While your comment gave me a chuckle, I find it's (perhaps unintentional) flame bait which will steer the discussion into an unproductive crapfest instead of staying on the topic, which is alcoholism in America. That's to say, it won't foster any intelligent discussion. I bet this is why some have expressed disagreement.
Emptiness, in some cases. Imagine living a life of poverty, or being trapped in a situation you realize you don't have the tools or privilege to escape (having to care for many dependents, no time to go to school, or can't afford to pay for it because you're trying to scrape enough for rent).
Having no direction or hope for a better future (perceived or real) has driven people I've known to alcoholism.
The Wikipedia pages for most major religions provide a decent set of candidates for further investigation. Ditto a huge percentage of fiction that's considered "literature", if you're into that kind of thing.
Some of the more recent research on alcohol suggests that it isn't so much of an escape. Instead it creates a type of myopia for the mind, shifting focus from the long-term to the short-term.
For some people, it can really help live more in the moment, enjoy time with friends, and temporarily put aside all the stress and worries about the future.
The unit for a single drink is a fixed measurement, so someone pouring a tall glass of wine or a very stiff drink could be consuming 2-5 “drinks” in a single glass, but regardless the consumption is extremely high.
It sounds like a lot but I know lots of people in rural areas with extreme poverty (grew up in one of the poorest counties in the midwest) where this sort of drinking was commonplace. They drink as soon as they wake up and don't stop until they fall asleep. Anecdotal I know but certainly believable for me.
The average of the top 10% of anything is going to be absurd compared to the population average; probably around 2 standard deviations over the mean. If you looked at the average caloric consumption at the top 10% of people, you'd probably find the amount similarly unbelievable.
Ten drinks isn't that much hard liquor: it's about 450ml. That's a little more than a can (392ml).
Yes, obviously weight also plays a big role in my previous statement. But the statement is still true: given that over half the population doesn't drink daily, if they decide to drink 10 drinks, it will have drastic physical effects. For what it's worth, the modern day description of "tolerance" is merely the individual's ability to mask their inebriation. There is a big difference of not being affected by something (being tolerant) and fooling others that you are unaffected.
Again, the modern view on alcohol tolerance is that people develop masking abilities. Their BAC and physiological effects remain relatively constant from [1]:
> Functional tolerance refers to a phenomenon where a person can ingest significant amounts of alcohol – either at once or slowly over time – and not appear to be intoxicated. A person who has developed a functional tolerance to alcohol may be under the influence of alcohol without it being noticeable, thus allowing them to participate in certain daily activities in a manner that appears normal to others.
This is also what TIPS, the training given to bartenders, teaches [2]. Finally, to the point about spreading out the drinks. Yes, this is how people consume large amounts of alcohol daily. I maintain that someone who barely drinks or never drinks will be incapable of doing their job after 4 hours, even after spreading out the drinks. They certainly shouldn't drive a vehicle.
This link is only for "High-Functioning Alcoholism" which is not the same as the entire spectrum of Alcoholism, your link even mentions this in the first sentence.
> When someone is colloquially termed a “high-functioning alcoholic”, they may be able to carry out daily tasks of living [trimmed] without exhibiting the full range of clinical impairments commonly associated with alcohol use disorders.
The sources listed in the article further breakdown different types of tolerances and their effects. For example source 5,
> Tolerance means that after continued drinking, consumption of a constant amount of alcohol produces a lesser effect or increasing amounts of alcohol are necessary to produce the same effect (1). Despite this uncomplicated definition, scientists distinguish between several types of tolerance that are produced by different mechanisms.
They then list the details of "Functional Tolerance", "Acute tolerance", "Environment-dependent tolerance", "Learned tolerance", "Environment-independent tolerance", "Metabolic Tolerance".
To imply that Functional Tolerance is synonymous with all forms of alcohol tolerance is incorrect, and it's incorrect to say that's "the" modern view on alcohol tolerance.
Source [6] is a book called "Understanding Why Addicts Are Not All Alike
Recognizing the Types and How Their Differences Affect Intervention and Treatment" which should tell you that generalizing all alcoholics into a single type is probably not the most correctly accepted modern view on alcoholism.
That's 60% of a fifth/750ml "regular" bottle of liquor. It's an enormous quantity of hard alcohol. If I drank that much in a day I would never be sober.
Honestly, as someone who has 2-3 drinks per day, I've always been more surprised by the amount of people who basically don't drink at all. In that chart it's over half of Americans.
Travel a bit, any you'll quickly discover that a couple drinks in the evening is basically normal in much of the world. I'm not arguing that it's healthy (it's not), but the median American really doesn't drink much - our Puritan values run deep.
As someone who doesn't drink more than 2-3 per week and have in the past been in the 2-3 per day category, perhaps it's related to age and/or kids. When kids were tots, I couldn't afford the time to socialize, and now I'm older, consumption has dietary/sleep impacts and I can't afford that too much. Also weirdly I simply don't enjoy the buzz as much.
I also drink about this much per week. I like a beer or wine or whiskey every now and again, but I've never really seen the point in getting buzzed or drunk (or high for that matter). When I do drink, I only have 1 or 2 at a time, not out of an express desire to stay sober, but because I'm usually pretty naturally satisfied by that amount.
For whatever reason, I like sobriety. It's strange to me that people should think we need a religious motive to prefer sobriety, as though escaping or distorting reality is inherently preferable. Maybe I equally misunderstand the motives of the heavy drinker?
>as though escaping or distorting reality is inherently preferable. Maybe I equally misunderstand the motives of the heavy drinker?
You understand the motives just fine. Reality for many people is some combination of boring, stressful, depressing, etc.
So yes, escaping reality is very much preferable to these people. And alcohol and other drugs are very effective at this.
To state the obvious, improving your situation so you don't want to escape reality would be preferable. But that takes a hell of a lot more time, motivation, resources, and effort than just cracking open that next beer.
> To state the obvious, improving your situation so you don't want to escape reality would be preferable. But that takes a hell of a lot more time, motivation, resources, and effort than just cracking open that next beer.
To that extent, I've gone through some very hard times (for me anyway--not interested in comparing traumas), and for whatever reason much of my cultural upbringing suggested I should reach for some whiskey; however, ultimately I was just too aware that that wouldn't fix my hurt and that "the only way through it was through it" cliche was ultimately true. What really got me through was accepting reality and acknowledging that even though reality was painful, avoiding pain isn't the objective in life (or that's my moral philosophy, anyway)--enduring a trial well is life-affirming. Embrace reality, truth, etc even if it sucks.
EDIT: "everything in my cultural upbringing" -> "much of my cultural upbringing". On reflection, I think the philosophy which allowed me to be successful was largely traditional, Judeo-Christian philosophy which permeates much of American culture. Credit where due.
> To state the obvious, improving your situation so you don't want to escape reality would be preferable. But that takes a hell of a lot more time, motivation, resources, and effort than just cracking open that next beer.
I would argue this isn't universally true. As I shared in another comment, I recently took a month-long break from drinking. For me it hasn't been difficult, but it's made life seem to explode with excitement and energy, just from taking alcohol out of my life. I think many people would benefit more than they expect just by cutting out alcohol for a month or even just a week.
> To state the obvious, improving your situation so you don't want to escape reality would be preferable. But that takes a hell of a lot more time, motivation, resources, and effort than just cracking open that next beer.
And sometimes when you try anyway, the universe decides to punish you for it. Some people experience this multiple times. I don't blame them for wanting to escape reality.
Speaking only for myself, it isn't about escaping or distorting reality. When I'm sober, I have zero desire to talk to strangers or people I'm not close with. I instinctively view it as an unwelcome intrusion when someone approaches me in public. Come to think of it, I get bored pretty quickly even in conversation with friends.
After a 3 or 4 drinks, the extroversion switch flips in my head and suddenly I want to stop and chat with just about anyone about any topic imaginable. This adds value to my life, and so I drink regularly and have a few at a time (not 10+ drinks a day though. That's probably more on the escaping reality level)
> It's strange to me that people should think we need a religious motive to prefer sobriety
I would not at all be surprised to see a strong correlation of people who are religious and people who never drink. Even "one drink a week" or whatever is a significantly different category than "zero drinks, ever."
I think I agree, but I’m not sure how that fits into the conversation. The OP was marveling at people who don’t drink heavily (and attributed their casual drinking to puritanism), not those who abstained altogether. People who abstain altogether in my experience are either religious, recovering alcoholics, or people who have been close enough to alcoholism to keep a wide birth. In my experience the latter camp is significantly bigger than the others, but that could be unrepresentative for any number of reasons (e.g., I don’t happen to hang out with many devout Muslims).
Eh, you throw out the 1/3 of the religious who have a direct religious prohibition against drinking and the correlation probably goes away.
Maybe depends on whether "would never drink again" and "basically never drink" are included in your definition of "never".
There are a lot of non-religious reasons people don't drink, and a lot of daylight between "one drink a week" and "zero drinks an ever". I fall into the "maybe 3-4 drinks per year" category. It could be more, it could be less -- alcohol just doesn't really occupy a different space for me than, say, pickles. I like pickles well enough, if one comes with my sandwich at a diner I'll eat it. But I only think to get a pickle from the jar in my fridge like once or twice a year, and eating pickles and drinking alcohol have about the same impact on my life and happiness.
Take it to the extreme of an LSD trip, you can get something out of it that you can't get any other way. You take a day to mentally dig into your psyche and cut through so many of your mental ruts, while having some crazy hallucinations.
Sobriety is great and preferable 99% of the time to me, but your framing of "escaping or distorting reality" is founded on a trust that your senses and current mental processes are objective reality and that reality is desirable.
Going away from the psychedelics, if I want to have an afternoon where I'm more giggly and enjoying of food, chemical enhancement for that experience seems like way to go, same way someone would listen to music to get in a work mood.
> Take it to the extreme of an LSD trip, you can get something out of it that you can't get any other way. You take a day to mentally dig into your psyche and cut through so many of your mental ruts, while having some crazy hallucinations.
Maybe. I'm unconvinced that this is the only way to achieve any kind of insight. In particular I'd be surprised if it outperforms a cup of coffee or a rhapsodical conversation for any type of insight.
> your framing of "escaping or distorting reality" is founded on a trust that your senses and current mental processes are objective reality and that reality is desirable.
How can a high be "more real" than what you perceive through your senses? That seems almost incorrect by definition, so I guess I plead guilty to the charge of believing that sober experiences are more real.
With respect to "I'm assuming that reality is desirable"--yeah, if you think reality isn't desirable, then you're escaping, so I think you're [agreeing violently][0] with me here. I am guilty of the charge that I think escapism is bad and confronting reality is good.
> How can a high be "more real" than what you perceive through your senses?
"Perceive" is the key word here. To draw an analogy, if your mind is a computer, your senses are raw data inputs, which your unconscious mind parses, filters, and transforms before the data is eventually passed to your conscious mind. Some hallucinogens give you a peek into this process - you get to see what's going on under the hood, so to speak.
Like a young child, you might find yourself enamored by the beauty of the simple greenness of a leaf.
These substances can teach you that there are many valid ways to "perceive" an event. It's not so much that what you perceive while intoxicated is "more real", but that it's an equally valid (and sometimes drastically different!) interpretation.
They're simple lessons that can mostly be learned without any drugs at all (meditation helps), but a proper trip can hammer a lesson home in such an immediate, visceral, enduring way that I'm not sure there's a sober equivalent.
Sometimes escaping can give you a little distance and a perspective from which you can see reality more clearly. Sometimes confronting reality is just (mis)applying ingrained cognitive patterns to a bunch of details.
Also, sometimes things are just really shitty and there's nothing that can realistically fix them and escapism actually is a reasonable choice.
> Also, sometimes things are just really shitty and there's nothing that can realistically fix them and escapism actually is a reasonable choice.
I don’t buy this. Even when you can’t fix things (and I’ve been there) you can still process through your emotions and accept and make sense of your new normal. You don’t have to do it all at once, but that’s the only path to recovery—drugs and alcohol won’t get you there.
>In particular I'd be surprised if it outperforms a cup of coffee or a rhapsodical conversation for any type of insight.
Ego death is a hell of a thing to experience. We can talk about it and how some people can reach it through years of meditation, but LSD is a sure ticket to it and the value of it is in the qualia of the experience, not the knowledge of what it is.
Imagine your psyche is a factory you've built over your life and you're standing high above it supervising. Regular introspection is walking through the lines and tuning the machine. Ego death is a tidal wave knocking down everything you've built, adjusting to your new reality, and the rest of the day is watching as it all comes back together. There's a level of forced commitment and intensity of the experience that you can't simulate. I'm not claiming you'll reach enlightenment, but something more akin to the learning from tearing down and rebuilding an engine, except it's ~~you~~.
There are real gains to going through it if you're of sound mind.
One reason some folks gravitate to mild-altering substances is "transcendent understanding"; drugs put the mind in enough of a different mode of operation that very frequently, it can enable you to understand things you can't understand, sober. And I don't just mean "fuzzy unprovable emotional things", I also mean concrete, empirical stuff like science, math, and programming. Some of this comes from "disinhibition"; some drugs like alcohol can remove various "writer's block" types of things where the mind (under normal, sober conditions) obstinately refuses to consider what, in retrospect, end up being painfully obvious solutions to a problem.
Some of it, though, genuinely comes from causing the mind to operate in a rather different mode and make connections and "leaps of understanding" that it just can't do under normal circumstances. It essentially forces a sort of "educational learning-difference" on you, and if you manage to muscle through and learn how to solve a problem in that state (and get the empirically correct answer), you've essentially allowed your mind to come up with a totally different approach to a problem it would never normally take.
Having previously been one of those programmers chasing the "Ballmer Peak", it definitely was more than just an XKCD joke; the joke worked because it was documenting a real phenomenon that's been known for ages. Several recreational drugs, like alcohol, marijuana, can also be used as "performance-enhancing" drugs in the same way things like Adderall can; it's down to careful dosing and discipline - you have to carefully stay in the "eye of the storm" and not get too inebriated, and you also need to exercise a careful awareness of how the drug's effects can "lead you astray" (i.e. something like Adderall can give you a rush of manic hyperfocus, but it's easy to waste this on irrelevant details, instead of focusing on something productive. There have been plenty of comedic stories of people taking Adderall and … instead of doing their homework, doing something daffy like carefully organizing all the books on their shelves … by color.) So you have to be aware of the drug's "biasing" effects and carefully wrangle your behavior during it.
All that said, I definitely recommend against long-term use of alcohol in particular, just due to the chronic toxicity of it. For a while it's great, but over time, it really starts to wear you down, and do more harm than good. Eventually you're so damn tired all the time, that any productivity gains from mental breakthroughs are wiped out. If it was used on rare occasions for breakthroughs/inspiration, it might be viable, but using it as an anti-adhd/procrastination drug (for which, anecdotally, it was very effective) just isn't sustainable, long-term.
I often drink flavored fizzy water - they are a great alternative to soda: no caffeine, no sugar, but some flavor and carbonation. Other times I drink water, or juice because it's there for the kids. Sometimes alcohol too, it really depends on the circumstances.
All the pediatricians and dentists I meet say juice is basically as bad as soda due to sugar content. I never imagined juice falling victim to new knowledge about health, but it makes sense considering sugar (and carbs) are basically public enemy number 1 for almost everyone in the world.
Total sugars is the relevant metric, although added sugar serves as a good proxy if you’re comparing nutritional labels.
A fruit smoothie that keeps all the fiber and hence is more filling and hence causes you to eat less sugar by way of eating less fruit overall is fine. A smoothie where you filter out the fiber or otherwise eat excess amounts of sugar would not be.
This. My parents never let me have soda or juice when I was just thirsty. That probably had more to do with saving money than health, but the constant repetition of "if you're thirsty, drink water" has been etched into my soul.
You can just drink whatever you want, the vast majority of people who drink wine have no idea and no interest in talking about the wine or food/wine pairings. If someone is giving you a hard time about your wine choices you could either turn it around on them and ask them to order for you. If it was me though I’d maybe just ask them to be less judgemental though.
One could easily see this as deeply Puritan reasoning in comparison to e.g. a stereotypical Southern European culture where the question is rather something like
“It’s cheap, and we all live to be 80 anyways. Why wouldn’t I casually drink alcohol while I enjoy a meal out with friends?”
Two Finns are in a bar. After hours of silence, one man raises his glass to the other and says, “Cheers.” The other man snaps back, “I didn’t come here for conversation.”
My experience of Spain was that people didn’t drink to excess. I specifically recall Feria de Abril where alcohol was abundantly available. It turns out being social is the focus, and the only inebriated people I saw were foreigners and a few teenagers.
New Zealand was culturally very different, where excessive drinking was strongly encouraged in the social groups I saw in my early 20s, and across a variety of social groups as I got older.
South Euros have no binge culture like the North Euros. While they are not abstaining, somehow overconsumption seems to be far less of a problem down there. Be it alcohol or food.
I just grew up hating alcohol by looking at grown ups acting stupid and mistreating their wives and children.
That's why I never developed a taste for alcohol. I sometimes drink socially but that is very rare: 3-4 times a year, 1 or 2 drinks each time. That's about it.
Statistically it is far more men than women; and since this account is from an anecdotal point of view, it’s entirely possible female abuse of alcohol wasn’t witnessed.
It’s just that some groups find the honest research inconvenient so they try, largely successfully, to suppress it. The suppression behavior on certain sides of issues has been discussed by plenty of reputable people, including Steven Pinker in his book The Blank Slate.
These days in order to believe the results of any research paper I need to read it for myself with an incredibly skeptical eye for what is being left out, how questions were asked, etc.
Most published research results are false, so it's not a good idea to believe individual papers whether or not they appear to be correct. It's not the purpose of publishing them either.
Basically why my Mom's side of the family barely drinks, myself included. My great grandfather was a drunken gambler who managed to drive the family into poverty to the point the only things the family owned were two chairs.
> but the median American really doesn't drink much - our Puritan values run deep.
For many of us, it's not about Puritanical values. We simply choose healthier behaviors.
It's true that the median alcohol drinkers in America doesn't drink much at all. The vast majority of alcohol is consumed by 10% of the population.
Drinkers tend to cluster with other drinkers, and non-drinkers tend to become less interested with attending gatherings that revolve around alcohol consumption. This can lead to misperceptions that either everyone is drinking a lot or no one is drinking much depending on which cluster you end up in. It's strange to hear some of my heavy drinking acquaintances insist that everyone drinks heavily, because that's what they see in their personal bubbles.
The parent is entirely wrong about it being puritan based. The US long ago lost its puritan influences as a primary. The US is a very different place today vs the 1960s or 1980s culturally. Puritanism is a small fraction of influence in the US at this point culturally.
The reason Americans drink less alcohol at the median, is due to how American populations are heavily distributed in housing developments, in suburbs, versus the higher density & primate cities that you see in nearly all of Europe. We gather less frequently European-style, we don't walk or bus or train nearly as much, so the majority generally avoids drinking & driving. In the US if you're going somewhere, the odds are high that you're driving to and from; drinking and driving is an incredibly high penalty risk to take now.
Anti-alcohol movements have been a feature of the US since the 1800s, I doubt a social historian would have difficulty drawing a line from the Puritans, to the Women's Temperance League to MADD. It's MADD's lobbying for laws against drunk driving that put the nail in the coffin of 1960's Mad Men style 3 martini lunches and 1980's high school ragers.
Most "American Values" are basically just puritan ethics. In America, you won't see someone sipping a beer on the subway for the same reason you see someone take take a 4 week summer vacation, or a nipple on TV. Most of the quirky values that separate us from western europe (like hard work, temperance, abstinence, etc.) can be traced back to our puritan roots.
Also nudity is a big thing. Sexy is used to sell many things, but nudity is viewed in very weird way from European perception. Violence is somewhat interesting too from same viewpoint.
> The US long ago lost its puritan influences as a primary...Puritanism is a small fraction of influence in the US at this point culturally.
Are you including the US' views on sex and nudity and the puritan work ethic in that? Sex and nudity in films will make them get an instant R-rating, but murder will only get a PG-13.
The puritan work ethic is the reason Americans work themselves to death and judge the poor: "They obviously deserve it because they must not work hard." It's obviously circular reasoning, but "not working hard" is a moral failing in the US.
Mine came from feeling like junk even after 1 beer/wine/cocktail the next day. I experimented with thinking it was an allergy to grains, allergy to hops, wine quality - but I think it's just alcohol.
I'm not sure if you're serious with both your arguments here: Americans obsess with their health? They have one of the highest rates of obesity globally ...
Likewise, how does this have anything to do with religion (Puritanical heritage)?
Binge Drinking is just having more than 5 drinks in a few hour time period, doesn't have to be everyday can just be occasionally. Its a pretty low threshold, compared to the article's top decile which you need to drink which is averaging above 9 drinks a day.
The Puritans drank plenty. I suspect that many such misconceptions about them are derived from HL Mencken's (wildly inaccurate) quip that "Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy."
It's more the fringe offshoots of the congregationalists that shattered off in the Great Awakening as they moved west. There's also a strong current of xenophobia in many of the 19th century abolitionist movements, as the Germans, Irish, Italians, Poles, etc brought their drinking cultures with them.
The puritans are undeservingly white-washed and praised.
They were extremists by contemporary standards (an insanely low bar).
They barely waited until they stopped starving to start being jerks to each other and antagonizing the natives.
If you want to idolize early settlers idolize Rhode Islanders, they were basically successive waves of people who left Massachusetts because the latter was no place for anyone who let their conscience get in the way of their ideology (amazing how little some things change in 400yr) and they managed to maintain some of the best relations with the natives.
A personal question, and I truly mean no offense - are you on the spectrum?
The only people I've met (in real life) to date who can't stand the taste of alcohol are children and people with Asperger's, I assume because bitter tastes are a sort of sensory overload for them. Purely anecdotal and could be a complete horseshit theory, but I'm just curious.
