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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32919 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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This isn’t culture war for today. It was between roughly 1918-1930’s. It’s short and about why he quit drinking alcohol. In my opinion he hit all the key points on the subject, his logic is correct, and wrote it in a very concise way.

He does seem to miss drinking alcohol. I have to agree as a mild alcoholic he’s correct. I think he’s also correct that cannabis isn’t the great substitute society now claims it is. Shrooms I am far less sure on.

It’s not culture war today but I’ve grown a lot of respect for the prohibitionists as being basically correct. I also wanted to post this as I felt like it’s a good example of fantastic writing.

https://pmarca.substack.com/p/on-pausing-alcohol?r=h8x

Edit: should we either more explicitly allow less culture war subjects or have another thread. Sitting on an Afghanistan article I found that was good journalism but it’s not heavily culture war

Funny how pmarca is pivoting to punditry , trying to memory-hole those awful crypto recommendations from 2020-2022. Today the Nasdaq up 2%, Bitcoin down 5% on Silvergate fallout. Way to go, man. High-five! As usual, VCs make money, regular investors, late adopters generally lose.

Today the Nasdaq up 2%, Bitcoin down 5% on Silvergate fallout.

This is a silly analysis, crypto regularly swings up and down much more than giant index funds. It's been holding around 20k for nearly a year now and is significantly up from it's bottom in November. It's down 5% but went up 8% on the 15th.

It looks like it is doing more swinging down than swinging up. Given that it's highly correlated with S&P 500 to the downside and less on the upside does not portend well because it means it captures the downside of the market and not the upside (I have realized a significant windfall over the past 4 months by exploiting this recurring pattern).

It's been holding around 20k for nearly a year now and is significantly up from it's bottom in November.

Yeah, but that is after a 77% decline. still 67% off highs. If something drops 99% and doubles, it's still 98% off the highs.

My point though is that he is pretending or acting like his firm was not hyping one of the worst performing assets of 2021-2022, at the very top. Which will likely not recover, but of course I could be wrong. This strikes me as as unconvincing at least.

https://archive.is/orIcB#selection-291.0-314.0

Andreessen’s flagship crypto fund shed around 40% of its value in the first half of this year, according to people familiar with the matter. That decline is much larger than the 10% to 20% drops recorded by other venture funds, which have largely avoided the risky practice of purchasing volatile cryptocurrencies, according to fund investors.

Sure, his earlier funds were a success as mentioned in the article, but ,imho, crypto is not at all like 'the early web' or 'the next Facebook'. His early success is like winning at roulette and then saying that playing roulette is a good business model. The world wide web and social networks saw rapid adoption, huge profits, and are convenient, but crypto is none of those. Crypto is more like Linux, less like Microsoft: great for coding enthusiasts or tinkerers, not so great for investors.

Yeah, but that is after a 77% decline. still 67% off highs. If something drops 99% and doubles, it's still 98% off the highs.

This is just a game of where you draw the lines. If you instead of picking the 2021 point pick 2020 then it's either doubled or quadrupled. Here is a log graph of all time data. You can make quality arguments against crypto valuation but isolating the drops from the rises is not an honest way to talk about risk.

/images/16779004002893846.webp

You can make quality arguments against crypto valuation but isolating the drops from the rises is not an honest way to talk about risk.

You can see how starting in early 2018 returns become much worse even if still positive. 22k/15k is just an 8% annual return since early 2018. If history is any guide and if you believe the people on twitter and youtube, November was the bottom BTC will go up 10-20x (or more) to $100k or whatever. I think it will not recover.

You can see how starting in early 2018 returns become much worse even if still positive. 22k/15k is just an 8% annual return since early 2018.

I mean here you go picking another peak. 2017 is a 20x and 2019 is a 5-6x but you, for not very mysterious reasons, picked 2018 and not just 2018 but a period of roughly 3 months that it was over $10k.

If history is any guide and if you believe the people on twitter and youtube, November was the bottom BTC will go up 10-20x (or more) to $100k or whatever. I think it will not recover.

Do you do all of your market sentiment analysis based off of the activities of random sketchy 'influencers'? This is like feeling bearish on cosmetics because of the unrealistic ramblings of Mary Kay stay at home moms, there is no signal where you are pointing.

Pre-2018 is where all the easy money was made. 100x returns from mid 2015 to late 2017. That will never happen again. At best, maybe $40-60k. Andreessen creating a crypto fund in 2020-2021 is too late. It's like creating a gold mining company in California in 1884 instead 1848. But since its not his money anyway, it's not like he is going to lose , unlike his followers who bought at the top.

Do you do all of your market sentiment analysis based off of the activities of random sketchy 'influencers'?

I said "I think it will not recover." so obviously not.

Of course people were saying this in 2019, and of course you could be right it may never go back up. But you could also be wrong and your confidence seems unfounded. I would also point out that a crypto fund isn't necessarily just buying bitcoin and sitting on it. Smaller and newer projects have different growth potential, making the right choice on the various bitcoin forks could have doubled or tripled the amount of bitcoin you were sitting on at certain points not to mention making the right bets on the various other happenings over the years, polygon/matic in 2021 could have done quite well for you and people plugged in could probably have seen the scaling benefits, I know I saw a great return on it.

Not that I agree with crypto. But I’ve seen factor rotations in public markets do 10% in a day when the algos change all at once. So I don’t think this is some great hot take.

Edit: should we either more explicitly allow less culture war subjects or have another thread. Sitting on an Afghanistan article I found that was good journalism but it’s not heavily culture war

If it helps, I'm sure I can come up with something in there to call you or the author "literally Hitler" over.

Well the gists of the article is “Afghanistan isn’t that bad right now just poor and functioning. “ Think they also got rid of drug addicts by arresting all of them and locking them into cages and dunking their heads in water forcing them to stop being drug addicts the hard way.

I guess there’s a little Hitler in anything.

Still feel this place is slightly smarter than the rest of the internet. Another example would be the EITC not in the news now but it had some bipartisan support and was thing not culture warred for example. Feel like there are still a few subjects like that.

I really appreciate this thread and some of the comments that hit home. I'm in my 40's and the way that many have articulated their experiences with alcohol as they age kind of validates my decision to cut it down to special occasions.

For me I realised that my drinking was impacting my ability to perform in a high stress professional role. You just can't drink any meaningful amount of alcohol and be at peak performance the next day as you age.

Damn.

IMO the ancients were right to orient alcohol around (1) low-ABV nutritious beers & (2) wine during festivals and rituals. Alcohol is a positive valence and bonding amplifier. This has a use that can be ultimately prosocial, because it’s good to have members of a community enjoy festivals and bond during rituals. It may have also been useful as a reward at the end of a laborer’s dull day, turning the bland water of his evening into pleasant wine. The issue comes when the human realizes that it is alcohol that is the source of pleasure, and not what he is doing while consuming alcohol.

It may have also been useful as a reward at the end of a laborer’s dull day, turning the bland water of his evening into pleasant wine.

Until relatively recently, wine and beer (even low ABV) may well have been preferable because they generally are safer for various water-bourne diseases. Also tea, in which the water is heated.

The main reason beer is safer for water-bourne diseases is because you boil the water before making beer. The other is that spoiled beer tastes absolutely foul.

The whole "beer was drunk because it was safer" thing is purely a myth. The advantage was that 1) most people rather like the effects of alcohol and 2) beer is a fairly easy way to get calories when you're doing heavy manual work.

How can it be a myth if it is true? I'm sure some redneck everyone made fun of said: "ma pa drank nothin but beer and never got the colora"

Because it isn't true: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ol1h45/deleted_by_user/h5bjn7s/

Typical askhistorians drivel. Just list a bunch of ambiguous anecdotes and let your authoritative tone carry the day.

If a water source was clear, odorless, and cold, they'd consider it quite drinkable.

An obvious but rather limited understanding of water’s drinkability.

Pliny the Elder preferred well water best of all, while Columella preferred spring water and put well water beneath that.

So there was no elite consensus, but even if there was, it does not translate to common understanding.

We can also look to what happens when someone messes with the water. If the myth were true, we should expect not much of a reaction, since people could simply avoid the water by turning more to alcohol.

Does not follow. All it requires is people believing that water can get dirtier and that beer is expensive.

And there is the example of a case from 1262. In Siena, a woman was accused of deliberately poisoning the fountains. The punishment was to be flayed alive and burned.

When they got sick from drinking the water, their primitive understanding naturally lead them to suspect poison, and so innocents died.

In 1367, some men of the papal marshal's retinue thought it was a good idea to wash a puppy. Right in the main basin of a fountain. This drew the attention of one of the local women, who roundly castigated the men.

You can use this anecdote either way: the retinue did not care about the water.

Mind you, they also justified this avoidance of water with some Roman-era treatises, but let's be real: it's because they didn't want to drink water if it could be helped.

This guy, who by his own admission made it his life’s work to kill this “myth”, turns into a mind-reader all of a sudden. So when common folk considered the drinkability of water, they were at the cutting edge of contemporary science, but when the turn came for beer’s assessment, they reverted to an animalistic mindset.

So the myth of 'Medievals drank alcohol because the water is unsafe' has a long, long provenance, to the Medievals themselves.

There you go, even the medievals said so. Everywhere else, he takes them at their word. But his ax to grind won't let him do so here.

The issue comes when the human realizes that it is alcohol that is the source of pleasure, and not what he is doing while consuming alcohol.

These are inextricably linked for me. Not only are they inextricably linked, they're linked even down to the experience of the beverage itself. I've never wanted to drink drinks like cranberry-vodka or hard seltzers that try to mask that they're alcoholic beverages, although I understand that for others this is precisely the point of them. Likewise, I've tried n/a beers a couple times and they're not exactly unpleasant, but I always realize that if I'm drinking a beer, I want it to just actually be a beer. For me, my go-to beverage classes are beer and whiskey, although I'm open to cocktails and wine as well, and the combination of the smell, flavor, texture, and mood and activities is what makes them enjoyable rather than just that they're alcoholic. I want a bunch of standard ABV IPAs or lagers with a football came, a Manhattan before a steak dinner, a big barrel-aged stout on a cozy night with a movie, a dram of whiskey after work with my wife, and so on. Last night, I went to a brewery with my running club, knocked out about 9 miles, then knocked out three beers when I got back in - the activities, the people, and the beverages aren't separable down to alcohol being desirable in isolation from time, place, and beverage.

Incidentally, alcohol is a culture war in Finland, or at least a heavily culture-war-type subject that pops up in national politics from time to time. Prohibition is not on the agenda, but the alcohol laws are still fairly tight, and there are set tribes on this topic that keep having the same debates over and over again (with nanny-state leftists and conservative Christians in one camp and various free-marketeers and cosmopolitan 'European' types in the other). Alcohol deaths and its effects on health are a constant worry, though of course the opinions on whether public policy can actually account for this vary.

Underpinning it all is a consistent topic on whether Finns are just culturally unable to handle alcohol without being tightly regulated or whether instead Finnish drinking habits (ie. binge drinking during the weekend, sobriety during the week) could be developed to a more "European" direction of (presumably) not bingeing in the weekend but also having wine and beer during working lunches and so on. During the COVID time, of course, the alcohol policy debates became about whether bar closures etc. are evidence of nanny-statist government hating alcohol so much it is willing to let barkeepers go under, instead of doing some other restrictions or not doing restrictions at all.

In some ways, after following all this closely, it starts looking a bit surprising that alcohol isn't a culture war issue in other countries. Alcohol is, after all, a huge part of the Western culture in general, various alcohol-related fields form a considerable part of economy (ie. not only considering the sales of alcohol as such but its role in restaurants, tourism etc.), alcohol abuse has a vast amount of negative effects on health, crime and such, and the comparable subject of drug policy has certainly been a culture-war issue.

Knowing little of Finland, but knowing how severe alcohol abuse is in your neighbor Russia, would have me siding with the many-state leftist if there was even 5% chance it could get just as bad and possibly irreversible.

In some ways, after following all this closely, it starts looking a bit surprising that alcohol isn't a culture war issue in other countries.

It sort of is, in Ireland. We've long had a problematic relationship with alcohol, attempts at temperance have been driven by religious organisations - even when I was making my confirmation back in the mid-70s, the joke at the time was they got us to take the (temporary) pledge then at age 12 because if they left it later we'd already have started drinking - and there are the same arguments over "European-style drinking" and extended opening hours, etc. The proponents say that if we have European-style opening hours and nightclubs and so forth, people won't be rushing to drink to excess in a few hours but can spread it out over the night.

