I’ve been reluctant to write about this, because in my adult life I have quit alcohol several times. Sometimes my sobriety streak lasted about a year, sometimes ten months or less.This time I don’t feel like am on a break from alcohol. I have it locked in as ‘aging poison’ AND as something that weak men do. It hurts my vanity. Alcohol does next to nothing FOR me and a whole bunch of things AGAINST me. It’s incompatible with my self-image. It used to go WELL with my self-image. Drinking felt like a fuck you to society. Now I see that booze is one of the glues that keeps our toxic society together. Drinking also felt like honoring my father, the culture of my city, something writers and creatives do, something pussy loving rogues do. All nonsense. That’s the short story of how I was able to quit. Little upside. Huge cost. Doing it clashes badly with who I want to be. Not doing it I experience as a loud statement/declaration on who I want to be. And it gels excellently with one of my strongest driving values: alcohol is something weak men do. As soon as I see something as typical for weak men it disgusts me. Important to note here: I have a very different idea of what makes a weak man versus a strong man. So if you’re going: ‘if he’s such a strong man, then why don’t I see him driving a Lamborghini and being hyperconfident?’, we have a very different view on healhty masculinity.

Now on to what you really need to know.

What never drinking alcohol does:

– you save thousands of dollars a year, yes, thousands, even if your drinking was moderate, because the price of drinking alcohol is not just the price of the drinks
– better sleep, fewer days lost by hangovers (note: people are so proud of how well they can handle booze they will claim they have no hangovers, but they do, even their head doesn’t hurt)
– hormones stabilize, more energy, but not spectacular, say, 10 to 20 percent, but over time this compounds. Imagine having always ten percent more energy than most people you know
– some fat loss (though not necessarily, depends on overall diet and habits)
– you spend less time in rooms with people you don’t actually want to spend time with, because alcohol gives you the illusion that something is good for you, when it isn’t
– fewer decisions you end up regretting 
– skin improves a bit (depends on how much alcohol was damaging you)
– liver health improves, obviously
– better focus, again, not spectacularly better, but noticeable
– you trust yourself more, because you stuck to a decision most people make at some point in their life, but can’t stick to
– quitting alcohol makes quitting other damaging things easier. First, because you have more clarity, with more clarity you get a clearer picture of what you do and what you want, what helps and what doesn’t help. Second, because self-discipline compounds. For example, after quitting alcohol I also quit social media
– over the years so much frustration, humiliation, pent up energy, directionless energy, bottled up intensity, unmetabolized libido, injustice and so on has built up that alcohol risks making me verbally vicious and that does a lot of damage without accomplishing anything
– definitely improves physical sexual health
– alcohol makes you less present in yourself, so also important for me: my son never gets to see me unpredictable, different, out of it, hungover, not in control of myself, not fully ‘there’. Kids of alcoholic often become perfectionists and control freaks because they grew up with a parent who scared them by not being fully there with them. Not only alcohol does that, but it’s one of the worst ways to badly influence your children
– very noticeable: fewer colds. Your immunity system doesn’t take the hits you expose it to with alcohol

What it doesn’t

– You don’t wake up feeling like a superhero
– it doesn’t make your body shredded overnight
– you won’t get applause, or only very, very little, so if you’re doing it to get praised, you won’t last
– it doesn’t make you magnetic
– if you have issues you will feel them more strongly and those issues will require work or you’ll drink again. Alcohol makes you postpone doing deep work
– eliminating alcohol doesn’t fix your mental health. Removing alcohol only stops making things worse. You stop pouring terpentine on a fire
– You will feel less shame for doing something your system, even if you don’t admit, registers as nothing but poisonous, but if you live with shame for other reasons that shame will become louder and require attention or…. Yes, you will relapse
– it won’t fix procrastination issues, it won’t fix any annoying issue you have that is not directly related to alcohol itself, but it will give you space to examine yourself more honestly
– There doesn’t come a point that you have given alcohol a ‘healthy’ place and now you can drink a few drinks once a while. Every alcoholic drink does damage. There is no safe amount. It’s a poison. I’ve noticed that people who warn about alcohol are scared to be too critical. Probably because they’re talking about something that is sacred to some people and a source of pride (think: I’m a balanced adult, I take what alcohol has to offer and am too smart to let it negatively impact me… Yeah right.)
– You will lose a cultural tool. Alcohol is use to bond, occasionally it boosts your creativity for like half an hour and very rarely, but it happens, alcohol can give you some useful insight. All because it lowers inhibitions and the saying ‘veritas in vino’ does have some truth to it. BUT. You can get the same benefits from going for a brisk walk for one hour without an assault on your whole body and brain. So you may need to design new rituals for yourself. I now sometimes drink a strong tasting mineral water with lemon juice as if it’s the most delicious cocktail on earth from a special glass… May sound silly, but it almost has the same pleasant effect as an alcoholic cocktail with none of the downsides and a hell of a lot cheaper

I could say a lot more about this topic and maybe I will return to it. We are talking about a culturally massively succesful poison that has truly complex shortterm and longterm effects, a poison all of us have our specific personal relationship with. It really is complex.

What’s not complex is that it’s ALWAYS a simple net benefit for you to quit this thing entirely, totally, radically, immediately and forever. If you sometimes got drunk in your student days you have already sucked everything out of it that was worth sucking out of it.

Maybe in a next post I will give a more personal account of what it’s like for me to be sober. 14 months it’s no longer some experiment, it’s my life and I know that if do ever relapse it will be worse than ever. I remind myself of that when it tempts me for a few seconds.