Or perhaps people who aren’t on the spectrum who don’t like the taste just keep it hidden and phrase it in some socially acceptable manner as to not offend the drunks.
Split a bottle of wine with the wife most days. That equates to 2-3 "standard" drinks per day I suppose. I find buying standard bottles of wine (versus boxes, 1.5L big bottles, etc.) exerts a certain amount of discipline. You're going to be averse to uncorking a new bottle after you just finished one :)
Many things are power laws, but many things are not. It's really easy to overfit your intuition here and assume it's all power laws, but that's an overcorrection from everyone previously assuming everything was a normal distribution.
The reality is that some stuff is power laws, some stuff is normal, some stuff is bimodal, etc. The more useful mental exercise is to try to learn what the actual distribution for something is, instead of assuming, and then try to dig in a bit more to figure out what causes might lead to that.
Power laws tend to arise when you have some amount of network effect and an iterative positive feedback loop. That shows up in popularity, wealth, etc. But things like, you know, height, are not a power law distribution.
Alcohol consumption does have some steep curve to that, but it's not clear if it's actually a power law. I assume its driven by both addiction times tolerance. In other words, if you couldn't build up a tolerance to alcohol, I'd expect something like a linear distribution reflecting levels of a addiction. But the more you drink, the higher your tolerance, so the more you need to drink, which leads to something more like quadratic or higher.
Right, so the interesting question to ask here is, around the biology of alcohol tolerance. How much alcohol does someone have to consume tolerance level X, and in turn how much more alcohol does someone at tolerance level X need to consume to reach the same level of inebriation as before?
At some point people become chemically dependent on alcohol so it's not necessarily an issue of inebriation. There's an upper limit based on blood alcohol concentration. Within the top 10% there are probably even more extreme drinkers than the average of 71 drinks a week.
The irony here is that these folks consume 60% of all alcoholic beverages. These are the whales of the industry. Makes you want to rethink the adult drinks market.
> but regardless the consumption is extremely high.
It's high, but not even close to some of the historic records. In early 1800s the per capita consumption was roughly equivalent 90 bottles of whisky per year. And that counts a lot of non drinkers in the denominator.
It’s easy to understand when you realize that certain types of alcoholics can’t bear to be sober. That is to say, they are drinking around the clock. An all-day buzz would take ~16 drinks a day to maintain.
One of the “tells” of this class of alcoholic is drinks stashed all over the place to facilitate this round the clock buzz.
Even those are at the extreme end of the extreme. It doesn't take long to develop a tolerance that allows one to function the next morning with 10-15 drinks/night, which is two to three wine bottles. I've seen several people fall into that trap out of desperation due to insomnia, since the never-ending hangover can be preferable to chronic extreme sleep deprivation. That's easily 3500+ drinks a year and all it takes is one of those per 9 teetotalers to get 1 drink/day average.
10 drinks of 100 proof vodka is ~200 ml (less than two thirds of a coffee mug.) That sounds like what I did pretty often in college (I remember saying I liked college at the time, in retrospect I may have been lying.)
In my head the greatest drunks are USA, South Africa, Russia, Sweden, England. The numbers involved in these countries are mind boggling. Not purely based on country-wide numbers, but based on binge drinking behaviours, quantities involved at parties, and destruction that follows.
The problem I have with it all, drunk people tend to affect other things: destroying public property, drunk driving (destruction of private property and death (sometimes death of sober people at wrong place, wrong time)) fights and injury (go check what an EC/ER looks like on a Friday night for hospitals in these countries), domestic violence, rape, animal abuse, emotional drunk spirals (can lead to suicide or relationship damage), financial destruction (lemme buy all you fine oaks 100 shots on my tab)..the list goes on.
Nah, skip alcohol if you can. I makes small men feel like strong men, and strong men feel like small men and creates a vicious cycle to cope with those false emotions, resulting erratic/impulsive/dangerous behaviours. Rather meditate, go to bed early, use cannabis (not daily) and make sandwich.. I've not seen a single instance where alcohol has improved someones life, mentally or physically. Alcohol is a false remedy that fills your hearts and minds with a false view of the world. Step away for a while.
Same goes for streaming/internet consumption, tv/news, caffeine, nicotine, porn, fast foods, religion, politics. All those things blend into a horrible mindset. Step away, introspect and modify your own behaviour/culture, reflect about who/what you are. It's a worthwhile experiment and costs nothing (in fact, it will save you time and money).
> The top 10 percent of American drinkers - 24 million adults over age 18 - consume, on average, [...] 10 drinks per day.
What counts as an "American drinker"? Apparently only 24M of our 330M population. That's 7% of the population.
So the average of the top 0.7% Americans consume 10 drinks per day. Since averages are heavily affected by the outliers at the top, you're looking at probably between 2-3 per 1000. I absolutely believe that many Americans consume the equivalent of 10+ light beers per day.
What's more surprising to me is that only 24M Americans count as "drinkers". Our college population alone is 17M.
Going back further, I'd love to know the source of the claim that the Mayflower was diverted from the mouth of the Hudson to Plymouth Rock because the ship was running low on beer. It seems like the sort of thing that would be more widely known.
The framing is a bit dubious, at the very least... The statement about 'preferring beer to water' ignores cholera, and the general difficult of keeping water potable over months at sea. Fermentation was, believe it or not, a public health strategy for ship voyages.
When I worked in offices (sw dev and qa, especially executives), or at survival jobs that mixed with lots of people (security guard, shelf stocking, etc), I was very often surprised at how many people I could smell alcohol on.
We're all drunks.
I don't drink much anymore. I never went to work drunk, but I used to drink a fair amount. Now that I'm a truck driver, it's too inconvenient for me personally to manage drinking, so I just don't drink. Others' mileage definitely varies.
I was working at Salesforce when they finally got rid of the kegs and alcohol that were all over the engineering floors. IIRC Parker was subdued about it, it happened overnight, I'd guess in response to an alcohol-based HR issue. I laughed because compared to every other company I knew no one ever drank in the SFDC office and the kegerators were covered in dust. I have one drink 3-4 times a week, but never connected to work.
Worked at a startup with beer stocked in the fridge. I enjoyed a beer several times a week once it hit 4-5pm. This behavior started as an intern and I still got brought back for full time so apparently they didn't care.
A few beers cost almost nothing vs. paying overtime to have you in the office longer for those hours spent starting your night of drinking.
And if the employer is lucky, your coworkers become your drinking buddies in the process. Before you know it you're now spending all your waking hours with your coworkers. Makes quitting your post a lot more difficult.
Obviously not not just the US. Drinking "culture" is too ingrained in our everyday lives. Alcohol addiction is totally normal, socially accepted and legally encouraged. I was appalled when our city allowed drinking alcohol in some of our parks as a Covid-19 measure to give people an alternative to drinking in restaurants or pubs. It makes me so sad that we realize we have a drinking problem and our solution is to give people spaces outside to indulge. In parks, right next to playgrounds. People here in Canada often point to Germany or Europe in general and say, well they're doing it and it works. No it doesn't work. Germany has a massive alcohol addiction problem, you can see it in families, at festivities but also in public. Sure it's nice as a young adult to be able to get alcohol 24/7 from a Kiosk or gas station but it's really is a symptom of a gigantic problem.
Lots of countries have an obesity problem, but the solution isn't to outlaw eating food in parks. If you are sitting outisde with friends having a beer shouldn't be a criminal activity. Addicts need help, and the justice system cannot offer that. Let the majority of the population who can control themselves live a normal life.
Can the majority of people control themselves though in the view of social normalisation of a poison like alcohol?
The very fact that you (as do most of us) consider it a "normal life" activity indicates a very skewed and unhealthy perspective has taken hold at a fundamental level.
> The very fact that you (as do most of us) consider it a "normal life" activity indicates a very skewed and unhealthy perspective has taken hold at a fundamental level.
I would argue it and the stats answers your own question. By in large yes they can. And personally I’m not one to judge peoples lifestyle decisions provided it’s not an epidemic of people doing things like b&E to hawk a motel microwave to get their next fix.
Im not sure I follow. Or how you would quantify that. Im sure most could probably quit cold turkey without physical withdrawal if that is what you mean. It takes a lot more than 4-10 drinks/day to be at risk of DT or even tremors.
There are plenty of toxins that we freely ingest daily..Heck water in sufficient amounts is a toxin. Pretty much anything your liver has to process is a toxin in some form (i know thats simplifying it but still....).
It would be easy to argue its not even the most abused or greatest threat to our health. I would argue that would would be sugar, or more specifically HFCS. Thats in literally everything, from crackers to gatorade. It also abused by people ranging from young children, even toddlers to the elderly. And Obesity and related diseases kills at much higher rates. Congestive Hearth Failure alone kills around 500k people a year in the US..
And I would argue etOH isnt really even 2nd place in the list of normalized drugs we abuse readily. Caffeine is probably that one, and there are PLENTY that couldn't quit that cold turkey if they wanted (I am one of them, and have tried multiple times). Its also another one used by both kids and adults.
I'd agree with most of those (with the caveat they don't have the same direct link with misery, mental illness, violence, crime and general anti-social behaviour) but don't see how us accepting them is justification for accepting alcohol beyond a defeatist "it all sucks so why bother".
Neither was I talking about physical dependency particularly; I see enough people failing miserably on simple stuff like dry January ("ha ha I only lasted 3 days" and the like) to be extremely sceptical that it is as easy as you imply to walk away from, especially in a society which surrounds us with it and sells it as "social" and normal.
>with the caveat they don't have the same direct link with misery, mental illness, violence, crime and general anti-social behaviour
Many people use it exactly that way. Epecially with depression etc.
And ultimately I am not of the opinion that we need to manage other peoples vices, or sources of temporary happiness. Alcohol is a very social vice and 99% of people can manage it responsibly.
So provided they arent direct contributors to larger issues in society (such as meth/opiates directly causing crime etc.), I dont think the government needs to be in the business of restriciting people freedoms (which does include the freedom to self-destructive behavior).
Otherwise where do you stop? Mandating exercise? Banning burgers? Ultimately we cant nerf the world. Prohibition doesnt work, if the 20's doesnt show you just look at the drug war and marijuana.
I'm not suggesting outlawing. I'm suggesting no longer supporting. Looking back at the smoking problem, to me it seems that we managed to "fix" by doing exactly that, no advertising in public spaces, no smoking in public spaces. Make it less "normal", less convenient to do something that's objectively harmful to you and a burden on society.
> I'm not suggesting outlawing. I'm suggesting no longer supporting.
That sounds like doublespeak. Either you allow something or you don't. Not allowing drinking in parks falls firmly in the "outlawing" category.
I can't speak for other countries but in the USA smoking has always been allowed in open public spaces and still is. In fact most states don't even have laws banning it in indoors. Cigarette boxes have no graphic warnings. Yet the smoking rate in the USA has consistently been among the lowest in the world.
My example was of a municipality (Canada) that designated a place where it previously wasn't allowed to drink alcohol to be allowed. That's what I meant by "supporting". At least don't expand the options.
Not all countries have a binge drinking culture that they are introduced to in their teens like Canada, the UK, the US, Australia, etc. where it's celebrated for young people to get totally intoxicated.
In many countries, you have a couple of social drinks - even gasp at lunch or in public - and it's not a problem. Being falling down drunk isn't considered 'cool' - it's pathetic and embarrassing. Drinking isn't a competition to see how much you can consume before you either lose consciousness, make idiotic decisions, or start street fights.
That said, I absolutely see no problem with drinking in parks or in public and this works fine in Montreal. We have laws already for public drunkenness. We don't need a nanny state.
I am not a heavy drinker, but one thing I noticed having moved around to a few places is how much everyone in my age group drinks(30's to mid 40's). I have gotten to know many a neighbor and they are all working professionals like me and I am just shocked that having 8-10 drinks a night seems like it comes standard for a Friday/Saturday night. I thought that it was just one location, but I moved twice in the past 2 years and at each location the same behavior. It seems really unhealthy and is everywhere(CA North and South) and Colorado) which is worrisome.
I know you said they are neighbors and I assume you live in an apartment complex because you have met "many a neighbor". But how much of this is selection bias? You meet social people, social people drink because drinking helps socializing.
Strangely its not apartments, these are houses, the people in the neighborhood are usually in sales, and other professional areas, sometimes in tech but not engineers.
That's definitely just a certain personality type, I think. 8-10 drinks is pretty aggressive for a random Friday night among grown-ass adults - that's 2 full bottles of wine. At best, you won't be able to drive home and you'll feel beat up in the morning.
How long are they staying out? I'm in my thirties, and a drink every 45 minutes seems pretty standard among my peers that don't have kids and still go out. In college we'd swing for the fences, but eventually everyone (well, everyone without an actual drinking problem) figured out that keeping a nice social buzz is a more pleasant way to spend an evening with friends.
Heavy alcohol drinkers tend to cluster with each other. This leads to a self-reinforcing cycle wherein they see their peers consuming a lot of alcohol and assume that means it's normal and fine.
Likewise, non-drinkers tend to cluster with each other because after a while it's just not fun to hang out with people consuming copious amounts of alcohol all of the time while their health slowly declines. I had to stop inviting several friends to certain activities because they wanted to make everything revolve around consuming alcohol. It gets old.
Anecdotes aside, the statistics just don't support 10 drinks/night as being average. That's top 10-20% behavior.
the way i look at it, my chances of dying outside of my control are alot higher than the things i can control. So i just live life with the knowledge that when i drink i'm just borrowing fun from the next day perhaps even shaving off a few seconds of my life probabilistically. Is it worth it? Sometimes.
I decided to give up alcohol for a year. That was three years ago and doubt I will ever go back.
Aside from having better sleep than at any other point as an adult, I truly enjoy the activities I partake in just as much, if not more, than when I still paired them with alcohol. It took about 6 months to stop feeling like I was missing out, and now I feel like everyone else is.
Anxiety in general is noticeably lower (this was a huge windfall for me when the pandemic started).
Enjoyment of conversation, food, setting, all seem richer and doesn't flag as quickly once the alcohol is metabolized.
The end of the drinking activities don't leave me sleepy or craving bad food. I can go home and read a book or get some work done.
General reduction in workout recovery time and aches and pains.
Holidays are way easier to get through.
The only drawbacks have been the situations you discover are entirely dedicated to consumption, e.g. dive bars, beer gardens, work holiday parties and happy hours. Without having dulled your senses adequately, some of these things tend to be only loud, smelly, or without much to offer besides booze and banter.
I got a drone pilot's license. 8 hour limitation after drinking basically obliterated my drinking over night because the nieces can immediately be like "Can we fly the drone?".
Not for everyone, because 13 year old nieces can be dangerous with drones.
Club soda (or flavored seltzer) + bitters. There's alcohol there still but less than half a percent ABV. Not enough that it tastes boozy or impairs my judgement. Drinking one relatively low ABV beer impairs my judgement enough that a second drink sounds like a good idea, the soda and bitters never does that for me.
>no one makes a point of asking (if that matters to you).
Actually it does kind of annoy me when I just drink water that people will ask all the time. My go to has been seltzer + lime + wedge because I do like to have some taste, and it does look cocktail-ish.
How are bitters with plain seltzer? I have a sodastream and am looking for some good flavors. Can't figure out anything that tastes as good as flavored bubly or lacroix and that doesn't have lots of sugar.
I love pairing bitters with my sodastream! A few of my favorite recipes are: 1) Grapefruit & Cherry, 2) Cardamom, and 3) Orange & Cranberry. Clearly it's all to taste, but a 3-4 dashes of each bitter is a good starting point for a ~16oz glass of seltzer.
Fee Brothers sells a 12 piece variety pack which is a great way to experiment. After that you have quite a rabbit hole of bitters brands and flavors to explore!
I also gave up most drinking where I drink probably 5-6 times a year, usually with a dinner where I want a nice mixed cocktail or at a large holiday party/wedding, where again I can enjoy mixed cocktails. I personally drink soda as a replacement since I drink almost strictly water otherwise.
I went from always ordering a soft drink at restaurants to only drinking water. The swich occurred almost overnight, and I ended up losing about 25 lbs.
The reason I did this was entirely social, and it happened by accident. My parents didn't have soft drinks at home, except occasional leftovers after a party, so ordering a soft drink at a restaurant was sort of a "special treat," even if it was an infinitely refillable fountain drink. It turns out 3 glasses of soda have a metric fuckton of sugar.
Anyway, when I went to college, literally none of my friends would order soft drinks when we'd go out to eat. I'm not sure if it was because people were being thrifty, or for ease of splitting the bill, or maybe they just knew more about sugar than I did, but being the one person to order a soda felt so awkward that I just stopped and eventually never went back.
There is more weight loss to be had switching from Diet Coke to water. It's obviously not the calorie content, but the insulin response from sweet tasting things that will occur even with artificial sweeteners.
I have yet to find a single study confirming any rumored ill effects of artificial sweeteners, including aspartame. At least in any reasonable consumption amounts since you need so little of the sweetener.
People (probably those with controlling interests in sugar cane/beet industry) have been trying unsuccessfully to find/prove any sort of real deleterious effect from aspartame specifically, and lower-calory sweeteners in general for about 50 years now, so I think we can say they're fine.
I haven't read that it affects insulin response. But I have heard that it can cause you to crave more calories because it gives you the perception of consuming something but without the calories. I'm not sure what the mechanism is here or if maybe it is just psychological.
I'm not sure about insulin resistance, but sweet-craving builds a tolerance kind of like spicy foods. That is, the more you eat sweet things, the more sweetness your body craves.
I've been using erythritol and stevia as sweeteners for years, and even with those, I find myself craving sweet things after consuming them more than when I go relatively long periods of time without eating sugary things or using sweetener.
The end result, at least for me, is that I crave sweet food more even when I use artificial sweeteners, making it harder to say no to eating shitty food later on.
Similar: one day in 2012 I quit soda cold turkey. It was supposed to be for 4 days as a challenge (I was drinking probably 2L+ a day of full-sugar cola / red bull at that point). I just didn't restart, and haven't had a glass of cola since. Now if I have a sip of Coca-cola it tastes so nasty I'll feel like spitting it out. Originally started drinking it because family didn't, so it was a way of showing my independence (and of doing what schoolmates could).
If available, sparkling water with lemon. Another commenter mentioned bitters, I plan to add that. They’re fine as long as the incredibly tiny alcohol amount won’t cause any issues.
If that isn’t available, some sort of soda or tea or coffee. Or, just water. No one really cares, though to be polite to the bar you’re at it’s good to try to buy something.
I'm also a fan of kombucha (and make it at home), but it's not quite a non-alcoholic beverage.
Commercial kombucha is generally < .5%, homebrew can be up to 10x that. It's a two step process - yeast ferments the sugar into alcohol, then bacteria digest the alcohol into acid. If the bacteria fall behind, the ABV goes up.
The yeast can work anaerobic, the bacteria need O2 to get the job done. Anything not pasteurized is likely going to increase in ABV some in the bottle, since the yeast are active and the bacteria aren't. This is also why I force carbonate my home-brew - when you build CO2 with a secondary ferment you're also building alcohol.
yup. I ferment craft soda in my cellar. root beer, ginger beer, cream soda, and I have to be careful or it starts to get a noticeable alcohol content. most of my friends drink when we get together and I am not fond of the flavor of beer. But home brew ginger beer seems to fill the space and I can drive home after as the sodas when done properly have like 1% or less abv. just have to pasteurize it at the right point or drink it soon enough.
How do you like it? I like the taste of beer, and often want something more than water at night. But, I don't typically have alcohol except on the weekends (my wife and I joke about 2 beers and things are getting crazy lol). So during the week I often drink milk or a sugar free sports drink. Tea is also ok, but I try to avoid all caffeine late in the day.
It's not exactly the same taste as beer but they satisfy my cravings. They've completely replaced the occasional beer I have with dinner in the evening, and if I drink socially I often alternate between them and “real beer” so that I don't pay for it the next day.
There’s a couple of really good non-alcoholic beers here in Iceland. For want of a better explanation the flavour is really there but it lacks the edge or bite of real beer. I don’t know if it’s flavour or feel but it’s noticeable. That said due to recent medical stuff I’ve been drinking it and think I could stick with it long term.
I'm in a similar position, and lately I've been having flavored sparkling waters (Mmm Orange Bubly) and herbal (i.e. non-caffeinated) teas, depending if I want hot or cold. Obviously they don't taste like beer, but what I found was at least for me after doing it a while, it's not really the taste I wanted; that was just the association I had with the ritual I enjoyed of a nightcap, and now I'm happy with my new ones.
Hoplark Hoptea (sparkling hoppy tea) is another good alternative I have found, and is lower in calories and comes in varieties that are caffeinated or not. I'll note that I tried Athletic's hoppy sparkling water and Lagunita's and neither was nearly as good. Though I will say overall, all of them seem too expensive to be buying on a regular basis unless they can really cut out more expensive beer for you.
Not OP, but I've also stopped drinking entirely and my standard go-to is a lime soda. I've never been somewhere where this is not known and it's not overly sweet or expensive. It looks enough like a drink to be a drink, if you know what I mean.
I found eating or drinking later has started to mess me up. (see e.g. the 3 hours before bed rule from the literature around circadian arrhythmia.)
Between that in particular, and all the intermittent fasting faddishness in the air, calories in drinks, especially outside mealtime, just began to feel weird. Water it is.
I live in Germany where beer is abundant and so are the non-alcoholic variants. My favorite is non-alcoholic Hefeweizen - unfiltered wheat beer: no spoiled taste, the only thing absent is alcohol.
you were more anxious when you were drinking ? that's a first
not to look naive, but there was a period of my life having a beer [0] was really the only way for me to exist outside my bedroom walls, i wasn't even tipsy.. I was just able to sit in a room without crippling dread.
