[HN Gopher] America has a drinking problem
___________________________________________________________________
America has a drinking problem
Author : pseudolus
Score : 186 points
Date : 2021-06-01 16:54 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theatlantic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theatlantic.com)
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| I also suspect that regular cannabis use is more harmful than
| some of us would care to admit.
| renewiltord wrote:
| 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.
| simonsarris wrote:
| _The sound rule in the matter would appear to be like many other
| sound rules--a paradox. Drink because you are happy, but never
| because you are miserable. Never drink when you are wretched
| without it, or you will be like the grey-faced gin-drinker in the
| slum; but drink when you would be happy without it, and you will
| be like the laughing peasant of Italy. Never drink because you
| need it, for this is rational drinking, and the way to death and
| hell. But drink because you do not need it, for this is
| irrational drinking, and the ancient health of the world._
|
| G.K. Chesterton, from Heretics
| trts wrote:
| 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.
| methyl wrote:
| How much you used to drink before?
| globular-toast wrote:
| 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.
| ckosidows wrote:
| 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.
| teachingassist wrote:
| In my experience: some people may take it as a personal
| reflection on them, if you stop drinking, and will react
| negatively.
|
| (I don't recommend keeping those people in your life.)
| RobotCaleb wrote:
| 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.
| tootie wrote:
| 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.
| matwood wrote:
| 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.
| fokinsean wrote:
| > 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.
| Rapzid wrote:
| 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.
|
| Strictly a night drinker.
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| 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.
| graeme wrote:
| Exactly the same experience. Gave it up after a concussion,
| substantially happier now. I notice the effects of even a
| single drink the next day.
| leifg wrote:
| Genuine question: what do you drink instead? Do you stick to
| water or do you order any kind of soda/lemonade (or something
| I'm not thinking about)
| [deleted]
| waterglassFull wrote:
| Give quality sparkling water a go if you can, eg San
| Pellegrino, Castello, Harrogate (glass only), etc.
| coderintherye wrote:
| As another non-drinker, Kombucha and occasionally non-
| alcoholic beers.
|
| 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).
| dlp211 wrote:
| 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.
| ohazi wrote:
| Tangentially related anecdote:
|
| 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.
| 1980phipsi wrote:
| I lost five pounds or so switching from Coke to Diet Coke.
| phkahler wrote:
| 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.
| silviogutierrez wrote:
| Do you have a link to a reputable source? I've heard this
| a lot, and have a company in the nutrition space, but I
| haven't seen anything conclusive
| koolba wrote:
| Does that apply to all artificial sweeteners such as
| sucralose or is it specific to aspartame?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| 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.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| 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.
| rhcom2 wrote:
| I don't think there is scientific evidence to back that
| up from what I could find: https://www.oatext.com/Blood-
| glucose-and-insulin-response-to...
| phkahler wrote:
| Thanks! While that is a very small study, it seems pretty
| convincing.
| jjeaff wrote:
| 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.
| crackercrews wrote:
| I prefer to eat my calories rather than eat them. So I drink
| water and soda water 95% of the time.
| tingletech wrote:
| a lot of beer places near me carry lagunitas hop water. It's
| zero calorie sparking water with a hoppy flavor.
| philips wrote:
| Dry kombucha is a really nice alternative at 50 - 100
| calories a can. My go to this summer
| https://www.lionheartkombucha.com/flavors/
| yojo wrote:
| 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.
| smegger001 wrote:
| 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.
| TheTrotters wrote:
| Flavored sparkling water
| graeme wrote:
| 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.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| I've also discovered that my favorite gin and tonic doesn't
| actually contain any gin. Tonic water and lime suits me
| just fine.
| globular-toast wrote:
| 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.
| paulgb wrote:
| I've replaced the beer in my fridge with Athletic Brewing's
| non-alcoholic beer.
| crazcarl wrote:
| 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.
| matwood wrote:
| 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.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| 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.
| paulgb wrote:
| 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.
| sciurus wrote:
| They're decent, and definitely towards the top of the
| pack of non-alcoholic beer brands. Clausthaler is also ok
| if you prefer a lager to an ale.
|
| (I spent a couple months trying every variety of non-
| alcoholic "craft" beer that I could get my hands on
| earlier in the pandemic)
| losvedir wrote:
| 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.
| bitcurious wrote:
| Usually seltzer, coffee, tea. Recently I discovered Hoplark
| "hop teas" which (to my tastebuds) separate the best parts of
| beer from the alcohol.
| sciurus wrote:
| If you like hop-flavored beverages, definitely try
| Lagunitas Hoppy Refresher.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| 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.
| czbond wrote:
| I've loved club soda - and dislike alcohol; however, never
| thought of adding bitters. I like this idea a lot.
| crackercrews wrote:
| 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.
| Epenthesis wrote:
| I personally like it a lot. It's my go-to at a bar when I
| don't feel like drinking
|
| That said I also like plain seltzer and bitter flavors
| generally (dark chocolate, black coffee, IPAs), so YMMV.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| This (or similar) is my go-to. In a rocks glass, it also
| looks enough like a cocktail that no one makes a point of
| asking (if that matters to you).
| carlmr wrote:
| >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.
| agumonkey wrote:
| > Anxiety in general is noticeably lower
|
| 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
| tw600040 wrote:
| > you were more anxious when you were drinking ? that's a
| first
|
| drinking habit increases baseline anxiety. it's not that
| having a drink will make you more anxious in next few hours.
