Who says a life without (or even just with less) alcohol is boring? There’s millions of things to do besides drink. There’s thousands of hobbies and sports to enjoy. There’s vast areas of natural and cultural beauty to explore. There are countless cities and cultures to visit, cuisines to taste, music to enjoy.
Seriously, people who think that drinking is the only thing to do are the boring ones.
To be fair most people can't visit countless cities weekly, can't visit or don't care for the nature you like, and the increased injury risk of many sports (compared to just cycling for cardio and doing resistance training) is probably as bad as the risks from moderate drinking.
Imagine if your life was just going utterly wrong. You're working hard as you can but you can barely make food or rent, and you're so tired every day that all you can do is just lie there like a dull sack remembering constantly and inescapably mulling at just how wrong everything is in your life. There's no end in sight, no light at the end of the tunnel, your existence is just this until you are broken and thrown out.
Now imagine there's a magic potion that make it feel like it all goes away even if for just a little while.
Then that life is already insufferable in my view. As a non-drinker, I would focus on fixing some of the root causes versus trying to dull my misery.
The fact one chooses to imbibe instead is not the thing bringing you joy, it’s escapism. So the fact you would conflate that to others that are content and have no need to escape is ass backwards logic.
If the criticism was phased as, “a drink really helps me unwind after a stressful day/week” I’d get it. But it’s usually projected outwards as “you must be boring/miserable for not drinking”. That’s the rub.
But many times you can’t fix the root cause. Maybe one of your parents is dying. Maybe your relationship with your spouse is falling apart. Maybe you bought a house in the last year and now you’re $50,000 underwater.
wait til you find out some people prefer their faculties dulled by a hangover than being fully present and in the moment for their dreary morning-midday routines.
Strangely some of my faculties are actually made keener by a mild hangover. I'm more empathetic, have keener hearing, and am in a reflective, more receptive frame of mind.
Unfortunately these effects are inseparable from less desirable ones: guilt, anxiety, upset guts, hypersensitivity to smells, hair-trigger impatience, flop sweat.
As a casual drinker, it's bizarre that there is this rather prominent belief from others that you cannot enjoy your life more if you drink from time to time
That’s like saying your drinking status is immutable. I’m a non drinker but that sure as hell doesn’t mean I’ve never drank in the past and know exactly how it affects my enjoyment in life.
Also I say I’m a non drinker as I think it’s the most accurate description but it’s also not a law or taken super duper literally. Middle aged Me probably averages 3 drinks a year. Some years I might have ten, some years zero. I had a few years where I drank every day. I partied a lot as a teen (regular shitface drunk), quit for most my 20s, then started drinking wines when I was in my early 30s, and quit again and have been super infrequent drinker since (about last 12 years). I’m always surrounded by people drinking, I know they enjoy it, I don’t frown upon them for imbibing. It looks like a hobby to me, people talk about whiskey/wine/brewers like they talk about sports teams. I’m just not very interested in it. Sports either for that matter.
That's a straw man though. Nobody said that you can't enjoy life when you drink from time to time. The thread is a response to someone saying that a life without alcohol would be a boring life (and a life focused on consumption, which is an even weirder argument).
Just because you don't find your life enhanced by something doesn't mean that something is useless... And of course we can live without it. I posit we can live quite a fulfilling life as a hunter gatherer in the kalahari.
Anyway, you can be quite a successful billionaire and have no one likes you. Being right and rigid is boring, sometimes being unhinged is interesting.
Well, I definitely see the attraction. What I don’t get is the projection.
Just because you think your life would be miserable/boring without alcohol, doesn’t mean my actual life without alcohol is miserable/boring. To me, I find people that lean into this projection don’t even realize that their life is already miserable and the drink is what makes things tenable
Translation: "Don't be a cog in the giant capitalist machine, be an adventurous free-thinking rebel, by..."
*checks notes*
"By regularly buying goods from alcohol companies, and especially by making those purchases (and chronic low-level self-poisoning) a core part of your self-identity like a good little consumer!"
Oh wait, was I not supposed to draw attention to that second part?
There’s nothing inherently consumerist or capitalist about drinking alcohol. Making beer for your own consumption is safe, easy, and cheap, which is probably why it’s been drunk since before recorded history. Hard alcohol can be more difficult but entirely possible to do yourself
The guy I was replying to was satirizing beer drinkers as consumerist cogs in the machine. I pointed out that of all the things to criticize someone for enjoying alcohol is probably one of the least corporate. If buying alcohol makes you a monopolist’s bitch then so does buying anything and everyone in the entire world is hopeless.
It’s like claiming solar panels make you a slave to factory owners when they can be used, operated and repaired in a distributed manner. Sure, maybe, but like what a weird hill to die on?
I don't know where you're from, but in the UK, over £50 billion is spent on it each year.
If you've seen anybody who lives for Friday / Saturday night and a Sunday hangover, it fits the consumerist image pretty neatly. Many (obviously not all) are slaves to alcohol.