[0] I didn't drink, but the few times I did at parties I realized how drinking a bit was lifting me up to ~people's normal
Conditions like GERD where stomach acids come up into the esophagus can be mistaken for anxiety or panic attacks. Alcohol can make GERD type symptoms a lot worse.
it isn't necessary mistaken. The issues like GERD and some other around stomach/digestion affect how your muscles handle the diaphragm and that may strangle the breathing in various ways and also obstruct heart beating movements - that all limits the oxygen supply, and while sitting relaxed doing nothing the oxygenation may be sufficient it struggles to cover any additional increased requirements which spike due to increased body and/or brain activity, and that insufficient oxygen delivery naturally makes one feel anxious.
Interesting. If I get drunk two nights in a row, there are high chances that I’ll wake up the night with a panic attack.
I grew up with panic attacks, and they were random and I had no clue what was happening to me until college when I first learned of the phrase (prior to that I just referred to it as “the chaos”).
I can control and fight them off them now. But if I drink too much, then my mind and body are weakened and I can’t fight them off (while sleeping!).
This is actually quite common because alcohol consumption effects GABA and serotonin levels in the brain, as well as the sensitization of GABAergic and serotonergic neurons, and both neurotransmitters are involved in anxiety and panic. It can also be the result of a very light kindling[1] effect.
The colloquial term seems to be "hangxiety" if you want a term to search for.
I'm glad someone has mentioned this. After a night of drinking I always feel nauseous to the point that it ruins my whole day. Even after a moderate amount of alcohol or any kind of mixing.
I'm not certain I have GERD, but it's been my hypothesis. Anyone else have similar experiences? I can never go to a brunch/lunch after drinking in fear that my nausea will turn into something worse.
Just for another perspective I have GERD spurred on by a hiatal hernia and don’t experience nausea this way after drinking. I only really get nauseous if I drink to excess.
GERD made me quit Scotch (other spirits are probably forbidden but I love undiluted scotch) , red wine, dark beer, black and white tea and dark chocolate.
I used to have a glass (2oz) of undiluted high proof scotch a few times a week after a good workday but around 37y I had to stop.
I wish something could replicate the taste and the warmth of the Aberlour A'bunadh but alas I fear that replicating the feeling of +60% ABV without using something even more deleterious than ethanol is impossible.
aight, i see my shortcomings, indeed it's pretty unsurprising that it messes with your emotions long term.. i only saw the usual removal of inhibition on occasional drinking.
My anecdote here is, I quit drinking temporarily three years ago to lose weight. My blood pressure went through the roof (Hypertension II) and I had extreme general anxiety. My physiological response was so intense I started thinking I might be in danger level of addiction. As I researched this more, it turns out high blood pressure and anxiety are normal responses.
Most people I know would not think I had a problem because I was functional and I didn't day drink. I might have two or three strong (> 7%) IPAs in the evening daily before bed. I would also on occasion binge pretty hard on weekends with friends.
After some time of not drinking my anxiety actually got better and I decided to keep it that way. I'm not a teetotaler but I have completely stopped bringing alcohol home and binge drinking in general. I still find that 2 drinks is harder than none, however.
My own take away (which may be different for everyone) is that alcohol is a reasonable way to make uncomfortable social situations tolerable but when used to treat a more general anxiety, it will likely make it worse.
> The end of the drinking activities don't leave me sleepy or craving bad food. I can go home and read a book or get some work done.
This is one of my biggest motivations for reducing my drinking during the week. Even having just one or two beers after work, the probability that I read or work on a side project drops close to 0.
This is also why I very rarely day-drink. Couple beers in afternoon and if I even stop nothing productive happens for the rest of the day. Even if something productive did happen I would get tired and have to take a nap. Now my sleep schedule is even more wrecked.
Same here. A drink at lunch and the rest of my day is pretty much shot, so it's only happening if I'm on vacation or my plan was to lie on the beach all day anyway.
> the probability that I read or work on a side project drops close to 0.
As someone who has done quite a few major projects on personal time and reads quite a lot as well: I personally have found the attitude that I must always be working on something or "improving myself" far more dangerous than excessive drinking.
Certainly there is balance, and I obviously don't advocate giving up all personal projects in order to drink. But the fact that many people on HN, myself included, feel bad if they're not working on some side project or improving some skill is its own kind of escapism.
I drink and smoke weed a lot more now then when I was younger. I still get many projects done, and read a ton, but there is a certain value to an evening spent stoned just getting lost in a video game or listening to music. Reflecting on it now, I also find that by any objective measure the output from my personal projects is always probably a bit higher now, though I have a lot more fun.
Oh yeah don't get me wrong, I have had my fair share of drunken/high video game time :)
FWIW this is a side project I _want_ to work on, I'm not trying to make money on it, purely a passion project. So I'm not feeling pressured to work on it, I'm just trying to keep the momentum going and I found that drinking will stop that momentum.
I go through waves of video games -> projects -> reading, it's always fluctuating.
When I'm drinking, the probability that I work on a side project is also much lower than when I'm sober. However when I do work on one, as long as I don't pass my Ballmer Peak, I work very hard on it. Sometimes I even do good work. Sometimes it's even good the next day.
I have been working on lowering my alcohol consumption, though. It's been working, slowly, over time.
Curious about your age? Does this get easier as you get older? I stopped drinking for 6 months and then a friend got a new job and my birthday rolled around. I felt like the situations called for celebratory drinking or that it was expected.
I really enjoyed my period of non-drinking and I feel exactly the same as you in regards to sleep, anxiety and well-being. But being in my late 20s I feel like people around my age just expect drinking and going out.
I'm sure that it feels like a real problem, but it really isn't. I haven't drank anything for my 39 years of life and I have found most people to be quite accepting of it and those that aren't aren't worth it.
Part age and part friends. As people get older many stop or cut back their drinking. Responsibilities means there's no time. Real friends support you if not drinking is something you want to do.
It also doesn't have to be a binary thing. I go months without drinking and then have a beer or wine because I want one.
I'm sure it just varies a ton from person to person. As much as some people (notably alcoholics) find it extremely difficult to stop drinking, I pretty much stopped without even trying. Got married, had kids, stopped hanging out so much with friends. I just didn't drink for months at a time and didn't really notice. I never consciously quit drinking, but I average maybe 2 drinks a month now and don't miss it. I also never really found that alcohol really relaxed me emotionally.
I went to a party the other night and didn't drink at all. Very unusual. I brought a bottle of tequila for the host and friends.
Strangely, I didn't feel anxious at all, despite having pretty high general anxiety. My energy levels were higher than usual, which I felt was connected to not drinking. I felt totally normal in my social interactions, didn't force anything, felt good. I kept my water bottle in hand and never felt out of place.
It was a good lesson that alcohol is not needed to have a good time.
The last time I had a drink was a beer festival. I used to drink beer a lot in my early 20s and beer festivals were something I looked forward to. I slept terribly that night and felt awful the next day. It suddenly dawned on me that this happened every time and I realised alcohol does nothing good for me at all. It's expensive, unhealthy, slows my senses, makes me less funny, makes me worse at sex, makes me sleep worse and often ruins the next day.
I don't plan to ever drink again. It is necessary to have the confidence to order something non-alcoholic and be straight with people if they question it. I don't drink. If they ask why (which is exceedingly rare), I ask why they don't smoke. That usually gets the message across.
I used to think there was some kind of intake threshold and hangovers were the result of surpassing that threshold. The "eureka" moment was realising that any amount alcohol made me feel worse.
I'm in a similar boat. I stopped, but without a timeframe for how long. I just knew I had to cut back, but that wasn't working well, so I just stopped, and when I was offered a drink, I'd say "I don't drink", because here in Australia, I find if you say no to a drink, it's mostly forced on you. The statement put an end to that.
However, I also internalized being an non-drinker. It became part of my identity.
I don't notice a measurable difference in my life, which is also part of the reason I didn't pick it up again. It wasn't enriching my life, but I'm also not a better person without it.
Having said all that, I am still looking for a replacement for what to drink when I do go to a bar. So far nobody has hit the right mixture of a drink that isn't defined by being non-alcoholic, but replaces the "I deserve this" attitude of having a drink .
My favorite non-alcoholic beverage is equal parts soda water and tonic water, a couple of splashes of orange juice and a few dashes of bitters. Tweak as necessary.
At the holidays I like non-alcoholic sparkling apple juice.
I also find soda water out of a can to be a good beer replacement on hot days. I think part of this is the sound of opening the can and the carbonation.
Yeah, it still feels like "soda", which is what I'm trying to get away from. I've been speaking to a friend about creating something new.
My requirements are:
- not trying to be alcohol/imitation alcohol
- not soda/juice/kombucha
- has the "occasion" attitude of alcohol
I admit this is probably 90% branding and 10% the drink itself. As I was mentioning to my friend, you probably wouldn't feel strange ordering a redbull at a bar without the vodka, because of the marketing and how it isn't considered a soft-drink. I don't know anybody that drinks redbull every day (though I'm sure there are people that do).
Something more mature than a soft drink in flavor profile, something that I hopefully don't chug, so it lasts like a cocktail or beer.
Keen to hear others thoughts on that.
There's Lyres https://lyres.com/ - which pretends to be gin/wisky/etc
And Non (https://non.world) - which is very juice, but at the price of wine.
I'm a regular drinker, but I do a dry month every year. I make it a point to not let it change my social life at all — which means still spending plenty of time at bars and socializing with people drinking. I typically drink non-alcoholic beers (there are good ones that taste like beer) or ciders when available. When not, I go for soda-bitters, sometimes with a splash of lime juice.
Lyres, Seedlip, and other non-alcoholic spirits just don't do it for me. They taste like water.
I drink a prodigious amount of decaf coffee. I buy quality, whole bean, Swiss Water Process stuff and make it in a French press. I drink it black, and the combination of good beans and a lot of effort in tuning my brew process makes for a palatable, sophisticated taste. The routine of making it in the morning makes drinking it through the day feel earned. As far as I can tell, it's a pretty healthy drink.
Another suggestion would be to get into quality teas. I particularly like Tie Guan Yin.
I drink coffee every day, unfortunately I can't stand tea, I can't stomach it at all!
I'm thinking more along the lines of how we "use" alcoholic drinks, and something to replace that. It doesn't need to be healthy. More about getting the right mood and taste, and likely not the typical every day drink.
I'm also in Australia, and though I do drink alcohol, I have wondered recently if it couldn't be a federal or state mandate that restaurants/bars/etc serving beer/wine/spirits must also have alcohol free equivalents - 0% beer, alcohol free wine, etc. If not a directive, maybe something strongly encouraged.
> when I was offered a drink, I'd say "I don't drink", because here in Australia, I find if you say no to a drink, it's mostly forced on you
I just avoid it as much as I can, but for me saying I don’t drink wouldn’t always work. People would just insist “just one drink”.
Friend of mine said, as joke, I should start telling people that I am an alcoholic (which I am not) so they leave me alone.
I actually tried this and it works every time.
I’ve never been much of a drinker, generally preferring soda, sports drinks, or sweet tea to stay hydrated. In my experience, this is unusual.
My friends, relatives, etc. all exclusively drink beer when doing yard work, home improvement projects, or hobbies like working on cars. When I’m at the marina, I’m the only one not drinking beer while working on their boat. Maybe all of these people stick exclusively to water in private, but I doubt it.
Given that, I can see how it’s quite easy for someone to consume 5-10 drinks per day. I’ll easily drink the equivalent of a six pack if I’m working outside, and if I were a beer drinker I don’t think I’d find it excessive to drink at least that much over the course of a day.
However, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the group drinking a six pack of 90-calorie light beer over the course of a day is healthier than people like me drinking a six pack of Dr. Pepper in the same timeframe. Cirrhosis on one hand, diabetes on the other. Pick your poison, I guess.
You're kind of like me, I simply do not enjoy doing any sort of work in a "buzzed" state so I never day drink at all. Not once have I been working on something in the middle of the day and thought "a beer would make this better" because I find the state to be distracting and the opposite of what coffee does for me in terms of motivation and focus. I spent years in co-working spaces with beer on tap and simply didn't indulge, it's not a will power thing or discipline I just don't want it. I'm not an alcohol hater either I'll still "go wild" with friends once in a while at a bar or club to make myself extroverted.
This is similar to my experience. I enjoy the state of being drunk so I would get drunk for its own sake, not to make work bearable or something; I could never focus whenever work had an in-office happy hour and went back to work. I actually also quit caffeine for similar reasons; I loved coffee but got distracted whenever I wasn't drinking coffee because I was just looking forward to having more.
> However, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the group drinking a six pack of 90-calorie light beer over the course of a day is healthier than people like me drinking a six pack of Dr. Pepper in the same timeframe. Cirrhosis on one hand, diabetes on the other. Pick your poison, I guess.
Most people choose neither option.
Drinking a 6-pack of beer every day and drinking a 6-pack of sugary sodas every day are not normal behaviors. We shouldn't try to normalize things like this when they're clearly unhealthy and definitely outlier behavior.
TFA states that top 10% is at least equivalent 2 bottles/wine per day, which is more than your 6-pack, closer to a 12-pack.
10% is not outliers.
edit to avoid confusion: this wasn't an average, this was the bottom of the 10% decile. So clearly there are bigger drinkers out there, but 10% is a lot of minimum 10-drink-a-day people.
I think the error we're making here is that the top 10% doesn't all drink the same amount. The top 1% might drink 20 drinks per day, while someone in the 91st percentile might drink 7 or 8.
I think its about a long term tolerance thing that people build. Couple anecdotes:
I was invited to my friend's bachelor party weekend. We rented a cabin in a fairly remote area of our province for an extended weekend with plans to golf, fish, campfire, and...drink.
I think by the time the first day was over, the majority of my buddies had each done 12 beer plus several mixed drinks or shots. No mistaking, we were all drunk. But what sort of set things apart was the next day. I basically just nursed a few beers/drinks through the day, probably 6 max while the rest of the guys were easily 12+ a piece, I know one of them had cleaned off his first 24pack by that night.
By the next day I was miserable. We were golfing in 30+ weather and I had 1 beer for the entire 18 holes, they were 6+ each. The heat, the hangover, I don't know how they do it. But it slowly dawned on me that they do this frequently. Most of their weekends are getting tankered at the lake or going through a case of beer in the yard doing chores and having impromptu bbq with the neighbors/buds while I pretty much only drank while at social outings (once a week top) and even then I never had more than 2 or 3 drinks.
When lockdown started a couple of the same buds got laid off from their jobs and mentioned how much they were drinking in isolation. Again, the quantities they drank were fucking astounding while I pretty much stopped drinking entirely due to the social outings coming to an end.
I've tried the "grab some beer and do the oilchange" type work myself but I find by the end my beer is warm, half drank and I was too involved in the work to think about stopping to drink. Even when I did stop, it was because I was thirsty so I'd be seeking water, not alcohol.
After all the experience with this lifestyle from friends I can see where its left us (we're mid 30s now). They're overweight, a few of them struggle with health issues while I'm the same weight I was 10 years prior and healthy as ever. I just think centering your activities around having a beer is something that these people do long term and what seems wild to you or me is normal for them.
> However, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the group drinking a six pack of 90-calorie light beer over the course of a day is healthier than people like me drinking a six pack of Dr. Pepper in the same timeframe
Dr. Pepper is tasty, but it and Coke are dependent on Phosphoric Acid to be able to deliver that much sugar to you. This along to caffeine mean it's dehydrating you and robbing you of nutrients, not hydrating you. It's really best if you can limit this to a single or find a replacement (Kroger has a seltzer with the Dr. flavor that satisfies my addiction nicely)
Ignoring the alcohol, the first near beer or light beer actually helps hydrate you and provides nutrients.
But the quantity of either is what quickly becomes the problem (2nd hand anecdote). Many alcoholics start with with the 1 beer a day after work which turns into a 12 pack a day after work (as suggested by this top 10%). And once an addict develops a tolerance to beer, they escalate in the top 10% rapidly; that vodka soda become an evening thing, then a morning an evening thing.
When we are no longer restricted by resource limits as a society, everything quickly becomes an addiction. Food, alcohol, cigarettes, caffeine, sex, drugs, gambling, shopping, TV, video games, social media. I'm sure people a lot more qualified than me will be able to talk about it in scientific terms, but I feel like a certain category of species (maybe all of them?) simply never ran into limiting excesses as part of their evolution. There are animals that will literally eat themselves to death if given the chance.
My mother worked in a alcohol rehab center. People who drank up to 12L of wine a day (I still wonder how that works) would turn to window cleaning liquid on withdrawal.
She said no-one ever quit the alcohol addiction by choice, all of them were brought here by court, generally after killing people in an accident.
I sure hope people can quit alcohol addiction by choice. But you do need to rebuild all the friendships that only existed around drinking routines. I for one have quit a coworking space that revolved too much around beer. They were good business contacts and that is why it’s hard to walk away.
I'm suspicious of bold claims like that from people observing a selected subset of a population. An alcohol rehab center, particular the type that accepts people sentenced there by a court, is likely to get few to no voluntary patients. Therefore, somebody working there will only see the people who have a serious enough alcohol problem to get in enough alcohol-related legal trouble to get sentenced to go to rehab.
I've known some people who would probably qualify as functional alcoholics, and none of them have ever got into legal trouble for it. IME, you generally have to be a wildly out of control drunk to get into legal trouble from it regularly.
I've also known plenty of people who stopped or cut back alcohol consumption voluntarily, with no help from any organized programs. It's quite doable for many people, once you decide that you genuinely want to stop, though I acknowledge that some people genuinely can't. You may infact have to change friendships and routines if some of the old ones are too conductive to binge drinking, but do what you gotta do.
I have some similar thoughts about this. Take Internet media streaming: am I happier being able to watch any of 10,000 things with no effort, rather than having maybe a couple dozen at hand and the ability, with some time and effort, to acquire one or two more if I really want them enough? Or is the ability to select exactly a certain thing to watch with low effort just scratching an itch that only exists because I can do that, and I'd be exactly as happy watching whatever caught my eye on the public library movie shelf earlier that week? I suspect, for most people, it's the latter. Am I happier with Spotify or whatever, than I would be with a smallish but well-used record collection that I add another entry to only a couple times a year? I suspect not.
Am I better off with 2-day shipping and the easy ability to read the opinions of enthusiasts and experts for any product I have a small interest in, then order it immediately? Does the change in what I buy actually pay off given the extra time-cost of that research, the extra brain-clutter of knowing things about products I'd probably never have though much about otherwise, and the extra money I'm sure I'm spending because of those factors? I kinda doubt it, but it's so damn hard to resist finding out what's the best way to do [thing] or the best product for the best way to do [thing] when you can do that, even if the result is that your life-satisfaction meter doesn't budge versus some hypothetical alternate universe in which, for anything you're not an actual enthusiast about, you just buy whatever looks good out of the selection at a local non-specialty store.
[EDIT] and yes I'm aware I'm dangerously close to realizing that almost everything "good" in life is just removing an irritation that only exists in the first place because of how life is and is structured, and how I'm choosing to respond to life and its typical structure, and then abandoning the material world to become a Buddhist monk or something.
Yeah, the universality and unoriginality of the observation isn't lost on me, but I do think there's some "the medium is the message" stuff going on with the sheer quantity and low-friction to selection of media and other options available to us now, with the Web and ubiquitous always-online computing devices turning into an outright engine for itch-generation and itch-scratching-of-same-itch. And that's before you factor in adversarial actors (marketers and such).
Packages show up on the lawn it is astonishing how they appear.
They are astonishing surprises.
It’s what I ordered the cat food the espresso machine the two new tables.
Ordering things and how they appear basically I am a small-scale sorcerer.
On the road I press the button and the music goes.
Air conditioning gas pedal restaurant take-out etc.
It is my will being perpetually sated.
Pretend we are writing a fable in which a sorcerer always gets what he wants.
Consider what happens to a soul which always gets what it wants.
> "Consider what happens to a soul which always gets what it wants."
In a popular Alan Watts talk he imagines a dreamer:
"let’s suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time, or any length of time you wanted to have.
And you would, naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each you would say “Well that was pretty great. But now let’s have a surprise, let’s have a dream which isn’t under control, where something is gonna happen to me that I don’t know what it's gonna be."
And you would dig that and would come out of that and you would say “Wow that was a close shave, wasn’t it?”. Then you would get more and more adventurous and you would make further- and further-out gambles what you would dream. And finally, you would dream where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today."
There was a book about this called the Paradox of Choice. Basically, that we want choices but they make us less happy.
There's a related phenomenon, I don't know a name for it, where given a choice between convenience and happiness people will almost always choose convenience, generally without even realizing they've made a choice. Our genes have a deep, deep preference for minimizing energy expenditure.
This happens with video games too. Players hate restrictions, but if they were removed, would get board and stop.
For a recent example, look at Valheim. They explicitly block you from using portals to move metal ore, which forces you to use a cart or a boat to move it. Suddenly I was a highway engineer for a few hours and pay more attention to harbour than before and had a blast.
Yet there are mods which remove this restriction, which removes this experience. Why build a highway if I can just drop a portal down?
I occasionally play Minecraft with my young son. I feel that eventual boredom arrives in creative mode. With no constraints, the charm can disappear.
I think constraints generally in a creative process (design, for example) are almost necessary. Graphic designers get it in print budgets, colour selections, quality of photographs, etc.
I remember once having to pitch to build a web site. The client stated they literally had no budget limitation. I honestly didn't know what to do, having spent my entire career fitting a solution to a budget!
Two of my favourite TED Talks are Barry Schwartz and the Paradox of Choice, where he says "in the past, you went to the store and there was one jar of peanut butter or one pair of jeans, and you bought them. If they weren't good, well, you had no choice. You demand choice. Now you go to the store and there's 30 jars of peanut butter or pairs of jeans - chunky, smooth, sweet, plain, large, small, organic, popular brand, niche brand, imported brand, etc. Now whatever you choose, you will have doubts, and if it isn't good, well there were so many choices it must be your fault, so you feel bad".