| meowfly wrote:
| 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.
| Jarwain wrote:
| There's a bit of a rebound effect. Alcohol can decrease
| anxiety while drunk, while increasing baseline sober anxiety.
|
| This is, of course, in the absence of other factors that may
| influence an individual's anxiety
| altcognito wrote:
| 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.
| trhway wrote:
| 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.
| ryantgtg wrote:
| 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!).
|
| Anyway, I'll look up this GERD thing.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindling_(sedative%E2%8
| 0%93hyp...
| ckosidows wrote:
| 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.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| 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.
| nick__m wrote:
| 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.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Alcohol can reduce anxiety in the short term, but it can bite
| you in the ass in the mid-to-long term by making you even
| more anxious the next day.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jan/27/hangxie.
| ..
| grumple wrote:
| 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.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I stopped drinking because I wasn't going out due to the
| pandemic. I've come to a similar conclusion, and intend to make
| this a long-term decision.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| The statistics about alcohol consumption are so stunning that I
| often wonder how accurate they are.
|
| 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.
| sjg007 wrote:
| Like everything alcohol consumption is a power law.
| ska wrote:
| > 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.
| willis936 wrote:
| For those curious:
|
| 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
| jhickok wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| s5300 wrote:
| Yeah, I'm from the poorest county in my state and 10+ beers a
| day is honestly absolutely nothing to quite a decent part of
| the population out here.
| soperj wrote:
| My uncles were 2 bottles of rye a day guys. 10 drinks seems low
| honestly.
| ufmace wrote:
| FWIW, there definitely are people who drink 10+ drinks a day
| every day. The top few percent of drinkers in the country drink
| an epic shitload.
| [deleted]
| ip26 wrote:
| 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.
| akiselev wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| swiley wrote:
| 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.)
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| 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.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > 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.
| tolbish wrote:
| How recent is your data? As of 2015, 18% of Americans are
| binge drinkers:
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/americans-are-
| dri...
| panzagl wrote:
| > We simply choose healthier behaviors.
|
| Hmm, I wonder where your desire to choose healthier
| behaviors came from...
| czbond wrote:
| 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.
| panzagl wrote:
| Could be, but in general Americans obsess more about
| health than other nations, which also can be traced back
| to our Puritanical heritage.
| [deleted]
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| I'd never heard that Puritans had any obsession with body
| health. What is the connection?
| adventured wrote:
| 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.
| panzagl wrote:
| 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.
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| Religion can fade away while its values endure.
|
| 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.
| coherentpony wrote:
| > our Puritan values run deep.
|
| 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?
| finiteseries wrote:
| 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?"
| pie420 wrote:
| 1. The lucky ones make it to 80, lots die to unimaginably
| painful cancers, let's not increase our odds by drinking
| volatile solvents
|
| 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.
| matwood wrote:
| It's mentioned in the article, but Europeans tend to look
| down on being drunk and view wine/beer as just part of
| the meal.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| Unless you're British. Or Scandinavian. Or big swathes of
| Eastern Europe. Basically anywhere with atrocious
| weather.
| jjgreen wrote:
| 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."
|
| https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2009/great-directors/aki-
| kaur...
| robocat wrote:
| 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.
| brnt wrote:
| 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.
| r00fus wrote:
| 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.
| namdnay wrote:
| I think having children limits serious partying, but what
| do you drink when you're eating your evening meals? Only
| water?
|
| 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.
| flatline wrote:
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I can't imagine drinking anything but water 99% of the
| time. Or milk if you're a kid.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| 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?
| kjeldoran001 wrote:
| 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)
| lovegoblin wrote:
| > 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."
| saalweachter wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| 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).
| Jetrel wrote:
| 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.
| piyh wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| [0]: http://joe.blog.freemansoft.com/2020/02/recognizing-
| violent-...
| bitbuilder wrote:
| >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.
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| > 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.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > 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.
| silicon2401 wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| phd514 wrote:
| > our Puritan values run deep
|
| 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."
| thrower123 wrote:
| 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.
| ksd482 wrote:
| 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.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| 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.
| czbond wrote:
| A version of this caused my grandfather and father to
| never touch the stuff - and acted like it was kryptonite
| when I grew up.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| > mistreating their wives and children
|
| ...and husbands. Not all people who drink alcohol to excess
| are male.
| mywittyname wrote:
| 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).
| mulmen wrote:
| 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.
| mywittyname wrote:
| You just described alcoholism.
| [deleted]
| hervature wrote:
| > 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.
| soperj wrote:
| Not if you regularly drink much more than that.
| hervature wrote:
| 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.
| ragona wrote:
| I think you're incorrect about a few things.
|
| 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.
| hervature wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] - https://americanaddictioncenters.org/alcoholism-
| treatment/th... [2] - https://www.tipscertified.com/
| pedroma wrote:
| 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.
| pengaru wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| 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.
| olivermarks wrote:
| 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
| gwbennett wrote:
| I stopped drinking 30 years ago. Haven't missed it a bit.
| tmm wrote:
| 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.
| sjg007 wrote:
| There's non alcoholic fatty liver disease too.
| neither_color wrote:
| 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.
| silicon2401 wrote:
| 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.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > 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.
| ska wrote:
| 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.
| kelnos wrote:
| 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.
| ska wrote:
| That claim was for the _minimum_ of the top 10%, being 2
| bottle wine equivalent per day, which is about 10
| standard drinks.
|
| Undoubtedly there are far heavier drinkers in the top end
| of that 10%; but 10 drinks is a lot, and 10% isn't
| outliers.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| 20 drinks/day sounds about right for the top 1% of
| alcohol drinkers, I've been at that level before.
| rdruxn wrote:
| Unfortunately, it isn't outlier behavior
| TheCapn wrote:
| 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.
| spankalee wrote:
| Why don't you drink water to stay hydrated?
|
| Sodas are liquid candy. I don't think many people eat 6
| Snickers instead of food to get calories while they work.
| tayo42 wrote:
| I found it pretty amusing to see how drunk our founding fathers
| were. I think being drunk played a huge role in the American
| revolution
| cobaltoxide wrote:
| Reminds me of the article "Were Early Modern People Perpetually
| Drunk? (2016)"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13535868
| drewcoo wrote:
| I'd love to see a drunk history about drunken Washington
| infecting his drunken troops with cowpox (sober cows).
| pseudolus wrote:
| 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.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| 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.
| lupire wrote:
| "When Britain taxed our TEA we got frisky/ Imagine what gon'
| happen when you try & tax our whiskey"
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey_Rebellion
| barbazoo wrote:
| 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.
| paxys wrote:
| 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.
| mellosouls wrote:
| 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.
| croutonwagon wrote:
| > 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.
| mellosouls wrote:
| How do it and they answer the question in another way to
| mine given that it is a toxin and millions are using it
| to damage their health every day?
|
| How many of those millions using could genuinely give up
| today forever easily if they wanted to?
| [deleted]
| barbazoo wrote:
| 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.
| paxys wrote:
| > 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.
| barbazoo wrote:
| 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.
| lupire wrote:
| Due to COVID-19, people couldn't drink their healthy
| moderation where they usually do.
| barbazoo wrote:
| No amount of alcohol consumption is "healthy". There
| might be an amount up to which it's not considered
| harmful.
| system16 wrote:
| 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.
| tqi wrote:
| "Media coverage, meanwhile, has swung from cheerfully overselling
| the (now disputed) health benefits of wine to screeching that no
| amount of alcohol is safe, ever; it might give you cancer and it
| will certainly make you die before your time."
|
| This back and forth cycle in media coverage on any health topic
| is so predictable. At this point can any study be taken at face
| value, or is the only real answer "it varies?"
| notlukesky wrote:
| I would highly recommend everyone to watch the documentary
| Prohibition by Ken Burns:
|
| https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/prohibition/
|
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1950799/
| floatingatoll wrote:
| ADHD folks, I'm pretty sure (but I don't have hard science) that
| alcohol depletes your precious and limited store of dopamine. For
| normal people, the hangover is just "my head hurts" and such. For
| ADHD people, the hangover _also_ includes "my willpower is
| reduced", potentially for days while the brain sloooowly
| replenishes dopamine.
| tablespoon wrote:
| America needs alcohol control and a ban on high-capacity assault
| beverages.
| offtop5 wrote:
| Why not let everyone do what they want?
|
| 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.
| agogdog wrote:
| We live in a society
| tjs8rj wrote:
| 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.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| Doesn't society already tell everyone that alcohol abuse is
| bad?
| offtop5 wrote:
| 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
| vinay427 wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/237908/smoking-rate-hits-
| new-lo...
|
| [2] https://ourworldindata.org/which-countries-smoke-most
| tjs8rj wrote:
| 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).
| Barrin92 wrote:
| 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.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| I'm going to generalize, but the US is more diverse (rank #90
| vs #151 for Germany, #169 for France, #111 for Croatia [0]) and
| we also have a very painful past and present that makes us
| _acutely_ aware of our inability to socialize.
|
| America also has a cultural obsession with self-
| reliance/liberty/frontier-as-a-virtue which makes "socializing"
| a bit of a taboo concept, in a weird way. It's a crutch to
| "need" to be around others, despite it being fundamentally
| human to feel this way.
|
| When you combine these two things, I think you get a group of
| people who _need_ to interact with one another, but also kind
| of hate one another, and refuse to admit the dichotomy. What we
| 've discovered then, is by heavy drinking we can start to pick
| at those barriers, though maybe that is, itself, part of the
| problem. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li
| st_of_countries_ranked_by_ethnic_and_cultural_diversity_level
| Bostonian wrote:
| "we also have a very painful past and present"
|
| I don't see why that is more true of the U.S. than say
| Germany, Japan, Russia, China etc.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| We've both refused to own our past like Japan and Germany,
| have more diversity than all of those countries, and have
| also not scrubbed all mention of said painful past from our
| national history like Russia and China.
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| > we also have a very painful past and present that makes us
| acutely aware of our inability to socialize.
|
| This is only a real problem for a small, but vocal part of
| the population. Most people don't think about these issues
| much at all.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| > 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.
| lhorie wrote:
| > to enhance meals
|
| 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.
| k__ wrote:
| I'm German, and I'd consider drinking 2-3 glasses of wine plus
| a glass cognac a day quite much.
|
| But I'd consider drinking daily or even weekly much.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Having lived in the UK and the US, I firmly disagree. I had
| never seen drinking at the extreme levels until I went to the
| UK.
|
| I seriously doubt the entire articles premise that somehow
| alcohol binging is unique to the US. There are a lot of
| counties with a lot of forms of alcohol out there...
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| Don't really get pubs outside the UK. A pub is basically a
| place where you can sit and enjoy yourself and chat with
| mates. Sometimes people can get outrageously drunk.
|
| Also in UK you can buy alcohol from 18, (and if you go to the
| right places younger even...). It seems totally absurd that
| in the USA even a 20 YO can't buy himself a drink.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Bars exist elsewhere. It's the same function, just
| positioned differently culturally. Yet many people across
| the US treat bars the same as they do in the UK.
|
| That said, I see way more people absolutely trashed at
| night walking around cities in the UK than I do the US. I'm
| not saying no one is trashed in the US, I'm just saying the
| frequency, percentage of people, and "normalcy" was way
| higher in the UK.
| StavrosK wrote:
| It's not unique to the US, but the US shares a culture with
| the UK in this regard. It's not similar to other countries
| I've been to (or lived in). In Greece, for example, it's not
| uncommon to see teenagers being served/sold alcohol, just
| because it's not a big deal. People go out, they have a drink
| or two, and they go home.
|
| In the US and the UK, if you aren't drunk when you get home,
| it wasn't a good night. Nobody here "pregames", simply
| because getting drunk is mostly something to be avoided.
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| The UK is an outlier in western europe (I think this is
| your point), but having lived in both countries, they
| definitely binge drink more than Americans.
| StavrosK wrote:
| Agreed on both points.
| ipaddr wrote:
| The happy hour culture and early closing time force binge
| drinking.
| Metacelsus wrote:
| Yeah, I've lived in both countries and UK is worse for sure.
| vmception wrote:
| What I got out of this was that you were around well-adjusted
| people in Europe and were around less well-adjusted people in
| the US.
|
| 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.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| 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.
| fantod wrote:
| 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.
| vdnkh wrote:
| This makes no sense. Do you think that Americans go out
| drinking to get drunk arounds friends, but not to socialize
| with them?
| elliekelly wrote:
| It definitely depends on the type of bar/club you're at but
| a lot of them have music so loud it's impossible to hold a
| conversation.
| sidlls wrote:
| 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.
| C19is20 wrote:
| 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?"
| TameAntelope wrote:
| 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.
| ipaddr wrote:
| We went out to get drunk and socializing happened. Without
| the going out to get drunk part the socializing doesn't
| happen.
|
| Getting beer was always the event.
|
| Like going to a weekly bowling game. Socializing happens
| but you go there for bowling.
| OminousWeapons wrote:
| 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.
| bitexploder wrote:
| 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.
| qeternity wrote:
| 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.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| It's hard to reduce the US to a single culture. Alcohol
| consumption habits vary greatly from region to region, or even
| city to city depending on where you live.
|
| I've noticed that heavy drinkers tend to cluster with other
| heavy drinkers. The more you see your friends and coworkers
| binge drinking regularly, the more you feel it's an acceptable
| and even common behavior. Likewise, non-drinkers tend to
| cluster with each other because it gets tiresome to have
| friends who want every event to revolve around alcohol.
|
| Statistically, the median drinker in the US doesn't drink much
| alcohol at all. The vast majority of alcohol is consumed by the
| top 10% of drinkers. You may have simply ended up with a
| cluster of heavy drinkers that aren't representative of the
| median US alcohol consumer.
|
| Statistic here:
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/25/think...
| Note that the median US alcohol drinker consumes less than 1
| drink per week.
| root_axis wrote:
| Nice comment. I also want to emphasize that your point about
| regional variance is true in Europe as well, this without
| even mentioning several well known European drinker
| stereotypes.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| That's a great (surprising) reference. Intellectually I know
| functional alcoholics exist but it's still tough to come to
| grips with that many people drinking that much alcohol.
|
| I'm curious what it looks by age, geography, and household
| income.
| tolbish wrote:
| And yet one year later we learn that 18% of Americans are
| binge drinkers:
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/americans-are-
| dri...
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| If approximately one in five people are doing it then
| either it needs to lose the "karen clutching her
| pearls"-esque stigma or the definition needs to change.
| bart_spoon wrote:
| Stigma doesn't exist simply based on how many people do
| something.
| spoonjim wrote:
| I think the US is a land of "extreme" personalities so I
| would guess that across a broad range of metrics (alcohol
| consumption, wealth, number of text messages sent per month),
| the ratio of the Top 1% to the median is probably higher in
| the US than in most other countries that the US considers
| "peers" (i.e. Western Europe, Australia, and Canada).
| quadyeast wrote:
| that chart does not make sense to me unless >10% of Americans
| are AA. I can't think of anyone, besides non-drinking
| Alcoholics, that have less than 1 drink/wk
| barry-cotter wrote:
| I live in a rather special world. I only know one person
| who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're
| outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can
| feel them. Quoted by Israel Shenker, "Critics Here Focus on
| Films As Language Conference Opens," The New York Times
| (1972-12-28)
|
| Often quoted as "How could Nixon have won? Nobody I know
| voted for him"; referring to George McGovern's loss to
| Richard Nixon in in the 1972 presidential election.
| bitexploder wrote:
| I do pretty demanding sport as a hobby. Even one drink
| during the week greatly impacts recovery and ability to
| perform and lessens my enjoyment considerably. It's rather
| commons in my circles for people to probably average a
| handful of drinks per year at most.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| If one drink/wk is noticeably affecting you then you're
| either a professional athlete who's got world class
| people monitoring their performance or you need to see a
| doctor.
| DeRock wrote:
| I have many friends (and family) most of whom are in no way
| an alcoholic in AA, that hardly ever (or never) drink. Some
| just don't enjoy the effects, some prefer not to for health
| reasons, some just honestly prefer to smoke a joint. The
| fact that you can't think of a single person like that is
| equally surprising to me.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Hi! Nice to meet you. There are weeks when I have 0 drinks
| per week, and then others where I have lots more. It all
| depends on mood and activities. Specifically if the smoker
| is running.
| hpoe wrote:
| Well for starters you've got all the Muslims and members of
| the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints sometimes
| know as Mormons. That's two big ole' swathes of people who
| probably don't drink at all.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| A lot of people don't like alcoholic beverages at all.
|
| I have member of my family that despise the taste of
| alcohol.
|
| Then, we have people like myself, and my father, whom self
| medicate.
|
| (I hate the taste of all alcohol. I only drink it for the
| effect. To the problem drinkers out there, don't even think
| about going to hard alcohol. Stick to low alcohol beer, and
| wine. Box wine can have as little as 9% alcohol. Naltrexone
| seems to help with the cravings if you need to stop.)
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > I can't think of anyone, besides non-drinking Alcoholics,
| that have less than 1 drink/wk
|
| Most people I associate with don't drink anything on an
| average week.
|
| It's likely that you're in a bit of a bubble if you can't
| think of anyone who doesn't drink in an average week.
| Wohlf wrote:
| Is it really that hard to imagine some people just don't
| have much of a desire to drink? I go pretty long stretches
| without drinking.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Note that the median US alcohol drinker consumes less than
| 1 drink per week.
|
| The article says something else:
|
| >> the median consumption among those who do drink is just
| three beverages per week.
|
| You might get less than 1 / week by including non-drinkers,
| who are (according to the article) at least 30% of American
| adults. But they're 0% of American alcohol drinkers.
| [deleted]
| maya24 wrote:
| Alcohol is a harmful drug much worse than some of the other
| banned drugs on the market.
| jmcdl wrote:
| 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)?
| gilbetron wrote:
| It's a really interesting question. Maybe the benefits of
| having something to drink that has alcohol to kill of
| pathogens outweigh the negatives?
| quickthrowman wrote:
| 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.
| bsder wrote:
| I wonder how much of the increase is due to ridesharing.
|
| The US basically requires that you drive everywhere. The
| penalties for DUI are incredibly stiff. So, you are forced to
| choose and most people had to choose driving over drinking.
|
| Now, with ridesharing, you can choose drinking over driving.
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| Not as big as The Atlantic's relevance problem
| silicon2401 wrote:
| 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.
| paxys wrote:
| 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.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| Alcohol withdrawals are serious enough that they can be fatal.
| This isn't true for cigarettes, opiates, or cocaine.
|
| Breaking habits is hard, but usually doesn't risk
| hospitalization or death.
| kiwih wrote:
| Nitpicking, but though rare, people can die from opiate
| withdrawal [1].
|
| The point of your comment still stands however.
|
| [1] https://ndarc.med.unsw.edu.au/blog/yes-people-can-die-
| opiate...
| laurent92 wrote:
| 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.
| ufmace wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| handrous wrote:
| 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.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| 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.
| svachalek wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| Tyr42 wrote:
| 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?
| birdyrooster wrote:
| I like your comment because it pretty much answers itself in
| the edit.
| handrous wrote:
| 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.
|
| - Emily Bludworth de Barios, from
| http://www.forkliftohio.com/index.php?page=freight-31
|
| That last line unsettles me every time.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _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."
|
| https://genius.com/Alan-watts-the-dream-of-life-annotated
| nestorD wrote:
| On the subject of addiction I highly recommend this comic on
| the rat park experiment:
| http://utw10426.utweb.utexas.edu/quest/Q3/ratpark.html
|
| 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.
| grumple wrote:
| 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.
| Diederich wrote:
| Most of my male genetic relatives have/had a history of alcohol
| abuse, so I decided from an early age that the best approach was
| to not drink any alcohol at all, and I held to that until about
| nine years ago. Long research has indicated that one cup of red
| wine per day has measurable health benefits, so I started to
| drink one cup, like medicine, immediately before bed.
|
| After doing that for a few weeks, I came home from work; my wife
| and son weren't home at the moment. I sat down at my computer and
| started working on my side project, as usual.
|
| I was shocked to see that there was a large plastic container on
| my desk filled most of the way up with red wine, and I'd been
| gulping it down.
|
| Honest to God, I had absolutely no recollection of getting that
| container, pouring the wine, and putting it on my desk.
|
| That was very chilling, I poured the rest of it out and haven't
| had a drink since.
