide. But this isn't true, and the shining example of that is Prohibition in the United States, which was understood in its own time as the next great moral frontier – explicitly in the mold of abolition – that would save the widow and the orphan and bring light to the darkness.
My mixed feelings about alcohol go so far as to think that we might all be better off if alcohol were indeed abolished. And yes it's different to have a society with No X than to personally boycott X, but still it's weird to be in the position of "in many ways I think this thing is good for me – not just enjoyable but actually good – but also I wonder if it should be banned, and wouldn't be shocked if future generations see it as evil."
5) For moderate drinkers, the health effects of alcohol seem to be mediated by its negative effects on sleep. These effects are greatly reduced by drinking earlier in the day – with a half life of 4 or 5 hours, every drink you have at 2pm should be about 1/4 as impactful on your sleep as a drink at midnight, and I suspect it's more extreme than this because of added effects of alcohol-driven dehydration or compensatory overhydration. The old saw says not to drink before 5pm, and the other old saw says it's always 5pm somewhere, but I wonder if a better norm would be never drink after 5pm in your timezone. (Yes this is incompatible with a 9-5 job, but equally I'm fine with saying "only drink on holidays, and even then only in the daytime")
6) How famous is the If By Whiskey speech amongst youse? Anyway, I think it's very good; mixed feelings about alcohol from 1952:
I want you to know that I do not shun controversy. On the contrary, I will take a stand on any issue at any time, regardless of how fraught with controversy it might be. You have asked me how I feel about whiskey....
If when you say whiskey you mean the devil's brew, the poison scourge, the bloody monster, that defiles innocence, dethrones reason, destroys the home, creates misery and poverty, yea, literally takes the bread from the mouths of little children; if you mean the evil drink that topples the Christian man and woman from the pinnacle of righteous, gracious living into the bottomless pit of degradation, and despair, and shame and helplessness, and hopelessness, then certainly I am against it.
But, if when you say whiskey you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine, the ale that is consumed when good fellows get together...; if you mean the stimulating drink that puts the spring in the old gentleman's step on a frosty, crispy morning; if you mean the drink which enables a man to magnify his joy, and his happiness, and to forget, if only for a little while, life's great tragedies, and heartaches, and sorrows.... then certainly I am for it.
This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise.