I read it told that the kids, meaning everyone under 30, aren’t drinking anymore.
That’s sad. Like Homer Simpson once said, beer is the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.
I relate.
Fact is I’m torn on this one.
There’s no denying that alcohol in excess does bad things to a body and a mind.
I can understand health-conscious folks not wanting to wade into that, if it’s a genuine health decision.
But I wonder if that’s really it. Health is the surface justification. The real issue is that there’s a lot of folks who’d rather be on the couch, scrolling the phone, vaping and going hog-wild on Door Dash and edibles than relaxing down at the bar with their friends like we used to do.
These people are buzzkill nerds.
They’re right to be worried about the mass-surveillance platforms now carried in everyone’s hand and ready to ruin your life with the push of a button.
Lord knows I can’t even tell a decent portion of my old drinkin’ stories in public because I’m not sure about statutes of limitation in multiple states.
Even so, my life would have been vastly different, far more boring, and less rewarding without the devil’s juice. Maybe that would have led to better places in some respects, but at what cost?
Drinking was like training wheels for my introverted self to be friendly and sociable around other people. My default state is uptight, anxious, and riddled with self-doubt. By beer two, the filter’s coming off, the neurotic voice in my head vanishes, and I can become downright fun to be around.
Without the booze I wouldn’t know half of my friends, met hardly any of the famous people I’ve met, or done the many occasionally unbelievable things that have happened to me over the years.
The downsides are real, too, and I pray to God in wonder that I’m not in jail or dead, but we’re talking cost-benefit trade-offs here.
This puritanical neo-temperance trend isn’t thinking about that.
Fermented alcoholic drinks have played a part in every human culture we know about dating back over some 5000 years of recorded history, and archaeological finds date the booze back much further.
Furthermore, animals in the wild are known to go after naturally-fermented (read: rotting) fruit to catch a buzz. There’s reports of elephants ramming fruit trees for this purpose.
Our local fatboi wood-pigeon, the kereru, likes to get a little tipsy and go out flying, if the one that accidentally buzzed my head over 8 am coffee a few years ago is any indication.
Point is, whenever egg-heads and finger-wagging moralists hop on the puritan soap-box and proclaim the evils of a practice that is as near to universal for human beings as breathing and eating, I throw them hard side-eye.
Y’all didn’t just discover a newly known fact of human nature when you pronounce that alcohol is unredeemable poison.
That’s why I never did buy into that “no amount of alcohol is safe!” BS that was making the podcast rounds couple years back.
You know what is deadly? Oxygen. You ever see what that junk does to organic chemicals? Nasty stuff. Best quit it.
There’s harm and there’s harm. Living organisms need a little chaos and danger to work properly. Cut it off from those minor risks and you remove the very stresses it needs to stimulate life-processes.
It’s the same principle behind progressive overload triggering muscles to get larger and stronger. Add a dash of chaos and the whole thing improves.
If you actually took the recommendations of these clowns at face value, insulating yourself from every last thing that hysterical health experts panic about, you’d be left with water and celery–and that only until the next fraudulent study “proved” water increases cancer risk by 12%.
The worst thing about drinking is messing up my sleep. The days when I’d pound a liter of Wild Turkey on my own, end up at a dive bar playing pool with strippers at 4 am, teleport home with the sun, and hit my squat workout at 8 after three ephedrine pills are back in 2002. I can handle a lot of drink as long as I get my beauty rest.
There’s ways around that if you’re clever, and if you know a lil’ bit about alcohol metabolism and circadian rhythms.
On the subject of hysterical panics:
I wrote a short-ish little piece about the recent fireworks in the AI world. It’s off-topic, not that I’ve been much on-topic here lately, but you might find it interesting if you care about why these nerds think AI is going to end us and keep working on it anyway.
Read it over at the Substack:
Matt Perryman