And Dan Gilbert on Happiness, demonstrating with studies that no, you are not happier with more choice, you are objectively, measurably, unquestionably, happier with no choice. 10,000 films that you can stop watching and change for another as soon as you are unhappy -> unhappiness. 1 film you have to watch all the way through and have no other -> you'll grow to like it. You become happier with things you're stuck with, and that even applies to people who are disabled, missed out on fortunes, got imprisoned for crimes they did commit, and for crimes they didn't commit, as well as for everyday people who bought something they can't return vs something they can return.
Via PJ Eby, you care about what you care for. People have it the other way round - "I'm not maintaining my car, but if I had a Lambo then I would care about my car". Noooo, if you start cleaning and maintaining your car, then you will care about your car because you're investing time and effort into it.
I personally love choice. But maybe for people like you, a service that curates some of the top choices and offers that as limited pool could be a useful.
It starts with the famous experiments where rats would prefer drugs to food and water but goes on to further study that lead to not so bleak conclusions.
“ In his 1979 history, The Alcoholic Republic, the historian W. J. Rorabaugh painstakingly calculated the stunning amount of alcohol early Americans drank on a daily basis. In 1830, when American liquor consumption hit its all-time high, the average adult was going through more than nine gallons of spirits each year.”
I think I remember hearing a similar stat on the ken burns prohibition doc. I didn’t quite understand why it was supposed to be that much though. 9 gallons of liquor is 36 liters is roughly 100 bottles of wine equivalent per year so less than a third of a bottle of wine a day which is what 1 or 2 glasses per meal equivalent? So the question then is are people drinking liquor drinking wine on top plus cider apparently? Or is it just a lot because that’s the average and plenty of people aren’t drinking much at or at all and that makes for the right tail of the distribution to be really drinking a lot?
9 Gallon is 34 Liters, 11 drinks per Liter of Vokda/Liquor
9*11 = 374 drinks per year or 1 drink a day
Its probably that Average/mean drinking amount isn't a good statistical representation when almost all the consumption is done by the top 10% of drinkers.
Historical comparisons also are tricky because sizes and %'s aren't consistent to today. Beer/Cider weren't as strong and bottle's of wine were smaller than 750ml etc etc.
“Liquor or spirit (also distilled alcohol) is an alcoholic drink produced by distillation of grains, fruits, or vegetables that have already gone through alcoholic fermentation.
[…]
Liquor generally has an alcohol concentration higher than 30%”
⇒ For a 10% alcohol wine, multiply that by a factor of (at least) 3. That makes it a bottle of wine a day.
Also, it was the average adult. Women likely consumed less alcohol. If so, the average adult male must have consumed more.
Title is definitely true (america has a drinking problem), in a way. Excessive drinking is normalized, though not as common as problem drinkers think. Since college I always drank too much, but my real issue was that I assumed everybody drank as much as I did (maybe 20-30 drinks per week). Since I wasn't drinking as soon as I woke up or getting shakes without drinking, I thought I was fine. It wasn't until I realized that I drank waaayyy more than most people that I started working on reducing consumption. Thankfully I only drank that much because I just have fun being drunk or enjoy the taste - I've never used alcohol to cope with stress, anxiety, shyness, etc - so it was easy when I decided to go cold turkey for a month. So I'm sharing in hopes that I can help someone else realize they drink too much even if they don't think they do, and that it's totally doable to cut back.
Just in this one month, I've already noticed a huge difference in my life. It's amazing to wake up rested and energetic every day, never having that dread about a hangover, being groggy, or wondering if I did something embarrassing last night. I feel present in everything I do, rather than having my routine and my attention thrown off by alcohol. Saving calories makes my weight more stable and lets me indulge in more food if I want to. I'm saving tons of money, especially at restaurants. I'm already regaining the hyperactivity and excitement towards life and events that I had in grade school before I started drinking, because now I can look forward to stuff other than getting drunk. It feels great to go to parties, restaurants, watch a movie, go on a date, do anything, and not even think about alcohol. For me drinking was fun and easy, but now I've learned that drinking is shallow and comes at way too high of a cost compared compared to the deep joy of living sober and enjoying life for its own sake again.
I wouldn't hesitate to recommend drinking less to anybody who does drink. You don't need to be black and white and think that it's either cold turkey or stay where you are. You don't need to worry about the "benefits" you get from red wine and whatever other stuff people love to talk about. Just try drinking less. Maybe don't drink on weekdays, set a maximum number you can drink in a day, take a 1-day break, take a 1-week break, start drinking lower-percentage drinks, set a maximum number of drinks per week, there are tons of options. I tried them all and over time I was able to consistently reduce how much I drank. I used to have trouble imagining not drinking during a weekend, and now I'm already having trouble imagining wanting to drink more than a few times a month at most.
Alcohol is like junk food or soda. It's fun and it's easy. But life is a lot better if you can break the habit and stop making it part of your life, or at least make it a once-in-a-blue-moon indulgence rather than a regular thing. Learn to love things with deeper and healthier value. If you don't control these things, there's the risk that you'll gradually get worse over time. You don't want to look at yourself in 20 years and realize you gained 50+ lbs and don't recognize yourself because you didn't take the chips or chocolate seriously. You don't want to look at yourself in 20 years and realize you have cirrhosis or heart disease because you didn't tone down the drinking. You don't have to be obese or an alcoholic to benefit from making healthy lifestyle changes.
I am in your same boat, I have always liked drinking very much, but I never dipped into any sort of serious "drinking problem" territory. For me the best way to reduce alcohol -- and stay healthy in general -- is to count calories. It's impossible to overdrink if you only have 200 calories at the end of your day and can only drink 1 beer. Nothing else has helped me cut back like that.
Yeah, that's a great way, even if you just do it to wake up to how many calories are in alcoholic drinks. I've switched to seltzer/carbonated drinks for both weekdays and weekend nights, and it's been great. Just as much fun for me to chug on friday or sip on after work without any health concerns (and a fraction of the cost)
Probably, but American paternalism means that for someone to take a hurts-self/adds-enjoyment tradeoff means that they have to convince everyone that the thing can't hurt anyone.
Because you aren't allowed to hurt yourself through consumption of a substance, you have to perform bad science first to 'prove' that the substance is good for you.
If we would allow people to hurt themselves, we could be truthful. But that much liberty is terrifying to many.
Most of us would actually happily admit that regular cannabis use is harmful ... so are a bunch of other things, like potato chips.
Cannabis use is not even in the same order of magnitude as the harm alcohol does. Alcohol kills 10K people a year in the US just from drunk driving. I'm not sure why you are bringing this up?
I don’t really think america has that big of a problem with alcohol. If anything the stats indicate drinking is dying out among the youths compared to previous generations. Fentanyl on the other hand, that is a real problem.
I hate these moralizing articles, if we have a drunk driving problem then write an article about that. But if people want to drink in their own homes let them be.
Are you saying there aren't downsides inherent with drinking itself? I'm onboard with letting people do what they want, but if what they want to do has negative effects the least we should do is make them aware of that.
There are downsides to eating Oreos, but we don't need articles which state obvious facts.
Much wrong has been done in this country by telling people their behavior is a moral. As long as you don't hurt me or anyone else do whatever you want, you're free to drink yourself silly every night
I would argue that benefits have also come from moralizing about certain practices. Consider smoking cigarettes, for instance, which has seen dramatic decreases in use over several decades in the US [1]. I suspect that the large amount of moralizing in schools, on TV and in movies, and other places had something to do with this given that it's still more common (perhaps because it's less taboo and still seen as "cool") in certain European countries [2], not to mention many other places around the world that weren't significantly different from the US some decades ago. This has public health benefits that everyone at least indirectly benefits from, without mentioning the more direct issues such as second-hand smoke or, in the case of alcohol, drunk driving or other crimes exacerbated by its use.
These aren't so obvious facts, and we DO write articles and run campaigns about the harms of junk food and overeating.
None of this is "moralizing", its simply reiterating the harmful effects of behaviors so others can make balanced decisions. Nobody is born aware of the dangers of junk food and alcohol, and they're easy to forget too unless one has personal experience with it (by then the damage is already done).
Some of my most cherished memories are those where I was out drinking wine and having really good food with my wife and friends.
When people were telling stories about Jesus, the central figure of their religion, one of the miracles they told of was him turning water into wine. This is held up as one of the most important stories in their entire moral system.
When the pyramids were being built, the builders were paid in beer.
People have been drinking, and enjoying the effects of drinking, for thousands of years, and "do not drink to excess" is a lesson the Greeks told us with their own myths and stories.
Be cautious of over drinking, however perhaps also be cautious of under drinking as well. These are not new revelations.
The history of human's connection to alcohol extends even further.
One of the anthropological theories is that it was a core reason for humans to take up agriculture in the first place and to domesticate certain grains.
And, the genetic mutation that allows us to process it in the first place (an enzyme in the liver to break it down much more easily than before) that we received in our lineage millions of years ago allowed us to descend from the trees to the ground. It was a key enabler to our expansion where rotting, fermented fruit sitting on the ground became an enabling calorie source!
I agree, these articles are ridiculous. If you have alcoholism in your family -- dont drink. If you're overweight because drinking causes you to eat shitty food and not exercise -- stop drinking. If you have anxiety because of drinking -- stop drinking. If drinking makes you an asshole and is causing relationship problems (I know a lot of people in this category) -- stop drinking.
If you like to go out on the weeks and drink 8 beers with your friends, all the more power to you. People have been drinking since time immemorial, it's part of who we are as human.
Life is too short to "dot every i and cross every t".
>If you like to go out on the weeks and drink 8 beers with your friends, all the more power to you. People have been drinking since time immemorial, it's part of who we are as human.
This just isn't true at all and it's probably offensive to large groups of people who view alcohol drinking (with pretty good reason) as a vice.
Abstaining from alcohol is also a praised act since time immemorial. Trying to keep one's mind and body free from intoxicants is also a noble goal and is something that is part of us as human, AND it is what distinguishes us from animals (animals in general don't abstain from things out of sheer willpower, but human beings in general do, be it dieting, teetotaling, etc.).
Life is also too short for you to accelerate your end voluntarily by drinking 8 drinks in one night in rapid succession.
This is the only part of modern social life where it's okay to tell people to do risky and dangerous behaviors which endanger the public. Excessive drunkenness is a public health problem. This past year should have made us keen to the fact that many actions we take for granted have consequences on others
Abstaining from alcohol is also a praised act since time immemorial. Trying to keep one's mind and body free from intoxicants is also a noble goal and is something that is part of us as human, AND it is what distinguishes us from animals (animals in general don't abstain from things out of sheer willpower, but human beings in general do, be it dieting, teetotaling, etc.).
This just isn't the truth. "Free from intoxicants" might be noble for some, but on the other hand, different sorts of intoxicants have been used for religion for a very, very long time. Folks have used this stuff for a very long time - not just alcohol. Folks to this day espouse the benefits of things like LSD and MDMA: pot/hash can be used to good effect.
Not to mention that folks bond over such experiences. Drinking 8 drinks in a night isn't necessarily dangerous, depending on the strength of the alcohol - no one said it was rapid either, nor unsafe. Just like you an do LSD or mushrooms and not be unsafe.
And there is just no way to know if animals abstain from things out of sheer willpower: We simply cannot communicate with animals on a level to give us that understanding. Animals DO seem to partake of mind-altering substances, though. (catnip, anyone?).
We tell folks to drive every day, and driving is a risky and dangerous behavior which easily endangers the public, by teh way.
1) If I want to accelerate my end voluntarily, that is my prerogative.
2) You have no evidence that drinking 8 beers in one sitting once a week will cause (1). Send me lots of studies that link excessive alcohol consumption to esophageal cancer, I will send you lots of studies that show the opposite.
3) Not everyone drinks excessively and partakes in "risky and dangerous behaviors which endanger the public" (this is a ridiculous assumption you're making). I do not drink and drive. I live in a city where I can walk home. etc. 99% percent of the time I actually am at home with friends, even pre-covid.
Quote frankly... I don't even binge drink that often, but I will defend anyone's right to do so, without judgement.
You will accelerate other people's ends as well, statistically, if you continue to get drunk. Drunkenness is related to so many car crashes, brawls, and other crimes. It's prevalence in society affects everyone else and you are selfishly doing it to the detriment of others.
Real people do not work like "I only drink 8 beers in one sitting once a week every week". In reality, the fact that you binge drink at all, makes you more likely to binge drink when special occasions arise, and this is exactly the reason there's a huge uptick in drunk driving accidents and deaths every holiday on the calendar in countries with large drinking populations. Those people involved in those incidents probably also don't drink to excess every day but rather they drink to excess on occasion and on this occasion they went too far.
Drinking and driving isn't the only dangerous behavior that alcohol consumption makes more likely, it impairs your decision-making skills, it is heavily linked to domestic and public violence, etc.
Drunk driving happens not because people are idiots but because situations press on them until they have very few options and driving while a little intoxicated (what an intoxicated perceives as "a little" is a lot more than a normal person does) is one of the only options left. If you get put in that kind of situation, we all have to suffer for it, not you. Drunk drivers usually kill others and rarely die in crashes.
noble is very subjective. I'm sure some religions(judio-christian) might see it as noble, but that is far from the only view point, before or since those religions
Just because something has been done a certain way for a long time does not mean it's something we should continue. In a lot of cases it just means we didn't have the knowledge that it was so bad for you. And that's exactly where alcohol fits in. We know alcohol is bad for us in just about every way. So there's really no such thing as "under drinking".
Cigarettes. Cocaine. Tanning. Not wearing seat belts. Not wearing helmets. Beating kids as punishment. Bloodletting. X-rays. I mean the list is just endless.
Folks should do as they please. I'm not suggesting everyone needs to stop drinking or anything. But to suggest that "perhaps also be cautious of under drinking as well" is just downright wrong.
Seriously, the traditionalist argument is poor. You know what else humans have done for thousands of years? Slavery. And it also has many "religious" ties: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bible_and_slavery
A more charitable interpretation of what I wrote would be to understand that I was tying drinking to the happy memories I have with my wife. This was the first sentence of the post you are replying to.
So in this case “under drinking” could be interpreted as a metaphor for being overly cautious and missing out on something enjoyable. Life is dangerous. Snowboarding, going on a road trip, swimming in the ocean, petting a dog, eating street food, traveling. These are all dangerous things that kill people every year. I stand by the statement that we should be cautious of anything prescribing that we avoid these activities completely.
> When the pyramids were being built, the builders were paid in beer.
Yeah, because water used to be much harder to sanitize, and “beer” (thick, lumpy, mildly alcoholic – think fermented porridge) is basically liquid bread. Doing manual labor all day takes a lot of calories, and cereals are much cheaper than alternative foods. It’s hardly a healthy diet though.
Keeping peasants drunk enough to be pliable is a side benefit much appreciated by the lords of just about every feudal/plantation economy throughout history.
> because water used to be much harder to sanitize
They actually addressed this in the article, but sanitizing water is as simple as boiling it which is much less involved than the process of making beer.
I’m no expert on ancient Mesopotamian/Egyptian theories of disease, but my understanding is that people knew that water with even a bit of alcohol was significantly less likely to get you sick than river water, and drinking beer was (in part) an intentional countermeasure.
Beyond that, in an ancient context you can’t indefinitely store your boiled water and expect it to stay uncontaminated. If you are on a construction site, boiling all of your drinking water every day before use sounds a lot less convenient than just storing beer. Moreover, if laborers were all drinking water they would still need to eat something.
> sanitizing water is as simple as boiling
It may be simple but it takes a lot of energy to boil & you can't store it. They didn't have the convenience of electric kettles.
> "do not drink to excess" is a lesson the Greeks told us with their own myths and stories.
Thank goodness the Roman's brought new light to Bacchus who shows us that excessive temperance is always punished more severally than excessive indulgence.
If anything your comment just reinforces how much of a problem it is, and how deeply it is engrained in society. If sugary processed foods had been developed 5000 years ago, would you be saying the same about those today?
You are associating alcohol == good times, which if you want to do so is fine (we are adults, we have free will), but know that you can have good times without alcohol as well. They aren't mutually inclusive.
There are a few other threads where people say similar things. If you need to have alcohol to have good times, then you do actually have a drinking problem. If you can't imagine going out with friends without drinking, then you do actually have a drinking problem. If you can't imagine eating a meal without drinking, then you do actually have a drinking problem.
I think the biggest problem the western societies have today is: Finding problems everywhere.
Ok, i am from germany, so i assume my views on alcohol probably differ a lot from the view most americans have. Here, it is totally fine for a 16 year old to buy and drink wine or beer. It is totally unproblematic if you enjoy a few beers with your friends in the park... and the alcohol ban in public some cities acted caused turmoil short of a full blown riots.
What i want to say is: Why do we allways need to find "the hair in the soup"?
Yes, it may be unhealthy... but so are other things, and i think a perfectly healthy life would be terrible boring.
I'm from The Netherlands. I won't throw a fit to get anyone to stop drinking. But it's pretty obvious that drinking, even one beer per day, on a societal scale leads to more obesity, more sickness, more violence etc. And the accompanying healthcare, police etc. spending.
Again, drink if you want. It's allowed. But don't pretend that it is unproblematic/healthy/natural/without consequences.
Just admit (or at least do not deny) that by drinking, you're making an (indirect) withdrawal from the community fund. Just like people who drive a car, people who hunt for fun, people who smoke etc.
That is what i want to say: Everything has consequeces! Nothing good comes without the bad, you will have to "pay a price" for everything... even when the "price" is a less enjoyed life ;-)
What really bothers me is that it seems that the western culture is (at least from my perspective) striving to become a totally clean, political correct, vegan, moral and abstinent society. Something like the society in "Demoliton Man". I really, really dont want to life in such an society...
I went my whole life not enjoying being social. Drinking allows me to be social when I want to be. I don't really see that as a problem. Socializing is just not something I have ever enjoyed sober.
I think you’re engaging in the exact sort of binary thinking that is the problem.
I’m saying: many people have enjoyed the effects of socializing and drinking alcohol for thousands of years. Perhaps we shouldn’t be so quick to demonize it since it seems to have demonstrated its utility.
You somehow read that as: “I need alcohol to have fun”.
The title is wrong imo because drinking is an intensely personal thing.
I don't drink for one year every four years and have been through this cycle multiple times. I have one year where I drink quite a bit and my current year is the weekends only drinking cycle.
Some observations: I don't miss alcohol at all when I don't drink, but in dry years I can get quite depressed.
As soon as I do have one drink my mind immediately goes to having more, plans change - I grew up in a binge drinking culture (UK) and that never seems to go away.
I body check myself socially to see if I've drunk too much even when I'm not drinking. I think a lot of social drinking is actually psychological.
Hangovers suck but are a great safeguard. If you don't have them be alarmed. The year when I drink a lot I get overtired, generally puffy skinned feeling and lacklustre.
Most important tip: don't drink pints of mineral water instead of beer: I got terrible kidney stones
Article mirrors my experience. For context I'm German, my wife's French and we've got family in Croatia who own a vineyard so I'm used to being around alcohol and people drinking. My first impression when I spent time was in the US was indeed how bipolar drinking is compared to Europe.
We probably drink a hell of a lot more in raw terms than the average American does.Two glasses of wine for dinner, another one in the evening, maybe some cognac to wind down, and so on. But it's for the most part not about getting drunk or coping with stress. I've got no illusions about the physical effects but speaking about addiction or being dysfunctional I've seen very little of it despite some people I know drinking enough to stun a mule probably.
The things that I noted were different in the US is how solitary everyone is, overworked and how little time people take for preparing food and just sitting at a table having a drink over conversation. People seem to drink to cope more, use it as a medicine rather than for pleasure or to enhance meals, and I think that turns very badly very quick.
That said I don't think solitary drinking is necessarily as bad as the article makes it out to be all the time, but it takes a certain personality. When you take drugs alone, not just alcohol, you need to be more mindful about why you do it.
Noticed this when I was in Germany/Austria as well. In America, if you go out drinking then that's the primary activity. It's what you're doing. But in central Europe socializing and seeing friends is the activity and you just happen to drink because that's what you do when you see your friends.
I’ve noticed that any bad habits or behaviors Americans have tend to be misunderstood when they aren’t being misrepresented or exaggerated in order to pile on.
From my (not op) experiences, oh yes.
Just last night I was talking to a potential bar investor and one of the huuuuge talking points was " how do we cater for the americans?"
I think Americans just aren't used to saying we're out to socialize. It's what's happening, but we're bad at it and we're not used to being explicit about it.
As a member of this target demographic, I would say that catering to American drinkers would be to provide a pretext to be at your establishment. You don't have to actually provide all that much, but if you provide a reason for being there that isn't, "Socialize with others" I bet you'd attract more Americans. In America we do "brewery tours" for example, but it doesn't even have to be related to alcohol itself ("good" music, board games, axe throwing, bumper cars, pub quiz, karaoke, etc.). What matters is that you're plausibly not there to "socialize", even though that's actually why you're there.
Anecdote: we've had curfews/restrictions that prevented the American military from drinking alcohol at establishments in the local community, sometimes for over a year. Almost all of my peers at the time would rather sit at the Officers' Clubs on base and get drunk, as if it was their only option for socializing.
My take (granted, I had quit drinking years prior): I know you guys can't drink off-base, but....that's where all the WOMEN are (the military officer ranks in our Service is ~94% males). I would expect your desire to get laid to exceed your desire to hide inside your alcohol-infused comfort zone....
My peers: Nah....if I can't drink alcohol I don't wanna go out to meet anyone.
The people I hang out with (even to this day) go out to get laid, and if they get DRUNK that's just a side-effect. Most guys I know go out to get drunk, and if they get LAID, that's just a side-effect.
> I would expect your desire to get laid to exceed your desire to hide inside your alcohol-infused comfort zone....
Honest question: what is his realistic chance to get laid with non-prostitute? How much money would it cost to pay sex worker? I also suspect that going around bars while not drinking looking for girl to have sex with might involve a lot of rejection and a lot of effort.
> The people I hang out with (even to this day) go out to get laid,
I honestly never socialized with people like that. I had always stable relationships and most my friends tended to form those too. Not everyone is for quick hookups.