| smcl wrote:
| That can definitely happen when you're focussed on something
| else than what you're drinking (or eating!). It's gonna be even
| more pronounced if you're drinking, distracted _and_ not
| particularly experienced with alcohol. If you enjoy what you
| 're drinking you just need to be conscious of when you refill
| and you'll be fine. If you don't and you're just doing it as a
| sort of health thing, maybe you made the right choice. As
| someone who enjoys whisk[e]y, rum, gin, wine and beer, I think
| it's incredibly enjoyable if you're able to keep on top of it
| and I feel a little bit sad that there are some who won't enjoy
| things like making cocktails or tasting wine due to abstinence.
| I don't want at-risk people to descend into alcoholism against
| their will, mind.
| Diederich wrote:
| > If you enjoy what you're drinking ...
|
| That's the thing: I hate the taste of wine.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| Just for clarification, no research (I'm aware of) has
| indicated that one cup of red wine has measurable health
| benefits _above not drinking at all_. The research suggests
| that _if_ you must drink, _then_ one cup of wine will have
| _some_ positive impacts _in addition to_ the negative impacts.
|
| That said, I dunno if I'd be so strongly swayed either way by
| any single event without any real negative consequences such as
| you say here.
| Havoc wrote:
| > (I'm aware of) has indicated that one cup of red wine has
| measurable health benefits above not drinking at all.
|
| There are various studies floating about. The part that has
| me sceptical is that they don't seem to account for whether
| it's in a social setting. i.e. is it the wine or is the being
| with friends and having a laugh
| technocratius wrote:
| Is it just me or all of the (many) ads on this page about
| booze/liquor?? :')
| antattack wrote:
| From the (rambling) article:
|
| " beer sales were down in 2020, continuing their long decline,
| Americans drank more of everything else, especially spirits and
| (perhaps the loneliest-sounding drinks of all) premixed, single-
| serve cocktails, sales of which skyrocketed."
|
| It's true that ready to drink cocktails are getting more popular
| and according to some [1] trend will continue as people like
| lower alcohol content and more flavor while consumption of beer
| and hard liqueurs continues to decline [2]:
|
| [1] https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/ready-
| to...
|
| [2] https://www.fooddive.com/news/report-us-beer-volume-has-
| decl...
|
| If the article was really trying to prove that Americans had a
| real drinking problem the article would cite stats on liver
| cirrhosis or alcohol poisoning.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| Drunk Discord channels have re-created a _lot_ of the missing
| "socialization" aspect of bar life I missed during the pandemic.
|
| I'm... not sure it's a good thing, but it was an
| interesting/unanticipated development. I don't think the author
| should be so quick to dismiss "Zoom" drinking! UX matters in this
| space, in a weird way.
| alexfromapex wrote:
| Or is the drinking caused by a deeper problem?
| topspin wrote:
| Let's hope so. That way we can have two moral panics.
| umvi wrote:
| I was watching "Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist" with my wife the
| other day and I commented "These characters seem to all be
| alcoholics" because seriously they have a drink in hand nearly
| every scene taking place outside of the workplace. I think part
| of the problem is glorification of alcohol in pop culture. Heck,
| at certain times of the year we _look forward_ to watching a
| bunch of back-to-back alcohol advertisements (Super Bowl).
| TameAntelope wrote:
| They explain this in Lucifer by attributing Lucifer's higher
| tolerance to his demigod status, but it's... kind of a problem,
| especially for the not-deities who are seemingly _always_ at
| his club, getting shitfaced.
| stephen_greet wrote:
| I noticed something similar. I quit drinking ~4 months ago once
| I realized I was drinking way too much during quarantine.
|
| Since then I can't stop noticing the prevalence of alcohol in
| nearly all aspects of pop culture. Even innocuous seeming
| sitcoms have episodes where the whacky, lovable characters
| drink to excess and have to deal with a hangover.
| gv123 wrote:
| I said the exact same thing with my partner, I was watching
| true detective season 1, not one scene where the lead pair is
| not in office is without smoking or beer in hand.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| > "But there's nothing moderate, or convivial, about the way many
| Americans drink today."
|
| Today? Are Americans (and Canadians) actually drinking more than
| they used to? Seems to me there was much heavier drinking in the
| 70s and 80s and the stats seem to back it up.
| a3n wrote:
| 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.
| billiam wrote:
| 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.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Reading Europeans' comments on threads like this leaves me
| wondering who is more ignorant about America, me (as an
| American...) or them.
|
| I don't know anyone who goes out drinking to get drunk. I know
| people who socialize with friends and drink alcohol while doing
| it. I know some people who have a glass of wine or two with
| dinner. I myself drink a couple microbrews once a week with
| friends.
|
| But what I'm getting from our European friends is that everyone
| they know from America is an alcoholic.
| smegger001 wrote:
| I knew people like that in our mutual early 20s a few years
| have gone by and now nope. I may drink once every other month
| or so on out D&D night. Much of that was because my mutual
| friend group were all from a background of strictly religious
| upbringings where alcohol was not considered acceptable so no
| one had a model of responsible drinking. all of us having
| gained independence around then I was the only one not getting
| hammered every weekend. (mostly because i don't like beer). but
| we have all aged and become more responsible and realized
| throwing up sucks.
| willcipriano wrote:
| > I don't know anyone who goes out drinking to get drunk.
|
| I've never met anyone who admits it but I've seen plenty of the
| "I drink it for the flavor" folks get the giggles seemingly by
| accident night after night.
