If you get a watch that measures heart rate variability (HRV), you will notice that alcohol is significantly reducing it, which is associated with a lot of things you don’t wish to yourself. And it doesn’t have to be a lot of alcohol.
So how sober has a simple answer if you care about your health : fully sober.
I have very little desire to read a novel centered around drinking or drug use in 2025. That subject has been covered pretty extensively - and the writers who explored it have mostly either found moderation in their later years or paid a significant price.
A lot of us are drinking less, but I’m not sure we’ve really come up with a suitable replacement yet - socially speaking. I would be more interested to explore that.
Edit: To be clear, some of my favorite writers were very heavy into drugs and alcohol: Kerouac, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, etc. I’m not criticizing their work - which again are some of my personal favorites - but if you read their biographies they often don’t end well. My thinking is what would these novels look like if written in 2025 and not set against the backdrop of substance abuse.
A surprising number of my colleagues over the years have been know to dabble in all sorts of things to "enhance performance".
Adderall: at one point in time I think half the engineers in the bay were popping these. They were practically free and available everywhere during the dot com bubble recovery.
Weed: A good number of JS engineers I know are just miserable people to work with till they smoke a joint.
Drinking: From casual to alcoholics, drinking culture used to be huge in many bay area offices. This has died down... still there but more discrete.
LSD: there is a shocking amount of this, your average dev team likely has someone who micro-doses if not more...
Cocaine and MDMA have gone the way of the dodo: fent made them mostly non starters.
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[ 10.2 ms ] story [ 156 ms ] threadI write my best code a little tipsy
So how sober has a simple answer if you care about your health : fully sober.
A lot of us are drinking less, but I’m not sure we’ve really come up with a suitable replacement yet - socially speaking. I would be more interested to explore that.
Edit: To be clear, some of my favorite writers were very heavy into drugs and alcohol: Kerouac, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, etc. I’m not criticizing their work - which again are some of my personal favorites - but if you read their biographies they often don’t end well. My thinking is what would these novels look like if written in 2025 and not set against the backdrop of substance abuse.
Adderall: at one point in time I think half the engineers in the bay were popping these. They were practically free and available everywhere during the dot com bubble recovery.
Weed: A good number of JS engineers I know are just miserable people to work with till they smoke a joint.
Drinking: From casual to alcoholics, drinking culture used to be huge in many bay area offices. This has died down... still there but more discrete.
LSD: there is a shocking amount of this, your average dev team likely has someone who micro-doses if not more...
Cocaine and MDMA have gone the way of the dodo: fent made them mostly non starters.
Show Mr. and Mrs. F. to Number—[1]
The Crack-Up[2]
[1] https://fitzgerald.narod.ru/zelda/shownumber.html
[2] https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/f-scott-fitzgerald-...
In particular, how do you feel when you do that? Mildly elated? Slightly cheesed-off but still cheery?