>>>Honest question: what is his realistic chance to get laid with non-prostitute?
At the time, pretty high. The clubs and bars were very active, and "gaijin-hunter" Japanese women are notoriously easy. If you are halfway-attractive and at least a LITTLE charismatic, you should be able to snag a one-night stand or two, and then a girlfriend in.....6 weeks? That's assuming going out Friday/Saturday every weekend. If you aren't drinking alcohol, it's not that expensive either. If you end up with a relationship that lasts a few months or more, I consider that a pretty good ROI.
>>>How much money would it cost to pay sex worker?
Depending on service (incall/outcall) and location...$100-$300+.
>>>I also suspect that going around bars while not drinking looking for girl to have sex with might involve a lot of rejection and a lot of effort.
It does put you "not on the wavelength" of people when they are drunk, doubly so if they are kinda dumb too. You can overcome these hurdles by being attractive, and knowing the right conversational hooks to say in their native language to build rapport quickly and lazily. Building that skillset does take time, and brings other risks (PUA's call it "calibration"....in my experience, "calibrating" for Japanese women can over-fit your social skills for a small dataset, and then your Game suffers when you engage with women from different cultures).
>>>I honestly never socialized with people like that. I had always stable relationships and most my friends tended to form those too. Not everyone is for quick hookups.
90% of my wingmen have been in stable relationships. That's never stopped any of us from adding to our harems. If you have a wife, get a mistress. If you have a mistress, get a side-chick. If you have a side-chick, get a fuck-buddy. If you have all four of those, bang all of them during the week, so on the weekend you can get some head in your car in the parking lot from a new girl, who might be a suitable replacement for any of the last 3 of your regulars (I don't recommend replacing your wife with a club-rat...).
I had a roommate that kept his accountant side-chick for over 5 years, even after his wife found out. She paid his $20,000 bail when he was getting kicked out of the country, no questions asked. That said....those kind of reliable women are rarely found in bars/clubs, but if you never venture outside of your fortified American enclave because you can't consume alcohol in town, how would a guy ever find out either way?
Thanks for answer. The prostitution sounds more expensive then I assumed (but I guess it factors in risk and periods without customers).
To the ending, your friends are kind of guys I really dont want to meet. I kind of assumed it was all about single guys having causual fun, now I feel sorry for their wifes. I honestly think better about guys that are not getting laid at the base.
I disagree with this. Americans go out drinking with friends because alcohol helps you cut through the bullshit small talk and get to the real talk that everyone is afraid to initiate but eager to take part in. If we could all have perfectly candid conversations surrounding sensitive topics without alcohol, there would be no need for most bars to exist.
It’s kind of amusing when you think about it like a philosopher. I’m a bit older than the average HNer, probably, at 41 this year. It’s all the same fears and doubts. The human condition. Finding love, acceptance, belonging. Not facing down the human condition alone. That is what “big talk” is about to me.
I don't drink but I agree it's the social drug. It makes you want to interact with others. Drinking alone makes you want to go out and tell people what's on your mind.
I used to drink with friends and in that country there was a custom that bars close at a given time at night, and then we would go to someone's apartment to drink more. I remember on one occasion we were sitting around in someone's kitchen maybe 8 people. And at one point I realize everyone was talking at the same time. Everyone was talking so no-one was listening. Everyone wanted to get their point across.
Where in Germany? I find this surprising. As an American expat who has spent a lot of time in Germany, I’d agree that the German relationship with alcohol is less taboo, but Germany/UK have pretty big binging cultures. The Mediterraneans definitely do it more responsibly though.
Yet, the Oktoberfest is such a small and insignificant detail of our culture. It’s a big party, mostly for tourists. After those two weeks, many people I know take a monthlong abstinence, and life carries on. Binge drinking happens, but it’s definitely nothing regular.
Can you clarify what you mean here? I was under the impression european habits of alcohol pairing takes much more space under this umbrella than, say, whether an american associates junk foods (pizza, wings) with beer.
This is a common refrain but at the same time it seems to be the one substance commonly used across most of the world since ancient times. None of the other supposedly less harmful, banned drugs are so ubiquitous. Perhaps there's a good reason for this (besides varying availability of other substances)?
I'm sorry, which pathogens are killed by imbibing alcohol? I've never heard of such a thing, even historically.
Edit: Next time I'll do a cursory googling before commenting. This is apparently an existing hypothesis for common types of bacteria such as e coli, salmonella, etc in the drink itself, not in the body.
One good reason is because alcoholic beverages could be stored for long periods of time and be safe for drinking. Water can become contaminated over time if bacteria is allowed to grow while it’s being stored, so it has to be relatively fresh to drink. Other options like milk would spoil quickly. Alcohol generally didn’t have these issues, giving it some utility that outweighed its advantages.
In an age where other beverages are as easily accessible for people living in the modern world, it’s utility isn’t there any more and you are left with all the downsides.
is it plausible humans initially hated the taste of alcohol and suffered worse hangovers, but in a manner of a few thousand years descend from ancestors who selected for high euphoria and strong livers.... all because alcohol was healthier than water?
Nope, I'm quite convinced it's the varying availability of the other substances.
Coffee, tea, and tobacco, became at least as widespread once global trade made that possible. Coca was late to the party because it doesn't grow well outside of its native region.
Cannabis is an odd one, in that it was extremely widespread and making solid inroads in Europe and North America, when it became a weapon for United States racial policy, and a jobs program for federal police after the repeal of Prohibition. Coca and cocaine got caught up in the same dragnet.
Opium and its derivatives are genuinely pernicious and attempts to normalize their use outside of medicine have been resisted repeatedly throughout history.
Which leaves psychedelics, which are... weird, and also were largely unknown until some anthropologists in the 40s and 50s drew attention to them.
The history of 'modern' drug prohibition owes more to politics than the inherent properties of the substances in question.
You left out refined sugar in its many forms. In total deaths and disease as well as cost to society dwarfs everything. The combination of being legal, advertised, and by some measures as addictive as any others is tough to beat.
Fermentation is a great way to store excess food, which is why there's a ton of fermented foods across cultures. For civilizations centered around cereal crops, it makes sense that you'd see a lot of fermented cereal crops such as beer.
You can definitely see the benefit for an ancient civilization, since you're able to store many more calories which allows you to grow a much larger population base. But like many things associated with the move to agrarian civilizations, being good for the civilization doesn't necessarilly correlate with being good for the individual.
> None of the other supposedly less harmful, banned drugs are so ubiquitous
You get alcohol when fruit spoils. Our experience with it is quite literally as old as foraging. This doesn't tell us anything about how harmful or not harmful alcohol is.
As far as ubiquity, plant-based substances had to follow migration or trade routes to gain use outside of their native habitats. Alcohol was coextensive with any food .
The fact that alcohol has been a part of human existence for so long might support my hypothesis, if you believe that humans physiology is at least partly shaped by human dietary habits over many thousands of years.
Alcohol is more dangerous than all other drugs, in my experience (been addicted to alcohol and heroin in the past, and have abused every common drug) and in my opinion.
The addiction rate for cocaine/heroin/meth may be higher, but the negative effects of those drugs mostly stem from the high cost (theft) and insane profit margins (murder). If a heroin addict could get their supply for $5/day (and have it be pure heroin w no fentanyl) then nearly all of the negatives would disappear.
It's somewhat more subtle, pure medical grade methamphetamine (desoxyn) taken orally is theoretically the best ADD medicine available but it's almost never prescribed for political reasons.
Meth has lot less sympathetic side effects than dextroamphetamine per unit of dopaminergic stimulation, this simple difference enables abuser to consume ridiculously large dose and those high doses are destructive.
Amphetamine-like drugs are used as pills or capsules, powder, or fluid, and can be ingested orally, smoked, insufflated, or injected intravenously. They cause euphoria but tolerance develops rapidly. Clinically evident effects of the two drugs are nearly indistinguishable, but methamphetamine appears to be a more potent stimulant. Amphetamine and methamphetamine induce euphoria, increased energy, alertness and libido, agitation and anxiety, increased locomotor activity and stereotypical movements, as well as hyperthermia, increased heart rate and blood pressure, vasoconstriction, bronchodilatation, hyperglycemia, and suppress appetite. Psychosis, hyperkinesia, seizures, and coma have been described in emergency patients. Chronic users may develop behavioral disorders, impulsivity, punding (non-goal directed repetitive activities), hallucinations, tremor, choreoathetosis, dystonias, ataxia, and gait disturbances (41–43). Stereotyped involuntary choreoathetotic hyperkinesias are characteristic in arms, neck and head, and usually disappear during sleep, while teeth grinding (bruxism) may occur during day and night. Movement disorders may develop during abuse or abstinence, and though they a usually resolve within few days, they may remain for a long time in some cases, even after the abuse of amphetamines is stopped. Treatment with benzodiazepines or neuroleptics may be of benefit (43–45). Choreiform movements have developed as an adverse effect in the therapeutic setting of amphetamine used in the treatment of ADHD in adult and pediatric patients (46, 47).
Yes, the dose makes the poison and yes medicl amphetamines are sometimes abused but the literature you cited¹ isn't really about the medical use of amphetamines. Those papers are about the abuse of amphetamines.
From my experience with Vyvanse I find that amphetamines have a dose response function with linear and exponential steps. 15mg is barely perceptible, 30mg is like a coffee without the anxiety but it last 8 hours. 45mg is like 30mg but a little longer. 60mg in 2 doses (first pill at 7am and next one at 9am) is a perfect treatment against my ADD. Once I tried 90mg and it was terrible, I experienced bruxism, anxiety and hyperacidity for 18 hours. I am sure that I would develop the problems you listed if I were to take 90mg a day but 90mg of Vyvanse is supratherapeutic...
1:
Link 41 is about abuse (supratherapeutic and frequent doses).
Link 43 I can't comment as I don't have acces but it's an old paper from 1988...
Link 45 is about abuse again.
Link 46 is about accidental ingestion by a baby. (a therapeutic dose for a teenager is clearly supratherapeutic in a 8months infant)
Link 47 is probably about abuse (the abstract talk of reversible consequences of dose escalation) but I don't have acces to the paper.
You can't avoid capillary vasoconstriction at any dose and that's what makes your teeth rot and gums go bad. Nothing you can do about that. I've used Adderall and Vyvanse many many years ago for "ADHD" as well. Bad breath and increased gum issues made me stop well before any damage occurred.
I remember seeing a study a few years ago that showed a lot of the negatives from Meth weren't inherent in the drug but from behaviors it encourages; like not sleeping.
I don't think I would say it "encourages" not sleeping. Rather it makes sleeping impossible. And that has bad effects. Drug causes something which causes something else, so you could say it is not the drug but its effects, but I would say that means it is the drug that causes it all. Don't take it if you don't want those "side-effects".
> That said I don't think solitary drinking is necessarily as bad as the article makes it out to be all the time
One of my great bugaboos is these cultural definitions of alcoholism that are independent from the actual amount of alcohol consumed. You know “you’re only an alcoholic if you drink alone” or “you’re only an alcoholic if you pour your own drinks” (apparently this is a meme in Japan?). Every culture that consumes alcohol seems to have these, and they’re all laughably naive and easily gamed. Alcoholics can and do drink heavily together, and they can pour each other drinks if that’s what it takes to sidestep some silly taboo. The only definition of this that’s meaningful is how much alcohol you drink and how often, nothing else.
> "you’re only an alcoholic if you pour your own drinks” (apparently this is a meme in Japan?)
(source: I've got family in Japan). It's polite in Japan to serve others and then let someone serve you. Otherwise it's "tejaku" (pooring oneself's drink). In, say, France/Belgium it's different: the one who serves from the bottle serves everybody and ends up serving himself.
Now, obviously, when you're drinking alone there's nobody to serve you...
Just to be extra precise; I’m not trying to imply that there’s anything wrong with customs around how a good friend or polite host serves other people. I’m just railing against the “you’re only an alcoholic if you <behavior unrelated to amount consumed>“ tropes.
I’ve never been to Japan, but I’d heard that “you’re only an alcoholic if you pour your own drinks” is a trope there. The question mark in my original post was to underscore my uncertainty.
This trope needs to die. Europe doesn't have drinking "problems" because it mostly draws the line for "problems" in what would solidly be "functional alcoholic" territory in the US.
Exactly. The numbers don't back up the narrative unless you do mental gymnastics to redefine Europe. HN often seems to forget that Europe extends south beyond the Alps and east beyond the Oder.
> HN often seems to forget that Europe extends south beyond the Alps
Unclear what this is supposed to mean. Italy[0], Portugal[1] and Spain[2] all have lower prevalence of heavy episodic drinking than the EU average.
Both Portugal ("south of the Alps") and France[3] ("north of the Alps") have higher alcohol consumption per capita than the EU average, which is largely due to a culture of moderate wine drinking with meals that has nothing to do with "functional alcoholism".
For what its worth it I looked up the data to disprove you but it actually backs you up. The data says that Germans drink more than Americans but have lower rates of alcoholism and liver disease.
When factoring in the alcohol-attributable fractions, it looks like German males have slightly higher rates of liver failure because of alcohol than American males, while German females have slightly less than American females. An this is with the U.S. population demographically being much more susceptible to alcohol liver disease than Germany[1].
Looking at the numbers, I think there's a real possibility that Germans and other Europeans have a problem with alcohol that's just as bad if not worse, but are possibly less willing to admit it. Just like how 70 years ago few in America would be willing to admit America's problems with alcohol and tobacco.
I'm surprised this is the top comment, what's the deal with Europeans tending to talk like they're the authoritative source on American culture based on a few people they've met and a few websites they've read? This seems like an absurd reductionist view of both European and American cultures. It honestly seems like the type of anecdotal content I would expect from a Reddit thread.
It's not just Europeans. Getting a taste of less than 1% of a country and becoming a total boor of a know-it-all any time the topic comes up is universal, AFAIK.
Spain would disagree. Many parts of Europe absolutely have binge drinking problems on par with the US or UK. Let's not even get started on Eastern Europe. You don't need to go far from Germany to find these problems.
I would probably say that Germany isn't indicative of the Eurozone at all.
I’ve lived in the US for 30-some years and could really only tell you the drinking habits of myself, my wife, and a few close friends with any kind of accuracy.
Do you do research on drinking habits? How can you assume to know so much about the US’ drinking habits in general terms?
I am an American. I drink 2 glasses at wine at dinner, maybe a cocktail before, and a whiskey or the like after. Dinner is an event for the family. We talk about the day. We take time to cook it for the most part. The other day we had the new neighbors over, cheese, meat and fish board, and lots of wine. Eating and drinking with friends and family is joy and happiness.
Why do we perpetuate these myths about European drinkers? If you’re not drinking to get intoxicated why are you drinking? I’ve seen addiction papered over with this nonsense on more occasions than not.
As an American, I find that most people drink much less than that. The alcoholics are often around people who drink so much that they aren't aware that drinking multiple drinks a day is uncommon.
I honestly get sick when I drink more than three drinks within three hours.
When I moved to Canada, what really shocked me if that people would drink alone, or be the only one drinking at a table. Alcohol is something social in France.
I agree with you. It's not that Germans don't drink a lot - but it's just not as much in a single session and generally not for the purpose of getting drunk.
Most people don't understand the concept of standard drink sizes (for medical purposes or blood alcohol calculation). Firstly the standard drink size in the US is larger than in the US, but even so it's still smaller than the typical size drink people actually receive. If there were more awareness around standard drink sizes we might discover that Americans drink more than statistics capture by a lot (though probably not more than Germans)! In Germany most of my friends in the US would be considered alcoholics.
- shots are typically much larger in the US - about 2x-3x
- the standard beer size (for beer on tap) is usually a pint in the US. In Germany it's about a half pint! (That's why Germans can have a lunch beer)
- Canned wine is fairly popular in the US, but nobody realizes that this is essentially half of bottle of wine.
On a related note: most people definitely drive under the influence (legally drunk) in the US! :(
I grew up in Germany in the restaurant business (family business) and was a bar tender from a young age (albeit in a fancy restaurant with a few locals who'd sit at the bar). The most shots I've ever seen someone drink in an evening was 9 shots - my staff and I thought that person was a crazy alcoholic. Those shots are 2cl. When you compare that to the typical tequila shots in US bars it's basically ~3 shots (a little more), which people in their 20s and 30s tend to drink like it's no big deal.
I have lived several places in the Midwest, in SF, Chicago and of course traveled lots of places in the US for business and vacation.
Disclaimer: German in the US for 15+ years.
I'm writing this right now whilst drinking my German Import Pilsener to wind down from work :D
I've been to Europe many times. It's no better there than here. In the USA it's a bit of a regional thing as well, some states are much worse than others, but I don't think Europeans should feel like they have "superior drinking practices", they're just as bad.
I don’t think France has a particularly healthy drinking culture. It’s worth pointing out that France has a far higher rate of alcohol deaths than the US, France has around 41K/year and the US 95K/year, which is shocking given the 5x population difference. Even if we assume there are accounting differences, France has a way higher rate of abuse at the extreme end (and thus likely indicates a higher rate of abuse more broadly)
I think it is necessary to distinguish between generations, at least in Italy, but I’ve seen similar patterns in other countries I’ve lived.
My generation in Italy (millennials) tends to drink a lot more and with the precise purpose of getting drunk. The way they/we do it resembles much more the American way than the way our parents used to drink.
Of course, this is based on personal experience, but I’ve seen this pattern across different social classes and it seems to be mainly linked to age, more than education or economic condition.
One thing that comes to mind is the 21 year age restriction on the US, which seems to actually be enforced. Where I grew up in Europe there was an 18 year limit officially but not really, and you could get all the booze you wanted as an teenager. Cannabis too.
I went to an international school, so we'd get American kids coming in and realising that they could drink before graduating into a dry university. At least one of my friends got his stomach pumped after a massive binge.
I wonder whether the culture in the US encourages people to guzzle it all down at once to minimise the risk of getting caught.
I noticed something similar in the UK, where they do seem to somewhat enforce the drinking age of 18, and so when I got to uni here my new friends would act like they'd just discovered alcohol and get incredibly drunk.
Now it's not like kids in Europe never get drunk, but it's always available so not really seen as an alluring thing. On much of the continent it's also the kind of thing you might consume with your parents around, which is the ultimate excitement killer.
I for one drink two bottles of wine while playing some slowly paced video game every Sunday night in anticipation of great new week in my hellscape of a project.
The data seems to indicate that half of American adults drink never or close to never.
My lived experience is much different; friends in their 20s/30s/40s drinking at every event and gathering. I live in an area full of very busy bars and restaurants with people drinking. Other wealthier areas are the same around the country. Traveling internationally, the story is the same. And even people like manual laborers drink a lot (I see construction workers regularly drinking on breaks, and I've known some personally), so it's not just a behavior amongst the college-educated professional crowd.
Maybe cities attract and sustain this behavior. People want to be around other people, to be around nightlife, etc. Characterization of this as a purely American problem (or a general problem America-wide) seems like a mistake given the numbers though.
One of my older brothers was a heavy drinker. He died recently at the age of 50. He had an enlarged heart and liver, which they believe were the cause of his death. It's not really clear to me if he saw it coming. He was fine one day, and then the next he was found dead by his housekeeper. I often hear about how alcohol in moderation can possibly cause you to live longer, but I don't hear much about how too much can shorten your lifespan.
How much do you hear about hereditary hemochromatosis and iron overload? It disproportionately affects people named Pat, and the family of people with mysterious liver and heart issues. Get your ferritin checked if you haven't. It's the most common genetic disorder in the United States, and commonly dismissed as alcoholism after death (it does complicate it and produce some of the same symptoms). Sorry for your loss.
As an American who’s spent most of their adult life working outside the US (Europe and Asia) I find this pretty hilarious. I mean, it may be true…drinking damage is absolute, not relative. But if America has a drinking problem, a huge chunk of the rest of the world are outright alcoholics.
Of course I think all of this is alarmist. Alcohol is one of those great traditions that has transcended centuries and generations. If I live a few years less, so be it. I’d rather be happy.
I think this is missing the point a bit. In my experience, while some countries in Europe have a higher intake of alcohol on average, I have never met anyone who drink to cope with stress, work, etc. outside full-blown alcoholics. Americans do this a lot. In my opinion those are two different discussions: one about the effect of too much alcohol on your system and one of the tendency to drink in ways that is normally only seen in alcoholics (but in smaller quantities). While they might sound similar one is overconsumption (bad) and the other is normalisation of alcohol abuse (very risky, likely bad).
I live in London and pre-Covid, a good chunk of people I know have drinks after work 3 days a week. I’m not trying to nit pick (I like the UK drinking culture) but it just seemed like a very Ameri-centric view from someone who hasn’t spent much/any time outside the US.
>but it just seemed like a very Ameri-centric view from someone who hasn’t spent much/any time outside the US.
I live in Denmark, which has one of the highest rates of alcohol consumption among young people in the EU and almost the same overall as the UK but without the pub culture you guys have. Most of our social consumption is the unhealthy heavy drinking party kind. But this is raw amount consumed and you yourself said you like the drinking culture (I wish we had it here). I'm talking about people drinking to cope. Going to a pub 3 days a week and drinking alone at home after work to cope with stress etc. is very different.
Absolutely. With the pandemic and the social isolation, alcohol has kept me going. I know the judgemental people will label me, but honestly nothing else has helped. In the pandemic I tried many other coping mechanisms, exercise, social media, etc… but alcohol, strangely enough kept me grounded through this mayhem. I am pretty sure I’ll wean off it when the world gets it’s shit together.. pardon my French
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 452 ms ] threadGo to work and stare at the medium rectangle.
Come home and watch the big rectangle.
Come home and watch Black Mirror on our largest black mirror.
[0] https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/05/31/qanon-poll-americ...
Take your pick!
Having no direction or hope for a better future (perceived or real) has driven people I've known to alcoholism.
Not an excuse. Just a perspective.
For some people, it can really help live more in the moment, enjoy time with friends, and temporarily put aside all the stress and worries about the future.