| ardit33 wrote:
| Selection bias, of where they stay. If you come as Tourist in
| the US, and stay in the center of any large city you are bound
| to see hordes of drunk people in the weekends... usually on
| their 20s.
|
| But that's not what most of the US is though. 3rd ave in
| Manhattan, from Lower East Side, to Murray Hill turns like a
| zoo, (pre covid), around midnight, with drunken 20 something
| acting like it is spring break.
|
| The rest of the areas of NYC are not like that, but tourists
| are more likely to stay near these places, rather lets say,
| somewhere sleepy in UES, UWS, Brooklyn, or Queens.
| tamade wrote:
| There's really no exceptionalism when it comes to America's so-
| called drinking problem. Having worked at an alcoholic beverage
| MNC, it's pretty clear that every country has its own subculture
| of getting hammered. I'd even hazard the hot take that America is
| rather middle-of-the-road when it comes to binge drinking
| (certainly by per capita consumption is not exceptional).
| patorjk wrote:
| 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.
| rriepe wrote:
| 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.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| > who, like most Europeans of that time, preferred beer to water
|
| Yes, the pilgrims preferred beer over water _because the water
| kept killing them_. Drinking tea or beer was a matter of safety,
| not mere preference or addiction. We now know that the
| combination of boiling, pH, and alcohol helped keep beer safer
| than drinking water of the time, but they were unaware of that
| and just knew that beer seemed safer.
|
| Trying to draw a parallel between modern drinking habits and the
| pilgrims is just silly, because we're drinking different things
| in different amounts for very different reasons.
| qeternity wrote:
| 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.
| Dah00n wrote:
| 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).
|
| Edit: I didn't down vote your comment btw.
| qeternity wrote:
| 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.
| RhodoGSA wrote:
| 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.
| awrence wrote:
| " 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?
| Someone wrote:
| Wine isn't a spirit (nor is beer). That number is about
| distilled alcohol. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquor:
|
| _"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.
| [deleted]
| soperj wrote:
| They already did that when they said 36 liters, which is 100
| bottles of wine.
| rkk3 wrote:
| 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.
| ska wrote:
| Okrent had it calculated at equivalent to 7 US gallons of
| pure ethanol/yr (1830s) to normalize this.
|
| 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.
| thebean11 wrote:
| Where are you getting 11 drinks per liter of vodka? I'm
| getting twice that (1.5oz shots)
| beckingz wrote:
| The joke being that "2 shots of vodka" is more like 4-5.
| netflixandkill wrote:
| America has problems with drinking, opioids, meth, prescription
| abuse, vaping bizarre things, health care, mental health,
| domestic violence, domestic terrorism and violent crime, school
| shootings and suicides because America has a misery problem.
|
| A few decades of bootstrap vs welfare paint don't fix the rotted
| and failing structure of a culture, if it can even be called that
| anymore, that had replaced well being with consumption and
| personal growth with work and public goods with privatized
| profits.
|
| There is a pretty international audience here that can probably
| relate to seeing the difference between cases like the hard
| drinking work culture in many east Asian nations or the near
| constant casual drinking of much of Europe with the abject
| despair visible in the poorer parts of the US.
|
| Naturally people have been crying for a social welfare system for
| basically the last 140 years with occasional fits and starts but
| mostly characterized by a complete failure to crib off the
| results of developed nations across the world that simply don't
| have constant ongoing crises about _everything_.
| k__ wrote:
| I didn't drink since the pandemic hit.
|
| Didn't miss it, because I only drank at parties and even then I
| didn't drink at every party.
|
| I like being drunk sometimes, it can turn a boring event into a
| fun night. But I don't think, I need it more than a few times a
| year.
| subsubzero wrote:
| 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.
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| soperj wrote:
| I worked with people who would finish off a 24 pack on a
| random Monday. It was lights out when they actually went out.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| 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.
| tolbish wrote:
| Apparently 18% of Americans are binge drinkers:
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/americans-are-
| dri...
| hervature wrote:
| 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.
| subsubzero wrote:
| 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.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| I heard this statistic (fwiw) here in the US: 10% of a liquor
| store's customers are responsible for 90% of the sales.
|
| That doesn't mean some fraction are drinking 10X what everybody
| else is. It means some fraction are drinking 81X what a normal
| person does.
|
| So yes it's a bipolar drinking culture in the US. Some folks
| drink, a lot, way too often. The rest drink occasionally or not
| at all (the liquor stores don't count those that never go into
| the store).
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| I am French and only drink very occasionally with friends or
| family. About a beer or two per month, and maybe a glass of wine
| or two a month as well.
|
| I do not like alcohol in the long run. I like the first few sips
| and then it becomes a burden. Friends look at me as if I was
| crazy when I pour the remaining of my glass to the sink.
|
| I learned to taste alcohol that way, for the taste and not the
| effects. My children are now teens and since they have seen me
| doing that a lot, they are not even drawn to alcohol. I let them
| taste in the past when they wanted to try but the taste was
| horrible for them and since they saw that I am not a big fan
| either they do not see it as a taboo thing.
| dluan wrote:
| America's early history is mass drinking. Rum was 'invented' in
| Barbados in ~1650, but beer, wine, and brandy have been drunk in
| the Caribbean and Americas since it was first touched by
| colonizers.