We've all heard the wine'o'clock jokes from middle aged women in the office, people struggling to complete "Dry January" and similar challenges, colleagues talking about how excited they are to get a drink when they get home.
These people are held under the thumb of a handful or two alcohol companies. In many cases, it's simply a wasted weekend and quite a sum of wasted money, especially when you can't remember any of it.
It feels like you're completely ignoring the comment that started this all, which then throws your comparisons out of whack. Here's what it looks like to me.
______
1 - Luminouslow: "Pfft, health shmelth, the corporations want us to be cowards who don't drink alcohol, and this is playing right into their hands!"
2 - Terr: "That's hypocritical nonsense. If anything, people like you--ones who treat regular alcohol as an important part of their identity and try to ostracize people who don't drink--are the real corporate sheep here."
3 - Subjectsigma: "Alcohol isn't always corporate, people can brew their own at home."
4 - Xornot: "That would be a very different situation than the world we're discussing right now."
5 - Subjectsigma: "But Terr started criticizing people who drink as consumer sheep, which is very unfair because they could have bought locally."
6 - Terr: "Dude, WTF, did you even see what I was replying to!? Where the guy suggested not buying anything was worse!? [Recursion error]
It was more of a reaction to how smug and condescending you came off as, but no I don’t agree with your interpretation of the original comment, which I interpreted as making fun of HN yuppies as opposed to a comment about society. I don’t know how or why (I really doubt Big Weed ™ is astroturfing the orange site) but the way people on HN chomp at the bit to defend weed and other drugs but decry alcohol for being “evil” feels distinctly robotic and manufactured.
That aside - the more I think about it the more I don’t understand how you could look at such a globally distributed and diverse product as alcohol and think its consumers can be easily stereotyped. Not even months ago in America there was a boycott of a massively popular brand of beer on political grounds; how very sheepish of those consumers!
Funny and there I thought the alcohol industry is a multi-billion dollar business creating lots of value for their shareholders (arguably externalizing the cost for general society).
It's also quite telling that you consider not drinking a boring life, in my experience (obviously this is anecdotal) people who are not drinking are more active and are typically more open to try new things.
I understand this point of view and I used to share it, but I see it from the other side now:
I used alcohol to cope with stress at work/life and when I stopped, the switch flipped and I saw how much I numbed myself to the pain that was necessary to change any of it.
I basically grew a pair over 90 days. Now, none of people's manipulation or crocodile tears affect me.
If you are stress- and anxiety-free, you don't have this problem and can afford it, but I highly recommend to people to quit drinking and doing drugs who recognize themselves in what I described.
How much did you drink? I went from 2/day during my phd - clearly to cope with the stress - to 1/day to 3/week...
I however really love the taste of good specialty beers and the meme of drinking a beer while cooking&eating food. Not sure if I want to cut down any further, I enjoy drinking too much. But investing any technique to increase anxiety resistance sounds worthwhile to me, otoh...
Indeed, don't drink beer and wine. Don't eat meat, just eat bugs instead! Don't eat white rice, oh wait, don't eat brown rice instead! Don't eat gluten! Don't eat dairy because it was not suppose to be this way after infancy.
Jesus, where is the line. I'm tired of other people to tell me what to eat and drink on a weekly basis.
Are you seriously complaining that some academics are advising you about the health consequences of some habits, while you constantly are bombarded by commercials and other media trying to influence what you eat and drink?
policy is forced on you, advertisements make suggestions. one is communism, the other is free market. if you value individual freedom, you should care about these things.
Bread is an absolutely massive number of calories for what it is.
In a pastrami sandwich, about 50% of the calories will be from the bread alone.
People can eat bread, but when they wonder why it's hard to lose weight they tend to ignore this unconsidered contributor (conversely if you're working in a field or at hard labour job, breads a pretty great, compact calorie source).
> but when they wonder why it's hard to lose weight
Dude but it's their problem. You can get heroin and crack on the streets right now. I do not want things to be banned just because some dumbass is doing it wrong.
Literally reminds me of the anti-cannabis activist who's biggest argument was that "I smoked some weed, went home and they said my relative died and I laughed. Now I think nobody should ever use cannabis and it should be banned completely."
Dude literally no one is calling for a bread or alcohol ban in this thread.
You have been complaining about a study which suggested that people who care about their health might want to re-evaluate their risk appetite in light of updated data.
All bodies are different: some people react well to a vegan diet, others get so broken by the FODMAPs in plant-based proteins that they can only eat meat and greens. When you interpret dietary advice not as "this is what you should eat and drink" but instead as "this worked for me; it might work for you too" it brings a whole lot more inner peace. The basic tried-and-tested ground rules are pretty simple: cover your nutritional needs, enjoy vices sparingly. How that looks specifically is entirely dependent on your own body and mind. Maybe the minor physical-health hit from social alcohol consumption is offset by the mental-health gains from socialising with friends.
Seriously, people who think that drinking is the only thing to do are the boring ones.