If these numbers are correct, the top 10% of alcohol drinkers consume the equivalent of 10 drinks per day: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/25/think...
The unit for a single drink is a fixed measurement, so someone pouring a tall glass of wine or a very stiff drink could be consuming 2-5 “drinks” in a single glass, but regardless the consumption is extremely high.
This is possibly the reason why studies say "moderate drinking can be healthy".
Ten drinks isn't that much hard liquor: it's about 450ml. That's a little more than a can (392ml).
Sure, the volume isn't unfathomable. But most people drinking a Mickey (13 ounces ~ 9 drinks) would render them useless.
First, tolerance to substances is more physiological than simply learning to hide it.
Second, consider one drink an hour ten eight hours. You’d barely be inebriated. It wouldn’t be particularly drastic.
> Functional tolerance refers to a phenomenon where a person can ingest significant amounts of alcohol – either at once or slowly over time – and not appear to be intoxicated. A person who has developed a functional tolerance to alcohol may be under the influence of alcohol without it being noticeable, thus allowing them to participate in certain daily activities in a manner that appears normal to others.
This is also what TIPS, the training given to bartenders, teaches [2]. Finally, to the point about spreading out the drinks. Yes, this is how people consume large amounts of alcohol daily. I maintain that someone who barely drinks or never drinks will be incapable of doing their job after 4 hours, even after spreading out the drinks. They certainly shouldn't drive a vehicle.
[1] - https://americanaddictioncenters.org/alcoholism-treatment/th... [2] - https://www.tipscertified.com/
> When someone is colloquially termed a “high-functioning alcoholic”, they may be able to carry out daily tasks of living [trimmed] without exhibiting the full range of clinical impairments commonly associated with alcohol use disorders.
The sources listed in the article further breakdown different types of tolerances and their effects. For example source 5,
[5] https://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/aa28.htm
> Tolerance means that after continued drinking, consumption of a constant amount of alcohol produces a lesser effect or increasing amounts of alcohol are necessary to produce the same effect (1). Despite this uncomplicated definition, scientists distinguish between several types of tolerance that are produced by different mechanisms.
They then list the details of "Functional Tolerance", "Acute tolerance", "Environment-dependent tolerance", "Learned tolerance", "Environment-independent tolerance", "Metabolic Tolerance".
To imply that Functional Tolerance is synonymous with all forms of alcohol tolerance is incorrect, and it's incorrect to say that's "the" modern view on alcohol tolerance.
Source [6] is a book called "Understanding Why Addicts Are Not All Alike Recognizing the Types and How Their Differences Affect Intervention and Treatment" which should tell you that generalizing all alcoholics into a single type is probably not the most correctly accepted modern view on alcoholism.
Travel a bit, any you'll quickly discover that a couple drinks in the evening is basically normal in much of the world. I'm not arguing that it's healthy (it's not), but the median American really doesn't drink much - our Puritan values run deep.
For whatever reason, I like sobriety. It's strange to me that people should think we need a religious motive to prefer sobriety, as though escaping or distorting reality is inherently preferable. Maybe I equally misunderstand the motives of the heavy drinker?
You understand the motives just fine. Reality for many people is some combination of boring, stressful, depressing, etc.
So yes, escaping reality is very much preferable to these people. And alcohol and other drugs are very effective at this.
To state the obvious, improving your situation so you don't want to escape reality would be preferable. But that takes a hell of a lot more time, motivation, resources, and effort than just cracking open that next beer.
To that extent, I've gone through some very hard times (for me anyway--not interested in comparing traumas), and for whatever reason much of my cultural upbringing suggested I should reach for some whiskey; however, ultimately I was just too aware that that wouldn't fix my hurt and that "the only way through it was through it" cliche was ultimately true. What really got me through was accepting reality and acknowledging that even though reality was painful, avoiding pain isn't the objective in life (or that's my moral philosophy, anyway)--enduring a trial well is life-affirming. Embrace reality, truth, etc even if it sucks.
EDIT: "everything in my cultural upbringing" -> "much of my cultural upbringing". On reflection, I think the philosophy which allowed me to be successful was largely traditional, Judeo-Christian philosophy which permeates much of American culture. Credit where due.
I would argue this isn't universally true. As I shared in another comment, I recently took a month-long break from drinking. For me it hasn't been difficult, but it's made life seem to explode with excitement and energy, just from taking alcohol out of my life. I think many people would benefit more than they expect just by cutting out alcohol for a month or even just a week.
And sometimes when you try anyway, the universe decides to punish you for it. Some people experience this multiple times. I don't blame them for wanting to escape reality.
After a 3 or 4 drinks, the extroversion switch flips in my head and suddenly I want to stop and chat with just about anyone about any topic imaginable. This adds value to my life, and so I drink regularly and have a few at a time (not 10+ drinks a day though. That's probably more on the escaping reality level)
I would not at all be surprised to see a strong correlation of people who are religious and people who never drink. Even "one drink a week" or whatever is a significantly different category than "zero drinks, ever."
Maybe depends on whether "would never drink again" and "basically never drink" are included in your definition of "never".
There are a lot of non-religious reasons people don't drink, and a lot of daylight between "one drink a week" and "zero drinks an ever". I fall into the "maybe 3-4 drinks per year" category. It could be more, it could be less -- alcohol just doesn't really occupy a different space for me than, say, pickles. I like pickles well enough, if one comes with my sandwich at a diner I'll eat it. But I only think to get a pickle from the jar in my fridge like once or twice a year, and eating pickles and drinking alcohol have about the same impact on my life and happiness.
Sobriety is great and preferable 99% of the time to me, but your framing of "escaping or distorting reality" is founded on a trust that your senses and current mental processes are objective reality and that reality is desirable.
Going away from the psychedelics, if I want to have an afternoon where I'm more giggly and enjoying of food, chemical enhancement for that experience seems like way to go, same way someone would listen to music to get in a work mood.
Maybe. I'm unconvinced that this is the only way to achieve any kind of insight. In particular I'd be surprised if it outperforms a cup of coffee or a rhapsodical conversation for any type of insight.
> your framing of "escaping or distorting reality" is founded on a trust that your senses and current mental processes are objective reality and that reality is desirable.
How can a high be "more real" than what you perceive through your senses? That seems almost incorrect by definition, so I guess I plead guilty to the charge of believing that sober experiences are more real.
With respect to "I'm assuming that reality is desirable"--yeah, if you think reality isn't desirable, then you're escaping, so I think you're [agreeing violently][0] with me here. I am guilty of the charge that I think escapism is bad and confronting reality is good.
[0]: http://joe.blog.freemansoft.com/2020/02/recognizing-violent-...
"Perceive" is the key word here. To draw an analogy, if your mind is a computer, your senses are raw data inputs, which your unconscious mind parses, filters, and transforms before the data is eventually passed to your conscious mind. Some hallucinogens give you a peek into this process - you get to see what's going on under the hood, so to speak.
Like a young child, you might find yourself enamored by the beauty of the simple greenness of a leaf.
These substances can teach you that there are many valid ways to "perceive" an event. It's not so much that what you perceive while intoxicated is "more real", but that it's an equally valid (and sometimes drastically different!) interpretation.
They're simple lessons that can mostly be learned without any drugs at all (meditation helps), but a proper trip can hammer a lesson home in such an immediate, visceral, enduring way that I'm not sure there's a sober equivalent.
Also, sometimes things are just really shitty and there's nothing that can realistically fix them and escapism actually is a reasonable choice.
I don’t buy this. Even when you can’t fix things (and I’ve been there) you can still process through your emotions and accept and make sense of your new normal. You don’t have to do it all at once, but that’s the only path to recovery—drugs and alcohol won’t get you there.
Ego death is a hell of a thing to experience. We can talk about it and how some people can reach it through years of meditation, but LSD is a sure ticket to it and the value of it is in the qualia of the experience, not the knowledge of what it is.
Imagine your psyche is a factory you've built over your life and you're standing high above it supervising. Regular introspection is walking through the lines and tuning the machine. Ego death is a tidal wave knocking down everything you've built, adjusting to your new reality, and the rest of the day is watching as it all comes back together. There's a level of forced commitment and intensity of the experience that you can't simulate. I'm not claiming you'll reach enlightenment, but something more akin to the learning from tearing down and rebuilding an engine, except it's ~~you~~.
There are real gains to going through it if you're of sound mind.
Some of it, though, genuinely comes from causing the mind to operate in a rather different mode and make connections and "leaps of understanding" that it just can't do under normal circumstances. It essentially forces a sort of "educational learning-difference" on you, and if you manage to muscle through and learn how to solve a problem in that state (and get the empirically correct answer), you've essentially allowed your mind to come up with a totally different approach to a problem it would never normally take.
Having previously been one of those programmers chasing the "Ballmer Peak", it definitely was more than just an XKCD joke; the joke worked because it was documenting a real phenomenon that's been known for ages. Several recreational drugs, like alcohol, marijuana, can also be used as "performance-enhancing" drugs in the same way things like Adderall can; it's down to careful dosing and discipline - you have to carefully stay in the "eye of the storm" and not get too inebriated, and you also need to exercise a careful awareness of how the drug's effects can "lead you astray" (i.e. something like Adderall can give you a rush of manic hyperfocus, but it's easy to waste this on irrelevant details, instead of focusing on something productive. There have been plenty of comedic stories of people taking Adderall and … instead of doing their homework, doing something daffy like carefully organizing all the books on their shelves … by color.) So you have to be aware of the drug's "biasing" effects and carefully wrangle your behavior during it.
All that said, I definitely recommend against long-term use of alcohol in particular, just due to the chronic toxicity of it. For a while it's great, but over time, it really starts to wear you down, and do more harm than good. Eventually you're so damn tired all the time, that any productivity gains from mental breakthroughs are wiped out. If it was used on rare occasions for breakthroughs/inspiration, it might be viable, but using it as an anti-adhd/procrastination drug (for which, anecdotally, it was very effective) just isn't sustainable, long-term.
Maybe it’s a southern European thing, but I can’t imagine eating a heavy meal without the acidity of a red wine, for example.
A fruit smoothie that keeps all the fiber and hence is more filling and hence causes you to eat less sugar by way of eating less fruit overall is fine. A smoothie where you filter out the fiber or otherwise eat excess amounts of sugar would not be.
Occasionally a glass of wine or cider is nice, but that's not every day - we usually finish a wine bottle in a week or two using the preserver.
Not at all. It's expensive and very harmful. Why would I drink alcohol when I can enjoy a meal out with friends without drinking at all?
“It’s cheap, and we all live to be 80 anyways. Why wouldn’t I casually drink alcohol while I enjoy a meal out with friends?”
2. If you have a drink every night out with friends you build a tolerance to it, and you put stress on your body for no gain.
3. Dehydration, sleepiness, and worse sleep and cost are big downsides
4. You can have better, cheaper effects with edible weed.
https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2009/great-directors/aki-kaur...
New Zealand was culturally very different, where excessive drinking was strongly encouraged in the social groups I saw in my early 20s, and across a variety of social groups as I got older.
That's why I never developed a taste for alcohol. I sometimes drink socially but that is very rare: 3-4 times a year, 1 or 2 drinks each time. That's about it.
...and husbands. Not all people who drink alcohol to excess are male.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233717660_Thirty_Ye...
It’s just that some groups find the honest research inconvenient so they try, largely successfully, to suppress it. The suppression behavior on certain sides of issues has been discussed by plenty of reputable people, including Steven Pinker in his book The Blank Slate.
These days in order to believe the results of any research paper I need to read it for myself with an incredibly skeptical eye for what is being left out, how questions were asked, etc.
For many of us, it's not about Puritanical values. We simply choose healthier behaviors.
It's true that the median alcohol drinkers in America doesn't drink much at all. The vast majority of alcohol is consumed by 10% of the population.
Drinkers tend to cluster with other drinkers, and non-drinkers tend to become less interested with attending gatherings that revolve around alcohol consumption. This can lead to misperceptions that either everyone is drinking a lot or no one is drinking much depending on which cluster you end up in. It's strange to hear some of my heavy drinking acquaintances insist that everyone drinks heavily, because that's what they see in their personal bubbles.
The reason Americans drink less alcohol at the median, is due to how American populations are heavily distributed in housing developments, in suburbs, versus the higher density & primate cities that you see in nearly all of Europe. We gather less frequently European-style, we don't walk or bus or train nearly as much, so the majority generally avoids drinking & driving. In the US if you're going somewhere, the odds are high that you're driving to and from; drinking and driving is an incredibly high penalty risk to take now.
Most "American Values" are basically just puritan ethics. In America, you won't see someone sipping a beer on the subway for the same reason you see someone take take a 4 week summer vacation, or a nipple on TV. Most of the quirky values that separate us from western europe (like hard work, temperance, abstinence, etc.) can be traced back to our puritan roots.
Are you including the US' views on sex and nudity and the puritan work ethic in that? Sex and nudity in films will make them get an instant R-rating, but murder will only get a PG-13.
The puritan work ethic is the reason Americans work themselves to death and judge the poor: "They obviously deserve it because they must not work hard." It's obviously circular reasoning, but "not working hard" is a moral failing in the US.
Hmm, I wonder where your desire to choose healthier behaviors came from...
Likewise, how does this have anything to do with religion (Puritanical heritage)?
He is suggesting your desire to be healthy comes from this.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/americans-are-dri...
The Puritans drank plenty. I suspect that many such misconceptions about them are derived from HL Mencken's (wildly inaccurate) quip that "Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy."
They were extremists by contemporary standards (an insanely low bar).
They barely waited until they stopped starving to start being jerks to each other and antagonizing the natives.
If you want to idolize early settlers idolize Rhode Islanders, they were basically successive waves of people who left Massachusetts because the latter was no place for anyone who let their conscience get in the way of their ideology (amazing how little some things change in 400yr) and they managed to maintain some of the best relations with the natives.
Some of us can't even stand fermented breads, let alone a light wine.
The only people I've met (in real life) to date who can't stand the taste of alcohol are children and people with Asperger's, I assume because bitter tastes are a sort of sensory overload for them. Purely anecdotal and could be a complete horseshit theory, but I'm just curious.
I am a supertaster however. That likely is the cause of my distaste for alcohol.
Not for me, I just hate the taste of alcohol, would much rather a can of coke.
I’m curious, what do you tell your doctor when he/she asks how much you drink?
The reality is that some stuff is power laws, some stuff is normal, some stuff is bimodal, etc. The more useful mental exercise is to try to learn what the actual distribution for something is, instead of assuming, and then try to dig in a bit more to figure out what causes might lead to that.
Power laws tend to arise when you have some amount of network effect and an iterative positive feedback loop. That shows up in popularity, wealth, etc. But things like, you know, height, are not a power law distribution.
Alcohol consumption does have some steep curve to that, but it's not clear if it's actually a power law. I assume its driven by both addiction times tolerance. In other words, if you couldn't build up a tolerance to alcohol, I'd expect something like a linear distribution reflecting levels of a addiction. But the more you drink, the higher your tolerance, so the more you need to drink, which leads to something more like quadratic or higher.
The irony here is that these folks consume 60% of all alcoholic beverages. These are the whales of the industry. Makes you want to rethink the adult drinks market.
It's high, but not even close to some of the historic records. In early 1800s the per capita consumption was roughly equivalent 90 bottles of whisky per year. And that counts a lot of non drinkers in the denominator.
1.5 ounces per drink
1.75 L per bottle (assuming a handle)
33.814 ounces per liter
59.175 ounces per bottle
39.450 drinks per bottle
3550.5 drinks per year
9.720 drinks per day
One of the “tells” of this class of alcoholic is drinks stashed all over the place to facilitate this round the clock buzz.
The problem I have with it all, drunk people tend to affect other things: destroying public property, drunk driving (destruction of private property and death (sometimes death of sober people at wrong place, wrong time)) fights and injury (go check what an EC/ER looks like on a Friday night for hospitals in these countries), domestic violence, rape, animal abuse, emotional drunk spirals (can lead to suicide or relationship damage), financial destruction (lemme buy all you fine oaks 100 shots on my tab)..the list goes on.
Nah, skip alcohol if you can. I makes small men feel like strong men, and strong men feel like small men and creates a vicious cycle to cope with those false emotions, resulting erratic/impulsive/dangerous behaviours. Rather meditate, go to bed early, use cannabis (not daily) and make sandwich.. I've not seen a single instance where alcohol has improved someones life, mentally or physically. Alcohol is a false remedy that fills your hearts and minds with a false view of the world. Step away for a while.
Same goes for streaming/internet consumption, tv/news, caffeine, nicotine, porn, fast foods, religion, politics. All those things blend into a horrible mindset. Step away, introspect and modify your own behaviour/culture, reflect about who/what you are. It's a worthwhile experiment and costs nothing (in fact, it will save you time and money).
What counts as an "American drinker"? Apparently only 24M of our 330M population. That's 7% of the population.
So the average of the top 0.7% Americans consume 10 drinks per day. Since averages are heavily affected by the outliers at the top, you're looking at probably between 2-3 per 1000. I absolutely believe that many Americans consume the equivalent of 10+ light beers per day.
What's more surprising to me is that only 24M Americans count as "drinkers". Our college population alone is 17M.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey_Rebellion
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13535868
We're all drunks.
I don't drink much anymore. I never went to work drunk, but I used to drink a fair amount. Now that I'm a truck driver, it's too inconvenient for me personally to manage drinking, so I just don't drink. Others' mileage definitely varies.
And if the employer is lucky, your coworkers become your drinking buddies in the process. Before you know it you're now spending all your waking hours with your coworkers. Makes quitting your post a lot more difficult.
The very fact that you (as do most of us) consider it a "normal life" activity indicates a very skewed and unhealthy perspective has taken hold at a fundamental level.
I would argue it and the stats answers your own question. By in large yes they can. And personally I’m not one to judge peoples lifestyle decisions provided it’s not an epidemic of people doing things like b&E to hawk a motel microwave to get their next fix.
How many of those millions using could genuinely give up today forever easily if they wanted to?
There are plenty of toxins that we freely ingest daily..Heck water in sufficient amounts is a toxin. Pretty much anything your liver has to process is a toxin in some form (i know thats simplifying it but still....).
It would be easy to argue its not even the most abused or greatest threat to our health. I would argue that would would be sugar, or more specifically HFCS. Thats in literally everything, from crackers to gatorade. It also abused by people ranging from young children, even toddlers to the elderly. And Obesity and related diseases kills at much higher rates. Congestive Hearth Failure alone kills around 500k people a year in the US..
And I would argue etOH isnt really even 2nd place in the list of normalized drugs we abuse readily. Caffeine is probably that one, and there are PLENTY that couldn't quit that cold turkey if they wanted (I am one of them, and have tried multiple times). Its also another one used by both kids and adults.
Neither was I talking about physical dependency particularly; I see enough people failing miserably on simple stuff like dry January ("ha ha I only lasted 3 days" and the like) to be extremely sceptical that it is as easy as you imply to walk away from, especially in a society which surrounds us with it and sells it as "social" and normal.
>with the caveat they don't have the same direct link with misery, mental illness, violence, crime and general anti-social behaviour
Many people use it exactly that way. Epecially with depression etc.
And ultimately I am not of the opinion that we need to manage other peoples vices, or sources of temporary happiness. Alcohol is a very social vice and 99% of people can manage it responsibly.
So provided they arent direct contributors to larger issues in society (such as meth/opiates directly causing crime etc.), I dont think the government needs to be in the business of restriciting people freedoms (which does include the freedom to self-destructive behavior).
Otherwise where do you stop? Mandating exercise? Banning burgers? Ultimately we cant nerf the world. Prohibition doesnt work, if the 20's doesnt show you just look at the drug war and marijuana.
This sounds like a made-up figure - even assuming you are being figurative, I suspect you are very optimistic.
So provided they arent direct contributors to larger issues in society
See previous comment. Alcohol clearly is.
That sounds like doublespeak. Either you allow something or you don't. Not allowing drinking in parks falls firmly in the "outlawing" category.
I can't speak for other countries but in the USA smoking has always been allowed in open public spaces and still is. In fact most states don't even have laws banning it in indoors. Cigarette boxes have no graphic warnings. Yet the smoking rate in the USA has consistently been among the lowest in the world.
In many countries, you have a couple of social drinks - even gasp at lunch or in public - and it's not a problem. Being falling down drunk isn't considered 'cool' - it's pathetic and embarrassing. Drinking isn't a competition to see how much you can consume before you either lose consciousness, make idiotic decisions, or start street fights.
That said, I absolutely see no problem with drinking in parks or in public and this works fine in Montreal. We have laws already for public drunkenness. We don't need a nanny state.
How long are they staying out? I'm in my thirties, and a drink every 45 minutes seems pretty standard among my peers that don't have kids and still go out. In college we'd swing for the fences, but eventually everyone (well, everyone without an actual drinking problem) figured out that keeping a nice social buzz is a more pleasant way to spend an evening with friends.
Likewise, non-drinkers tend to cluster with each other because after a while it's just not fun to hang out with people consuming copious amounts of alcohol all of the time while their health slowly declines. I had to stop inviting several friends to certain activities because they wanted to make everything revolve around consuming alcohol. It gets old.
Anecdotes aside, the statistics just don't support 10 drinks/night as being average. That's top 10-20% behavior.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/americans-are-dri...
Aside from having better sleep than at any other point as an adult, I truly enjoy the activities I partake in just as much, if not more, than when I still paired them with alcohol. It took about 6 months to stop feeling like I was missing out, and now I feel like everyone else is.
Anxiety in general is noticeably lower (this was a huge windfall for me when the pandemic started).
Enjoyment of conversation, food, setting, all seem richer and doesn't flag as quickly once the alcohol is metabolized.
The end of the drinking activities don't leave me sleepy or craving bad food. I can go home and read a book or get some work done.
General reduction in workout recovery time and aches and pains.
Holidays are way easier to get through.