|
| Wayne Curtis reported that in the 1600/1700s the average person
| aged 15 years old and up drank 6 gallons of pure alcohol a year,
| equal to 75 fifths of 80 proof rum a year, or roughly 5 shots per
| day. Continental european emissaries who would visit towns in the
| new world would be shocked at the drunkenness of just countless
| near dead bodies laying in the streets, and from this British,
| and sometimes Irish, indentured workers got the reputation for
| being insane drunkards.
|
| He posited that the main driver of heavy drinking was misery - in
| the colonies and early corporation towns back then, when the
| weather went bad and there was no work, you drank until things
| improved. Not too different from today imo.
| yosito wrote:
| Getting drunk is not a "colonizers" thing, it's a human thing.
| People have been getting drunk for tens of thousands of years,
| all around the globe.
| dluan wrote:
| Where did I say it was a colonizers thing?
| meristohm wrote:
| What are we trying to escape?
| Railsify wrote:
| Stress
| aeternum wrote:
| 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.
| emptyfile wrote:
| Life.
| 35fbe7d3d5b9 wrote:
| A lack of community. Or, eachother.
|
| Take your pick!
| bobcallme wrote:
| The regulators and bureaucrats.
| subpixel wrote:
| Apparently 15% of our countrymen believe the QAnon pedophilia
| hoax/theory [0]. That gives me a certain thirst.
|
| [0] https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/05/31/qanon-poll-
| americ...
| subpixel wrote:
| Of all the downvotes I have received on HN, these puzzle me
| the most.
| 1_player wrote:
| 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.
| ttz wrote:
| 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.
|
| Not an excuse. Just a perspective.
| handrous wrote:
| 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.
| kingTug wrote:
| Our deeply unnatural existence staring into glowing rectangles
| 8+ hours per day.
| namdnay wrote:
| If that were the case you'd see lower alcohol consumption
| among manual labourers than among software engineers...
| ativzzz wrote:
| More likely loneliness, the article mentions solitary
| drinking long before we worked in cubicles.
| miguelmota wrote:
| We wake up and look at the small rectangle.
|
| Go to work and stare at the medium rectangle.
|
| Come home and watch the big rectangle.
| handrous wrote:
| > Come home and watch the big rectangle.
|
| Come home and watch Black Mirror on our largest black
| mirror.
| watertom wrote:
| I stopped drinking at 25, that was 30 years ago.
|
| I just decided that there weren't any benefits but a lot of
| negatives, so I stopped.
|
| When I tell people I stopped drinking they assume I had a
| problem. I laugh and say "No." Then I tell them I just did a
| pro's and con's evaluation and realized there were zero pro's and
| a whole lot of con's. I know 6 people that quit drinking after
| having a the pro's and con's discussion, they went off and did
| their own evaluation and realized that drinking wasn't providing
| anything positive. All the positives are imagined. The, "one or
| two drinks" have a positive effect is all nonsense.
| wbobeirne wrote:
| I've gone through phases of drinking more and less, and I'd
| that say at least in my personal experience I notice a lot of
| my relationships suffer when I'm staying completely sober. Not
| because my friends who drink don't want to hang out with a non-
| drinker, but many activities lose their appeal, I often end up
| leaving before the night gets "interesting", and I don't have
| the same shared experiences or increased sense of vulnerability
| that forms bonds.
|
| Some days the cons still outweigh the pros, but for me "all the
| positives are imagined" just doesn't ring true at all.
| racl101 wrote:
| I have probably the equivalent of a beer every two months lol.
| I'll be ok.
| blhack wrote:
| 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.
| misiti3780 wrote:
| 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".
|
| You might be dead tomorrow.
| joekrill wrote:
| This is horrible advice.
|
| 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.
| DeRock wrote:
| 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
| clomond wrote:
| 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!
| jacobolus wrote:
| > _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.
| leafmeal wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| steve76 wrote:
| Why Americans drink more:
|
| Half the country are cowards and traitors. At the very least,
| they think taking the other side and destroying their own home
| shows how fair, or smart, or credible their selfish attempt at
| power is. At worst, they are tried and true amoral win at all
| cost marxists and nihilists. They don't take orders from foreign
| armies who just killed millions with a bioweapon, a modern
| holocaust right before our eyes. Likely, they gave the order. To
| think what it would be like to be their kid. Come home on
| Christmas vacation. All your friends are having fun with their
| families getting stuff. And you come home to your dad's drunk in
| some armchair after being sodomized by his boyfriend.
|
| And the world's to blame. They've been at war with the USA since
| our start. They're the ones seeking to be unrestrained by laws,
| to do whatever they want.
|
| Notice now the liberals have power, no more riots, no more drugs
| or resistance. Nice if they would walk away without throwing a
| fit.
|
| Anyways:
|
| No one likes a drunk engineer.
|
| If you work for someone, you need to perfect. No fooling it.
| You'll be found out soon.
|
| Drinking doesn't just destroy your liver. It leads to high blood
| pressure, which causes strokes, which means anything. Blindness,
| pneumonia, paralysis. Awful.
|
| Likely the people making all the booze are foreigners. They crash
| airplanes into buildings and dance and cheer when Americans die.
| With drugs and booze, they found a way to charge you admission to
| the gas chamber.
|
| Usually it's one person. They go away or turn their lives around.
| Everything is better.
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(page generated 2021-06-01 23:00 UTC)