The problem in part is, when people are young, they drink to get drunk (legal drinking age in Ireland is 18 which always trips me up when I see Americans talk about under-age drinking at college, and they mean '20 year old drank beer or even alcopops'). They don't care about taste, they drink as much as fast as possible to get shit-faced and they want more bang for their buck, which of course is why bars offer special rates to college students.

We even have the charity campaigning for responsible drinking being funded by the alcohol industry, copying the UK version. Partly this is to help ameliorate the stigma from public drunkenness and to avoid punitive measures by government to cut down drinking by slapping taxes etc. on alcohol. They want to sell drink, after all, not promote Prohibition. So if campaigns around "don't binge drink" work, then all the better for them, as it means no pressure for prohibition (though that would never work here). Much the same motives as described below:

UK version:

In 2006, Drinkaware was established as a charity in the United Kingdom following a memorandum of understanding between the Portman Group and various UK government agencies. This debate piece briefly reviews the international literature on industry social aspects organizations, examines the nature of Drinkaware's activities and considers how the public health community should respond. Although the British addiction field and the wider public health community have distanced themselves from the Portman Group, they have not done so from Drinkaware, even though Drinkaware was devised by the Portman Group to serve industry interests. Both long-standing and more recent developments indicate very high levels of industry influence on British alcohol policy, and Drinkaware provides one mechanism of influence. We suggest that working with, and for, industry bodies such as Drinkaware helps disguise fundamental conflicts of interest and serves only to legitimize corporate efforts to promote partnership as a means of averting evidence-based alcohol policies. We invite vigorous debate on these internationally significant issues and propose that similar industry bodies should be carefully studied in other countries.

I don't know about the Finns, but I don't think Irish drinking culture will change that greatly even if we do adopt "European models". Underage drinking is being tackled, and is improving, but it's still a problem. The kind of solutions offered as in this article (the Icelandic model) may or may not work - a national curfew where all under-16 year olds have to be home by 10 pm? Good luck with that, I can already hear the civil liberties crowd complaining about a police state.

I don't know about the Finns, but I don't think Irish drinking culture will change that greatly even if we do adopt "European models".

One common guess is that adopting the "European model of drinking" would just mean getting tipsy during the week and also continuing weekend binges.

It should be noted that alcohol consumption has been going down lately in Finland, particularly among teens. This has been combined with some amount of alcohol law liberalization, leading to crowing from liberalization advocates on how the nanny-statist argument on liberalization leading to alcohol abuse being proven wrong, though I'd guess it's more that any potential increase from liberalization has been negated by general effect of stay-at-home smartphone teen culture, and possibly nanny-statish informing/nudge campaigns on harms of alcohol actually having some effect.

The kind of solutions offered as in this article (the Icelandic model) may or may not work - a national curfew where all under-16 year olds have to be home by 10 pm? Good luck with that, I can already hear the civil liberties crowd complaining about a police state.

Do you think they're wrong? That policy sounds absolutely terrible to me, effectively infantilizing young adults out of a misplaced concern for their safety. When I was 16, it was pretty common for me to be at a friend's house pretty late, playing video games or just messing around, then drive home. If I lived in a town, I suppose it would have been walking or biking home instead. I have trouble imagining growing up in world where playing Halo until 11 PM is unreasonably dangerous behavior.

In some ways, after following all this closely, it starts looking a bit surprising that alcohol isn't a culture war issue in other countries. Alcohol is, after all, a huge part of the Western culture in general,

Culture War is a result of there being a massive rift in the culture. In most European countries "alcohol is a huge part of culture" in the sense that most people enjoy it, and are on the same page on how it's supposed to be enjoyed - i.e. what "is a huge part of culture" is supposed to mean, rather than "we love to hate each other about it".

True, but it's not like there haven't been areas with wide societal and cultural shared understanding that have then become hugely divisive culture war topics before.

My father was a serious alcoholic (like had a hard time holding a job down and our family lost a house) kind of drinker. This experience has given me a very negative view of the drug relative to some of its alternatives. For instance, there were two relatively pleasant years during my teens when he mostly stopped drinking and actually acted like a typical dad. During this time he taught me how to ski, helped me with my homework (which was something that had literally never happened during the rest of my childhood) and did other typical dad things.