The only drawbacks have been the situations you discover are entirely dedicated to consumption, e.g. dive bars, beer gardens, work holiday parties and happy hours. Without having dulled your senses adequately, some of these things tend to be only loud, smelly, or without much to offer besides booze and banter.
Not for everyone, because 13 year old nieces can be dangerous with drones.
Actually it does kind of annoy me when I just drink water that people will ask all the time. My go to has been seltzer + lime + wedge because I do like to have some taste, and it does look cocktail-ish.
That said I also like plain seltzer and bitter flavors generally (dark chocolate, black coffee, IPAs), so YMMV.
Fee Brothers sells a 12 piece variety pack which is a great way to experiment. After that you have quite a rabbit hole of bitters brands and flavors to explore!
I went from always ordering a soft drink at restaurants to only drinking water. The swich occurred almost overnight, and I ended up losing about 25 lbs.
The reason I did this was entirely social, and it happened by accident. My parents didn't have soft drinks at home, except occasional leftovers after a party, so ordering a soft drink at a restaurant was sort of a "special treat," even if it was an infinitely refillable fountain drink. It turns out 3 glasses of soda have a metric fuckton of sugar.
Anyway, when I went to college, literally none of my friends would order soft drinks when we'd go out to eat. I'm not sure if it was because people were being thrifty, or for ease of splitting the bill, or maybe they just knew more about sugar than I did, but being the one person to order a soda felt so awkward that I just stopped and eventually never went back.
I've been using erythritol and stevia as sweeteners for years, and even with those, I find myself craving sweet things after consuming them more than when I go relatively long periods of time without eating sugary things or using sweetener.
The end result, at least for me, is that I crave sweet food more even when I use artificial sweeteners, making it harder to say no to eating shitty food later on.
If that isn’t available, some sort of soda or tea or coffee. Or, just water. No one really cares, though to be polite to the bar you’re at it’s good to try to buy something.
Commercial kombucha is generally < .5%, homebrew can be up to 10x that. It's a two step process - yeast ferments the sugar into alcohol, then bacteria digest the alcohol into acid. If the bacteria fall behind, the ABV goes up.
The yeast can work anaerobic, the bacteria need O2 to get the job done. Anything not pasteurized is likely going to increase in ABV some in the bottle, since the yeast are active and the bacteria aren't. This is also why I force carbonate my home-brew - when you build CO2 with a secondary ferment you're also building alcohol.
(I spent a couple months trying every variety of non-alcoholic "craft" beer that I could get my hands on earlier in the pandemic)
Kombucha has a tiny bit of alcohol (<0.5%) and tastes a bit like a soda but has a tiny amount of sugar (usually only 8g / serving).
Between that in particular, and all the intermittent fasting faddishness in the air, calories in drinks, especially outside mealtime, just began to feel weird. Water it is.
you were more anxious when you were drinking ? that's a first
not to look naive, but there was a period of my life having a beer [0] was really the only way for me to exist outside my bedroom walls, i wasn't even tipsy.. I was just able to sit in a room without crippling dread.
[0] I didn't drink, but the few times I did at parties I realized how drinking a bit was lifting me up to ~people's normal
drinking habit increases baseline anxiety. it's not that having a drink will make you more anxious in next few hours.
I grew up with panic attacks, and they were random and I had no clue what was happening to me until college when I first learned of the phrase (prior to that I just referred to it as “the chaos”).
I can control and fight them off them now. But if I drink too much, then my mind and body are weakened and I can’t fight them off (while sleeping!).
Anyway, I’ll look up this GERD thing.
The colloquial term seems to be "hangxiety" if you want a term to search for.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindling_(sedative%E2%80%93hyp...
I'm not certain I have GERD, but it's been my hypothesis. Anyone else have similar experiences? I can never go to a brunch/lunch after drinking in fear that my nausea will turn into something worse.
I used to have a glass (2oz) of undiluted high proof scotch a few times a week after a good workday but around 37y I had to stop.
I wish something could replicate the taste and the warmth of the Aberlour A'bunadh but alas I fear that replicating the feeling of +60% ABV without using something even more deleterious than ethanol is impossible.
This is, of course, in the absence of other factors that may influence an individual's anxiety
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jan/27/hangxie...
Most people I know would not think I had a problem because I was functional and I didn't day drink. I might have two or three strong (> 7%) IPAs in the evening daily before bed. I would also on occasion binge pretty hard on weekends with friends.
After some time of not drinking my anxiety actually got better and I decided to keep it that way. I'm not a teetotaler but I have completely stopped bringing alcohol home and binge drinking in general. I still find that 2 drinks is harder than none, however.
My own take away (which may be different for everyone) is that alcohol is a reasonable way to make uncomfortable social situations tolerable but when used to treat a more general anxiety, it will likely make it worse.
This is one of my biggest motivations for reducing my drinking during the week. Even having just one or two beers after work, the probability that I read or work on a side project drops close to 0.
Strictly a night drinker.
As someone who has done quite a few major projects on personal time and reads quite a lot as well: I personally have found the attitude that I must always be working on something or "improving myself" far more dangerous than excessive drinking.
Certainly there is balance, and I obviously don't advocate giving up all personal projects in order to drink. But the fact that many people on HN, myself included, feel bad if they're not working on some side project or improving some skill is its own kind of escapism.
I drink and smoke weed a lot more now then when I was younger. I still get many projects done, and read a ton, but there is a certain value to an evening spent stoned just getting lost in a video game or listening to music. Reflecting on it now, I also find that by any objective measure the output from my personal projects is always probably a bit higher now, though I have a lot more fun.
FWIW this is a side project I _want_ to work on, I'm not trying to make money on it, purely a passion project. So I'm not feeling pressured to work on it, I'm just trying to keep the momentum going and I found that drinking will stop that momentum.
I go through waves of video games -> projects -> reading, it's always fluctuating.
I have been working on lowering my alcohol consumption, though. It's been working, slowly, over time.
I really enjoyed my period of non-drinking and I feel exactly the same as you in regards to sleep, anxiety and well-being. But being in my late 20s I feel like people around my age just expect drinking and going out.
(I don't recommend keeping those people in your life.)
It also doesn't have to be a binary thing. I go months without drinking and then have a beer or wine because I want one.
Strangely, I didn't feel anxious at all, despite having pretty high general anxiety. My energy levels were higher than usual, which I felt was connected to not drinking. I felt totally normal in my social interactions, didn't force anything, felt good. I kept my water bottle in hand and never felt out of place.
It was a good lesson that alcohol is not needed to have a good time.
I don't plan to ever drink again. It is necessary to have the confidence to order something non-alcoholic and be straight with people if they question it. I don't drink. If they ask why (which is exceedingly rare), I ask why they don't smoke. That usually gets the message across.
However, I also internalized being an non-drinker. It became part of my identity.
I don't notice a measurable difference in my life, which is also part of the reason I didn't pick it up again. It wasn't enriching my life, but I'm also not a better person without it.
Having said all that, I am still looking for a replacement for what to drink when I do go to a bar. So far nobody has hit the right mixture of a drink that isn't defined by being non-alcoholic, but replaces the "I deserve this" attitude of having a drink .
At the holidays I like non-alcoholic sparkling apple juice.
I also find soda water out of a can to be a good beer replacement on hot days. I think part of this is the sound of opening the can and the carbonation.
No idea if any of those will fit your needs.
Doesn't leave much though. Peppermint tea.
My requirements are: - not trying to be alcohol/imitation alcohol - not soda/juice/kombucha - has the "occasion" attitude of alcohol
I admit this is probably 90% branding and 10% the drink itself. As I was mentioning to my friend, you probably wouldn't feel strange ordering a redbull at a bar without the vodka, because of the marketing and how it isn't considered a soft-drink. I don't know anybody that drinks redbull every day (though I'm sure there are people that do).
Something more mature than a soft drink in flavor profile, something that I hopefully don't chug, so it lasts like a cocktail or beer.
Keen to hear others thoughts on that.
There's Lyres https://lyres.com/ - which pretends to be gin/wisky/etc And Non (https://non.world) - which is very juice, but at the price of wine.
Lyres, Seedlip, and other non-alcoholic spirits just don't do it for me. They taste like water.
Another suggestion would be to get into quality teas. I particularly like Tie Guan Yin.
I'm thinking more along the lines of how we "use" alcoholic drinks, and something to replace that. It doesn't need to be healthy. More about getting the right mood and taste, and likely not the typical every day drink.
I just avoid it as much as I can, but for me saying I don’t drink wouldn’t always work. People would just insist “just one drink”.
Friend of mine said, as joke, I should start telling people that I am an alcoholic (which I am not) so they leave me alone. I actually tried this and it works every time.
My friends, relatives, etc. all exclusively drink beer when doing yard work, home improvement projects, or hobbies like working on cars. When I’m at the marina, I’m the only one not drinking beer while working on their boat. Maybe all of these people stick exclusively to water in private, but I doubt it.
Given that, I can see how it’s quite easy for someone to consume 5-10 drinks per day. I’ll easily drink the equivalent of a six pack if I’m working outside, and if I were a beer drinker I don’t think I’d find it excessive to drink at least that much over the course of a day.
However, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the group drinking a six pack of 90-calorie light beer over the course of a day is healthier than people like me drinking a six pack of Dr. Pepper in the same timeframe. Cirrhosis on one hand, diabetes on the other. Pick your poison, I guess.
Most people choose neither option.
Drinking a 6-pack of beer every day and drinking a 6-pack of sugary sodas every day are not normal behaviors. We shouldn't try to normalize things like this when they're clearly unhealthy and definitely outlier behavior.
10% is not outliers.
edit to avoid confusion: this wasn't an average, this was the bottom of the 10% decile. So clearly there are bigger drinkers out there, but 10% is a lot of minimum 10-drink-a-day people.
Undoubtedly there are far heavier drinkers in the top end of that 10%; but 10 drinks is a lot, and 10% isn't outliers.
Sodas are liquid candy. I don't think many people eat 6 Snickers instead of food to get calories while they work.
I was invited to my friend's bachelor party weekend. We rented a cabin in a fairly remote area of our province for an extended weekend with plans to golf, fish, campfire, and...drink.
I think by the time the first day was over, the majority of my buddies had each done 12 beer plus several mixed drinks or shots. No mistaking, we were all drunk. But what sort of set things apart was the next day. I basically just nursed a few beers/drinks through the day, probably 6 max while the rest of the guys were easily 12+ a piece, I know one of them had cleaned off his first 24pack by that night.
By the next day I was miserable. We were golfing in 30+ weather and I had 1 beer for the entire 18 holes, they were 6+ each. The heat, the hangover, I don't know how they do it. But it slowly dawned on me that they do this frequently. Most of their weekends are getting tankered at the lake or going through a case of beer in the yard doing chores and having impromptu bbq with the neighbors/buds while I pretty much only drank while at social outings (once a week top) and even then I never had more than 2 or 3 drinks.
When lockdown started a couple of the same buds got laid off from their jobs and mentioned how much they were drinking in isolation. Again, the quantities they drank were fucking astounding while I pretty much stopped drinking entirely due to the social outings coming to an end.
I've tried the "grab some beer and do the oilchange" type work myself but I find by the end my beer is warm, half drank and I was too involved in the work to think about stopping to drink. Even when I did stop, it was because I was thirsty so I'd be seeking water, not alcohol.
After all the experience with this lifestyle from friends I can see where its left us (we're mid 30s now). They're overweight, a few of them struggle with health issues while I'm the same weight I was 10 years prior and healthy as ever. I just think centering your activities around having a beer is something that these people do long term and what seems wild to you or me is normal for them.
Dr. Pepper is tasty, but it and Coke are dependent on Phosphoric Acid to be able to deliver that much sugar to you. This along to caffeine mean it's dehydrating you and robbing you of nutrients, not hydrating you. It's really best if you can limit this to a single or find a replacement (Kroger has a seltzer with the Dr. flavor that satisfies my addiction nicely)
Ignoring the alcohol, the first near beer or light beer actually helps hydrate you and provides nutrients.
But the quantity of either is what quickly becomes the problem (2nd hand anecdote). Many alcoholics start with with the 1 beer a day after work which turns into a 12 pack a day after work (as suggested by this top 10%). And once an addict develops a tolerance to beer, they escalate in the top 10% rapidly; that vodka soda become an evening thing, then a morning an evening thing.
Breaking habits is hard, but usually doesn't risk hospitalization or death.
The point of your comment still stands however.
[1] https://ndarc.med.unsw.edu.au/blog/yes-people-can-die-opiate...
She said no-one ever quit the alcohol addiction by choice, all of them were brought here by court, generally after killing people in an accident.
I sure hope people can quit alcohol addiction by choice. But you do need to rebuild all the friendships that only existed around drinking routines. I for one have quit a coworking space that revolved too much around beer. They were good business contacts and that is why it’s hard to walk away.
I've known some people who would probably qualify as functional alcoholics, and none of them have ever got into legal trouble for it. IME, you generally have to be a wildly out of control drunk to get into legal trouble from it regularly.
I've also known plenty of people who stopped or cut back alcohol consumption voluntarily, with no help from any organized programs. It's quite doable for many people, once you decide that you genuinely want to stop, though I acknowledge that some people genuinely can't. You may infact have to change friendships and routines if some of the old ones are too conductive to binge drinking, but do what you gotta do.
Am I better off with 2-day shipping and the easy ability to read the opinions of enthusiasts and experts for any product I have a small interest in, then order it immediately? Does the change in what I buy actually pay off given the extra time-cost of that research, the extra brain-clutter of knowing things about products I'd probably never have though much about otherwise, and the extra money I'm sure I'm spending because of those factors? I kinda doubt it, but it's so damn hard to resist finding out what's the best way to do [thing] or the best product for the best way to do [thing] when you can do that, even if the result is that your life-satisfaction meter doesn't budge versus some hypothetical alternate universe in which, for anything you're not an actual enthusiast about, you just buy whatever looks good out of the selection at a local non-specialty store.
[EDIT] and yes I'm aware I'm dangerously close to realizing that almost everything "good" in life is just removing an irritation that only exists in the first place because of how life is and is structured, and how I'm choosing to respond to life and its typical structure, and then abandoning the material world to become a Buddhist monk or something.
Packages show up on the lawn it is astonishing how they appear.
They are astonishing surprises.
It’s what I ordered the cat food the espresso machine the two new tables.
Ordering things and how they appear basically I am a small-scale sorcerer.
On the road I press the button and the music goes.
Air conditioning gas pedal restaurant take-out etc.
It is my will being perpetually sated.
Pretend we are writing a fable in which a sorcerer always gets what he wants.
Consider what happens to a soul which always gets what it wants.
- Emily Bludworth de Barios, from http://www.forkliftohio.com/index.php?page=freight-31
That last line unsettles me every time.
In a popular Alan Watts talk he imagines a dreamer:
"let’s suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time, or any length of time you wanted to have.
And you would, naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each you would say “Well that was pretty great. But now let’s have a surprise, let’s have a dream which isn’t under control, where something is gonna happen to me that I don’t know what it's gonna be."
And you would dig that and would come out of that and you would say “Wow that was a close shave, wasn’t it?”. Then you would get more and more adventurous and you would make further- and further-out gambles what you would dream. And finally, you would dream where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today."
https://genius.com/Alan-watts-the-dream-of-life-annotated
There's a related phenomenon, I don't know a name for it, where given a choice between convenience and happiness people will almost always choose convenience, generally without even realizing they've made a choice. Our genes have a deep, deep preference for minimizing energy expenditure.
For a recent example, look at Valheim. They explicitly block you from using portals to move metal ore, which forces you to use a cart or a boat to move it. Suddenly I was a highway engineer for a few hours and pay more attention to harbour than before and had a blast.
Yet there are mods which remove this restriction, which removes this experience. Why build a highway if I can just drop a portal down?
I think constraints generally in a creative process (design, for example) are almost necessary. Graphic designers get it in print budgets, colour selections, quality of photographs, etc.
I remember once having to pitch to build a web site. The client stated they literally had no budget limitation. I honestly didn't know what to do, having spent my entire career fitting a solution to a budget!
https://youtu.be/hZ7lFV9Z2hk?t=32
And Dan Gilbert on Happiness, demonstrating with studies that no, you are not happier with more choice, you are objectively, measurably, unquestionably, happier with no choice. 10,000 films that you can stop watching and change for another as soon as you are unhappy -> unhappiness. 1 film you have to watch all the way through and have no other -> you'll grow to like it. You become happier with things you're stuck with, and that even applies to people who are disabled, missed out on fortunes, got imprisoned for crimes they did commit, and for crimes they didn't commit, as well as for everyday people who bought something they can't return vs something they can return.
Via PJ Eby, you care about what you care for. People have it the other way round - "I'm not maintaining my car, but if I had a Lambo then I would care about my car". Noooo, if you start cleaning and maintaining your car, then you will care about your car because you're investing time and effort into it.
It starts with the famous experiments where rats would prefer drugs to food and water but goes on to further study that lead to not so bleak conclusions.
I think I remember hearing a similar stat on the ken burns prohibition doc. I didn’t quite understand why it was supposed to be that much though. 9 gallons of liquor is 36 liters is roughly 100 bottles of wine equivalent per year so less than a third of a bottle of wine a day which is what 1 or 2 glasses per meal equivalent? So the question then is are people drinking liquor drinking wine on top plus cider apparently? Or is it just a lot because that’s the average and plenty of people aren’t drinking much at or at all and that makes for the right tail of the distribution to be really drinking a lot?
9*11 = 374 drinks per year or 1 drink a day
Its probably that Average/mean drinking amount isn't a good statistical representation when almost all the consumption is done by the top 10% of drinkers.
Historical comparisons also are tricky because sizes and %'s aren't consistent to today. Beer/Cider weren't as strong and bottle's of wine were smaller than 750ml etc etc.
So approx 17.5 gallons at today's standard of 40%. Which is about 2250 standard (1.5oz) drinks a year, or average of 6/day.
There are higher and lower estimates too, but anyway you work the calculations, it's a lot.
“Liquor or spirit (also distilled alcohol) is an alcoholic drink produced by distillation of grains, fruits, or vegetables that have already gone through alcoholic fermentation.
[…]
Liquor generally has an alcohol concentration higher than 30%”
⇒ For a 10% alcohol wine, multiply that by a factor of (at least) 3. That makes it a bottle of wine a day.
Also, it was the average adult. Women likely consumed less alcohol. If so, the average adult male must have consumed more.
Just in this one month, I've already noticed a huge difference in my life. It's amazing to wake up rested and energetic every day, never having that dread about a hangover, being groggy, or wondering if I did something embarrassing last night. I feel present in everything I do, rather than having my routine and my attention thrown off by alcohol. Saving calories makes my weight more stable and lets me indulge in more food if I want to. I'm saving tons of money, especially at restaurants. I'm already regaining the hyperactivity and excitement towards life and events that I had in grade school before I started drinking, because now I can look forward to stuff other than getting drunk. It feels great to go to parties, restaurants, watch a movie, go on a date, do anything, and not even think about alcohol. For me drinking was fun and easy, but now I've learned that drinking is shallow and comes at way too high of a cost compared compared to the deep joy of living sober and enjoying life for its own sake again.
I wouldn't hesitate to recommend drinking less to anybody who does drink. You don't need to be black and white and think that it's either cold turkey or stay where you are. You don't need to worry about the "benefits" you get from red wine and whatever other stuff people love to talk about. Just try drinking less. Maybe don't drink on weekdays, set a maximum number you can drink in a day, take a 1-day break, take a 1-week break, start drinking lower-percentage drinks, set a maximum number of drinks per week, there are tons of options. I tried them all and over time I was able to consistently reduce how much I drank. I used to have trouble imagining not drinking during a weekend, and now I'm already having trouble imagining wanting to drink more than a few times a month at most.
Alcohol is like junk food or soda. It's fun and it's easy. But life is a lot better if you can break the habit and stop making it part of your life, or at least make it a once-in-a-blue-moon indulgence rather than a regular thing. Learn to love things with deeper and healthier value. If you don't control these things, there's the risk that you'll gradually get worse over time. You don't want to look at yourself in 20 years and realize you gained 50+ lbs and don't recognize yourself because you didn't take the chips or chocolate seriously. You don't want to look at yourself in 20 years and realize you have cirrhosis or heart disease because you didn't tone down the drinking. You don't have to be obese or an alcoholic to benefit from making healthy lifestyle changes.
Because you aren't allowed to hurt yourself through consumption of a substance, you have to perform bad science first to 'prove' that the substance is good for you.
If we would allow people to hurt themselves, we could be truthful. But that much liberty is terrifying to many.
Cannabis use is not even in the same order of magnitude as the harm alcohol does. Alcohol kills 10K people a year in the US just from drunk driving. I'm not sure why you are bringing this up?
https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/prohibition/
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1950799/
I hate these moralizing articles, if we have a drunk driving problem then write an article about that. But if people want to drink in their own homes let them be.
Much wrong has been done in this country by telling people their behavior is a moral. As long as you don't hurt me or anyone else do whatever you want, you're free to drink yourself silly every night
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/237908/smoking-rate-hits-new-lo...
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/which-countries-smoke-most
None of this is "moralizing", its simply reiterating the harmful effects of behaviors so others can make balanced decisions. Nobody is born aware of the dangers of junk food and alcohol, and they're easy to forget too unless one has personal experience with it (by then the damage is already done).
When people were telling stories about Jesus, the central figure of their religion, one of the miracles they told of was him turning water into wine. This is held up as one of the most important stories in their entire moral system.
When the pyramids were being built, the builders were paid in beer.
People have been drinking, and enjoying the effects of drinking, for thousands of years, and "do not drink to excess" is a lesson the Greeks told us with their own myths and stories.
Be cautious of over drinking, however perhaps also be cautious of under drinking as well. These are not new revelations.
One of the anthropological theories is that it was a core reason for humans to take up agriculture in the first place and to domesticate certain grains.
And, the genetic mutation that allows us to process it in the first place (an enzyme in the liver to break it down much more easily than before) that we received in our lineage millions of years ago allowed us to descend from the trees to the ground. It was a key enabler to our expansion where rotting, fermented fruit sitting on the ground became an enabling calorie source!
If you like to go out on the weeks and drink 8 beers with your friends, all the more power to you. People have been drinking since time immemorial, it's part of who we are as human.
Life is too short to "dot every i and cross every t".
You might be dead tomorrow.
This just isn't true at all and it's probably offensive to large groups of people who view alcohol drinking (with pretty good reason) as a vice.
Abstaining from alcohol is also a praised act since time immemorial. Trying to keep one's mind and body free from intoxicants is also a noble goal and is something that is part of us as human, AND it is what distinguishes us from animals (animals in general don't abstain from things out of sheer willpower, but human beings in general do, be it dieting, teetotaling, etc.).
Life is also too short for you to accelerate your end voluntarily by drinking 8 drinks in one night in rapid succession.
This is the only part of modern social life where it's okay to tell people to do risky and dangerous behaviors which endanger the public. Excessive drunkenness is a public health problem. This past year should have made us keen to the fact that many actions we take for granted have consequences on others
This just isn't the truth. "Free from intoxicants" might be noble for some, but on the other hand, different sorts of intoxicants have been used for religion for a very, very long time. Folks have used this stuff for a very long time - not just alcohol. Folks to this day espouse the benefits of things like LSD and MDMA: pot/hash can be used to good effect.
Not to mention that folks bond over such experiences. Drinking 8 drinks in a night isn't necessarily dangerous, depending on the strength of the alcohol - no one said it was rapid either, nor unsafe. Just like you an do LSD or mushrooms and not be unsafe.
And there is just no way to know if animals abstain from things out of sheer willpower: We simply cannot communicate with animals on a level to give us that understanding. Animals DO seem to partake of mind-altering substances, though. (catnip, anyone?).
We tell folks to drive every day, and driving is a risky and dangerous behavior which easily endangers the public, by teh way.
2) You have no evidence that drinking 8 beers in one sitting once a week will cause (1). Send me lots of studies that link excessive alcohol consumption to esophageal cancer, I will send you lots of studies that show the opposite.
3) Not everyone drinks excessively and partakes in "risky and dangerous behaviors which endanger the public" (this is a ridiculous assumption you're making). I do not drink and drive. I live in a city where I can walk home. etc. 99% percent of the time I actually am at home with friends, even pre-covid.
Quote frankly... I don't even binge drink that often, but I will defend anyone's right to do so, without judgement.
Real people do not work like "I only drink 8 beers in one sitting once a week every week". In reality, the fact that you binge drink at all, makes you more likely to binge drink when special occasions arise, and this is exactly the reason there's a huge uptick in drunk driving accidents and deaths every holiday on the calendar in countries with large drinking populations. Those people involved in those incidents probably also don't drink to excess every day but rather they drink to excess on occasion and on this occasion they went too far.
Drinking and driving isn't the only dangerous behavior that alcohol consumption makes more likely, it impairs your decision-making skills, it is heavily linked to domestic and public violence, etc.
Drunk driving happens not because people are idiots but because situations press on them until they have very few options and driving while a little intoxicated (what an intoxicated perceives as "a little" is a lot more than a normal person does) is one of the only options left. If you get put in that kind of situation, we all have to suffer for it, not you. Drunk drivers usually kill others and rarely die in crashes.
Just because something has been done a certain way for a long time does not mean it's something we should continue. In a lot of cases it just means we didn't have the knowledge that it was so bad for you. And that's exactly where alcohol fits in. We know alcohol is bad for us in just about every way. So there's really no such thing as "under drinking".
Cigarettes. Cocaine. Tanning. Not wearing seat belts. Not wearing helmets. Beating kids as punishment. Bloodletting. X-rays. I mean the list is just endless.
Folks should do as they please. I'm not suggesting everyone needs to stop drinking or anything. But to suggest that "perhaps also be cautious of under drinking as well" is just downright wrong.
So in this case “under drinking” could be interpreted as a metaphor for being overly cautious and missing out on something enjoyable. Life is dangerous. Snowboarding, going on a road trip, swimming in the ocean, petting a dog, eating street food, traveling. These are all dangerous things that kill people every year. I stand by the statement that we should be cautious of anything prescribing that we avoid these activities completely.
Yeah, because water used to be much harder to sanitize, and “beer” (thick, lumpy, mildly alcoholic – think fermented porridge) is basically liquid bread. Doing manual labor all day takes a lot of calories, and cereals are much cheaper than alternative foods. It’s hardly a healthy diet though.
Keeping peasants drunk enough to be pliable is a side benefit much appreciated by the lords of just about every feudal/plantation economy throughout history.
They actually addressed this in the article, but sanitizing water is as simple as boiling it which is much less involved than the process of making beer.
Beyond that, in an ancient context you can’t indefinitely store your boiled water and expect it to stay uncontaminated. If you are on a construction site, boiling all of your drinking water every day before use sounds a lot less convenient than just storing beer. Moreover, if laborers were all drinking water they would still need to eat something.
Thank goodness the Roman's brought new light to Bacchus who shows us that excessive temperance is always punished more severally than excessive indulgence.
You are associating alcohol == good times, which if you want to do so is fine (we are adults, we have free will), but know that you can have good times without alcohol as well. They aren't mutually inclusive.
There are a few other threads where people say similar things. If you need to have alcohol to have good times, then you do actually have a drinking problem. If you can't imagine going out with friends without drinking, then you do actually have a drinking problem. If you can't imagine eating a meal without drinking, then you do actually have a drinking problem.
Ok, i am from germany, so i assume my views on alcohol probably differ a lot from the view most americans have. Here, it is totally fine for a 16 year old to buy and drink wine or beer. It is totally unproblematic if you enjoy a few beers with your friends in the park... and the alcohol ban in public some cities acted caused turmoil short of a full blown riots.
What i want to say is: Why do we allways need to find "the hair in the soup"?
Yes, it may be unhealthy... but so are other things, and i think a perfectly healthy life would be terrible boring.
Again, drink if you want. It's allowed. But don't pretend that it is unproblematic/healthy/natural/without consequences.
Just admit (or at least do not deny) that by drinking, you're making an (indirect) withdrawal from the community fund. Just like people who drive a car, people who hunt for fun, people who smoke etc.
What really bothers me is that it seems that the western culture is (at least from my perspective) striving to become a totally clean, political correct, vegan, moral and abstinent society. Something like the society in "Demoliton Man". I really, really dont want to life in such an society...
So if there's no downside...why don't we stop?
Alcohol is a social lubricant, and consuming alcohol with people is a great way to bond, and form communities.
It's not the only way to bond, but it does provide help regarding sociability, especially for shy/introvert people.
I’m saying: many people have enjoyed the effects of socializing and drinking alcohol for thousands of years. Perhaps we shouldn’t be so quick to demonize it since it seems to have demonstrated its utility.
You somehow read that as: “I need alcohol to have fun”.
Your reading is wrong.
I don't drink for one year every four years and have been through this cycle multiple times. I have one year where I drink quite a bit and my current year is the weekends only drinking cycle.
Some observations: I don't miss alcohol at all when I don't drink, but in dry years I can get quite depressed.
As soon as I do have one drink my mind immediately goes to having more, plans change - I grew up in a binge drinking culture (UK) and that never seems to go away.
I body check myself socially to see if I've drunk too much even when I'm not drinking. I think a lot of social drinking is actually psychological.
Hangovers suck but are a great safeguard. If you don't have them be alarmed. The year when I drink a lot I get overtired, generally puffy skinned feeling and lacklustre.
Most important tip: don't drink pints of mineral water instead of beer: I got terrible kidney stones
We probably drink a hell of a lot more in raw terms than the average American does.Two glasses of wine for dinner, another one in the evening, maybe some cognac to wind down, and so on. But it's for the most part not about getting drunk or coping with stress. I've got no illusions about the physical effects but speaking about addiction or being dysfunctional I've seen very little of it despite some people I know drinking enough to stun a mule probably.
The things that I noted were different in the US is how solitary everyone is, overworked and how little time people take for preparing food and just sitting at a table having a drink over conversation. People seem to drink to cope more, use it as a medicine rather than for pleasure or to enhance meals, and I think that turns very badly very quick.
That said I don't think solitary drinking is necessarily as bad as the article makes it out to be all the time, but it takes a certain personality. When you take drugs alone, not just alcohol, you need to be more mindful about why you do it.
As a member of this target demographic, I would say that catering to American drinkers would be to provide a pretext to be at your establishment. You don't have to actually provide all that much, but if you provide a reason for being there that isn't, "Socialize with others" I bet you'd attract more Americans. In America we do "brewery tours" for example, but it doesn't even have to be related to alcohol itself ("good" music, board games, axe throwing, bumper cars, pub quiz, karaoke, etc.). What matters is that you're plausibly not there to "socialize", even though that's actually why you're there.
Getting beer was always the event.
Like going to a weekly bowling game. Socializing happens but you go there for bowling.
My take (granted, I had quit drinking years prior): I know you guys can't drink off-base, but....that's where all the WOMEN are (the military officer ranks in our Service is ~94% males). I would expect your desire to get laid to exceed your desire to hide inside your alcohol-infused comfort zone....
My peers: Nah....if I can't drink alcohol I don't wanna go out to meet anyone.
The people I hang out with (even to this day) go out to get laid, and if they get DRUNK that's just a side-effect. Most guys I know go out to get drunk, and if they get LAID, that's just a side-effect.
Honest question: what is his realistic chance to get laid with non-prostitute? How much money would it cost to pay sex worker? I also suspect that going around bars while not drinking looking for girl to have sex with might involve a lot of rejection and a lot of effort.
> The people I hang out with (even to this day) go out to get laid,
I honestly never socialized with people like that. I had always stable relationships and most my friends tended to form those too. Not everyone is for quick hookups.
At the time, pretty high. The clubs and bars were very active, and "gaijin-hunter" Japanese women are notoriously easy. If you are halfway-attractive and at least a LITTLE charismatic, you should be able to snag a one-night stand or two, and then a girlfriend in.....6 weeks? That's assuming going out Friday/Saturday every weekend. If you aren't drinking alcohol, it's not that expensive either. If you end up with a relationship that lasts a few months or more, I consider that a pretty good ROI.
>>>How much money would it cost to pay sex worker?
Depending on service (incall/outcall) and location...$100-$300+.
>>>I also suspect that going around bars while not drinking looking for girl to have sex with might involve a lot of rejection and a lot of effort.
It does put you "not on the wavelength" of people when they are drunk, doubly so if they are kinda dumb too. You can overcome these hurdles by being attractive, and knowing the right conversational hooks to say in their native language to build rapport quickly and lazily. Building that skillset does take time, and brings other risks (PUA's call it "calibration"....in my experience, "calibrating" for Japanese women can over-fit your social skills for a small dataset, and then your Game suffers when you engage with women from different cultures).
>>>I honestly never socialized with people like that. I had always stable relationships and most my friends tended to form those too. Not everyone is for quick hookups.
90% of my wingmen have been in stable relationships. That's never stopped any of us from adding to our harems. If you have a wife, get a mistress. If you have a mistress, get a side-chick. If you have a side-chick, get a fuck-buddy. If you have all four of those, bang all of them during the week, so on the weekend you can get some head in your car in the parking lot from a new girl, who might be a suitable replacement for any of the last 3 of your regulars (I don't recommend replacing your wife with a club-rat...).
I had a roommate that kept his accountant side-chick for over 5 years, even after his wife found out. She paid his $20,000 bail when he was getting kicked out of the country, no questions asked. That said....those kind of reliable women are rarely found in bars/clubs, but if you never venture outside of your fortified American enclave because you can't consume alcohol in town, how would a guy ever find out either way?
To the ending, your friends are kind of guys I really dont want to meet. I kind of assumed it was all about single guys having causual fun, now I feel sorry for their wifes. I honestly think better about guys that are not getting laid at the base.
I used to drink with friends and in that country there was a custom that bars close at a given time at night, and then we would go to someone's apartment to drink more. I remember on one occasion we were sitting around in someone's kitchen maybe 8 people. And at one point I realize everyone was talking at the same time. Everyone was talking so no-one was listening. Everyone wanted to get their point across.
People defend both sides of this thesis often.
Can you clarify what you mean here? I was under the impression european habits of alcohol pairing takes much more space under this umbrella than, say, whether an american associates junk foods (pizza, wings) with beer.
How do you even know about solitary drinking in the US? Why are you unaware of solitary drinking in France/Germany/Croatia?
I have no way of quantifying any of your observations.
I am aware of people with drinking problems in France, Germany and Croatia. It is easy for alcohol to periodically become a problem in people's lives.
I'm not trying to defend American culture at all. These observations read kind of comically though.
Edit: Next time I'll do a cursory googling before commenting. This is apparently an existing hypothesis for common types of bacteria such as e coli, salmonella, etc in the drink itself, not in the body.
In an age where other beverages are as easily accessible for people living in the modern world, it’s utility isn’t there any more and you are left with all the downsides.
Coffee, tea, and tobacco, became at least as widespread once global trade made that possible. Coca was late to the party because it doesn't grow well outside of its native region.
Cannabis is an odd one, in that it was extremely widespread and making solid inroads in Europe and North America, when it became a weapon for United States racial policy, and a jobs program for federal police after the repeal of Prohibition. Coca and cocaine got caught up in the same dragnet.
Opium and its derivatives are genuinely pernicious and attempts to normalize their use outside of medicine have been resisted repeatedly throughout history.
Which leaves psychedelics, which are... weird, and also were largely unknown until some anthropologists in the 40s and 50s drew attention to them.
The history of 'modern' drug prohibition owes more to politics than the inherent properties of the substances in question.
Hard liquor is a big part of the problem, but social life in America is a total disaster and overshadows everything else.
You can definitely see the benefit for an ancient civilization, since you're able to store many more calories which allows you to grow a much larger population base. But like many things associated with the move to agrarian civilizations, being good for the civilization doesn't necessarilly correlate with being good for the individual.
You get alcohol when fruit spoils. Our experience with it is quite literally as old as foraging. This doesn't tell us anything about how harmful or not harmful alcohol is.
As far as ubiquity, plant-based substances had to follow migration or trade routes to gain use outside of their native habitats. Alcohol was coextensive with any food .
The addiction rate for cocaine/heroin/meth may be higher, but the negative effects of those drugs mostly stem from the high cost (theft) and insane profit margins (murder). If a heroin addict could get their supply for $5/day (and have it be pure heroin w no fentanyl) then nearly all of the negatives would disappear.
Meth has lot less sympathetic side effects than dextroamphetamine per unit of dopaminergic stimulation, this simple difference enables abuser to consume ridiculously large dose and those high doses are destructive.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/know-your-amphetamines
[41] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23688691/
[43] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3355623/
[45] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7299411/
[46] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22883290/
[47] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15254949/
From my experience with Vyvanse I find that amphetamines have a dose response function with linear and exponential steps. 15mg is barely perceptible, 30mg is like a coffee without the anxiety but it last 8 hours. 45mg is like 30mg but a little longer. 60mg in 2 doses (first pill at 7am and next one at 9am) is a perfect treatment against my ADD. Once I tried 90mg and it was terrible, I experienced bruxism, anxiety and hyperacidity for 18 hours. I am sure that I would develop the problems you listed if I were to take 90mg a day but 90mg of Vyvanse is supratherapeutic...
1: Link 41 is about abuse (supratherapeutic and frequent doses). Link 43 I can't comment as I don't have acces but it's an old paper from 1988... Link 45 is about abuse again. Link 46 is about accidental ingestion by a baby. (a therapeutic dose for a teenager is clearly supratherapeutic in a 8months infant) Link 47 is probably about abuse (the abstract talk of reversible consequences of dose escalation) but I don't have acces to the paper.
But I'd consider drinking daily or even weekly much.
One of my great bugaboos is these cultural definitions of alcoholism that are independent from the actual amount of alcohol consumed. You know “you’re only an alcoholic if you drink alone” or “you’re only an alcoholic if you pour your own drinks” (apparently this is a meme in Japan?). Every culture that consumes alcohol seems to have these, and they’re all laughably naive and easily gamed. Alcoholics can and do drink heavily together, and they can pour each other drinks if that’s what it takes to sidestep some silly taboo. The only definition of this that’s meaningful is how much alcohol you drink and how often, nothing else.
(source: I've got family in Japan). It's polite in Japan to serve others and then let someone serve you. Otherwise it's "tejaku" (pooring oneself's drink). In, say, France/Belgium it's different: the one who serves from the bottle serves everybody and ends up serving himself.
Now, obviously, when you're drinking alone there's nobody to serve you...
I’ve never been to Japan, but I’d heard that “you’re only an alcoholic if you pour your own drinks” is a trope there. The question mark in my original post was to underscore my uncertainty.
From the WHO:
https://www.euro.who.int/en/health-topics/disease-prevention...
"The WHO European Region has the highest proportion in the world of total ill health and premature death due to alcohol."
Unclear what this is supposed to mean. Italy[0], Portugal[1] and Spain[2] all have lower prevalence of heavy episodic drinking than the EU average.
Both Portugal ("south of the Alps") and France[3] ("north of the Alps") have higher alcohol consumption per capita than the EU average, which is largely due to a culture of moderate wine drinking with meals that has nothing to do with "functional alcoholism".
[0] https://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0016/402190/... [1] https://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/402198/... [2] https://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/402202/... [3] https://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0020/402185/...
German data: https://www.who.int/substance_abuse/publications/global_alco...
US data: https://www.who.int/substance_abuse/publications/global_alco...
Looking at the numbers, I think there's a real possibility that Germans and other Europeans have a problem with alcohol that's just as bad if not worse, but are possibly less willing to admit it. Just like how 70 years ago few in America would be willing to admit America's problems with alcohol and tobacco.
[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150220190741.h...
I would probably say that Germany isn't indicative of the Eurozone at all.
I'd sat the Binge Belt is US, UK, AU, DK, NO, IS, JP, KR
[1] https://movendi.ngo/news/2019/04/18/study-germany-has-an-alc...
Do you do research on drinking habits? How can you assume to know so much about the US’ drinking habits in general terms?
There are two possible relationships a person can have with alcohol - it is either primarily a food, or primarily a drug.
Americans have a hard time treating it as food, although thankfully that seems to be changing.
It seems that continental Europe is the outlier.
I honestly get sick when I drink more than three drinks within three hours.
Funny, whenever I visit W Europe I find it pretty sad and people look pretty grumbling. America is a lot more lively.
I think of this Eurostory as a EU coping mechanism.
Most people don't understand the concept of standard drink sizes (for medical purposes or blood alcohol calculation). Firstly the standard drink size in the US is larger than in the US, but even so it's still smaller than the typical size drink people actually receive. If there were more awareness around standard drink sizes we might discover that Americans drink more than statistics capture by a lot (though probably not more than Germans)! In Germany most of my friends in the US would be considered alcoholics.
- shots are typically much larger in the US - about 2x-3x
- the standard beer size (for beer on tap) is usually a pint in the US. In Germany it's about a half pint! (That's why Germans can have a lunch beer)
- Canned wine is fairly popular in the US, but nobody realizes that this is essentially half of bottle of wine.
On a related note: most people definitely drive under the influence (legally drunk) in the US! :(
I grew up in Germany in the restaurant business (family business) and was a bar tender from a young age (albeit in a fancy restaurant with a few locals who'd sit at the bar). The most shots I've ever seen someone drink in an evening was 9 shots - my staff and I thought that person was a crazy alcoholic. Those shots are 2cl. When you compare that to the typical tequila shots in US bars it's basically ~3 shots (a little more), which people in their 20s and 30s tend to drink like it's no big deal.
I have lived several places in the Midwest, in SF, Chicago and of course traveled lots of places in the US for business and vacation.
Disclaimer: German in the US for 15+ years.
I'm writing this right now whilst drinking my German Import Pilsener to wind down from work :D
My generation in Italy (millennials) tends to drink a lot more and with the precise purpose of getting drunk. The way they/we do it resembles much more the American way than the way our parents used to drink.
Of course, this is based on personal experience, but I’ve seen this pattern across different social classes and it seems to be mainly linked to age, more than education or economic condition.
I went to an international school, so we'd get American kids coming in and realising that they could drink before graduating into a dry university. At least one of my friends got his stomach pumped after a massive binge.
I wonder whether the culture in the US encourages people to guzzle it all down at once to minimise the risk of getting caught.
I noticed something similar in the UK, where they do seem to somewhat enforce the drinking age of 18, and so when I got to uni here my new friends would act like they'd just discovered alcohol and get incredibly drunk.
Now it's not like kids in Europe never get drunk, but it's always available so not really seen as an alluring thing. On much of the continent it's also the kind of thing you might consume with your parents around, which is the ultimate excitement killer.
The night life hours being so few exacerbate that too
My lived experience is much different; friends in their 20s/30s/40s drinking at every event and gathering. I live in an area full of very busy bars and restaurants with people drinking. Other wealthier areas are the same around the country. Traveling internationally, the story is the same. And even people like manual laborers drink a lot (I see construction workers regularly drinking on breaks, and I've known some personally), so it's not just a behavior amongst the college-educated professional crowd.
Maybe cities attract and sustain this behavior. People want to be around other people, to be around nightlife, etc. Characterization of this as a purely American problem (or a general problem America-wide) seems like a mistake given the numbers though.
Of course I think all of this is alarmist. Alcohol is one of those great traditions that has transcended centuries and generations. If I live a few years less, so be it. I’d rather be happy.
Edit: I didn't down vote your comment btw.
I live in Denmark, which has one of the highest rates of alcohol consumption among young people in the EU and almost the same overall as the UK but without the pub culture you guys have. Most of our social consumption is the unhealthy heavy drinking party kind. But this is raw amount consumed and you yourself said you like the drinking culture (I wish we had it here). I'm talking about people drinking to cope. Going to a pub 3 days a week and drinking alone at home after work to cope with stress etc. is very different.