Eventually he landed himself in rehab and we later discovered that he had been addicted to (or at least using regularly) hydrocodone for most of that time period. I still don’t really know what had happened (I think his doctor may have just cut him off, this was around the time they tightened up prescriptions or perhaps he just didn’t manage his tolerance effectively, it’s my understanding that it’s basically impossible to use opiates regularly without developing physical dependence issues). I still really don’t know how about the fact that my two most pleasant teenage years coincided with a time when my father was substituting opioids for ethanol.

I have spent a lot of time wondering about how he rationalized it to himself. He is actually incredibly sharp and was once quite handsome.

I also wonder about myself. I have tried getting drunk a couple of times and I really didn’t enjoy it. I only ever drink when I feel the social setting requires it and then usually as little as possible.

Basically the only drugs I have ever liked are stimulants and running (and especially running on stimulants). I have had adhd (diagnosed as a child) but I really don’t know if I believe that the pathology is a real thing. I would unquestionably be less successful on almost every meteric if I couldn’t legally take vyvanse. I tried being unmedicated my first two years of college which were a total train wreck. I had a high level of self loathing and insecurity mostly related to my relatively low levels of academic performance and lack of friends.

I eventually went back on stimulants, my grades improved substantially, I made more friends and got a masters degree. now have a high paying job which I love and my life is better than I ever believed it could be. And at times like this I ask myself if the stimulants helped (and continue to help) because they make it easier to focus on things other than my various emotional traumas (essentially making it easier to live in the present). If I had had a more functional family would I even need to be on them? Or is, it the case that some people are just genetically predisposed to be addicted to something. If I hadn’t been given prescription stimulants would I have become addicted to something else instead. Or put another way, if my dad had been given Ritalin as a child would he be more like me today? Do you fix an addict by finding the correct drug?

My father was a serious alcoholic (like had a hard time holding a job down and our family lost a house) kind of drinker. This experience has given me a very negative view of the drug relative to some of its alternatives. For instance, there were two relatively pleasant years during my teens when he mostly stopped drinking and actually acted like a typical dad. During this time he taught me how to ski, helped me with my homework (which was something that had literally never happened during the rest of my childhood) and did other typical dad things.

I can relate a lot to this. Minus the 2 years where your dad was "sober". My dad basically had a Coors Light in his hand every waking moment he was at home. And driving. And golfing. He'd have me fish them out of the cooler in the back seat of the car and pop them open for him. Or cover up the open can with a towel when a cop drove by. Outside of small moments like that, I have vanishingly few memories of him being a dad the way you hear about other dads. I don't remember ever playing with him. I remember begging him to teach me things and him never doing it. I remember riding in a old pickup truck with him because that was fun and adventurous. But I mostly remember being afraid of how often he'd fly off the handle.

In 2007 his liver failed and we lost him. Although the cause of that turned out to be a smidge more complicated than the drinking. But it certainly didn't help. I know he strived to be better than his father, and in many ways he succeeded. I suppose you can only ask so much from one man when it comes to changing generational patterns.

Addiction is shot through my family. Both sides. My mom partook of box wine to my dad's Coors Light. One of my uncles also had his liver fail after a divorce. I have a cousin who's addictive personality manifest in literally everything that passes through his life. He also is no longer allowed to drive.

I don't know how I lucked out, but to whatever degree that sort of compulsive addiction is genetic, it missed me. Sometimes I drink when I find a drink I like. Then I go long stretches completely without. I smoke a cigar on the weekends when the weather is nice. But I typically pack that habit away for the winter, or I run out of cigars in my humidor and just plain don't feel like getting more. I have a sweat tooth, but try to moderate it as best I can. I make scones once a month for the family.

When I do drink, I try not to drink in front of my daughter. It just feels wrong. One day when I asked my wife to grab some beer when she was out since I hadn't had any in a few weeks, and my daughter said "Daddy needs beer", something in my heart broke a little.

He made a followup post: https://pmarca.substack.com/p/followup-on-pausing-alcohol

As an alcoholic (not physically addicted, but sure am mentally), I've been experimenting with not drinking. I feel just like Marc does. I sleep and exercise and just generally live MUCH better when not drinking. But fucking hell, I'm less happy. I love the depressed/self-destructive/edge-off/dopey feeling of being drunk.

Yeah, the older I get, the more even a little alcohol impacts my quality of life. Way worse sleep, brain fog the next day, you can forget working out. Which sucks, because one of my goals is to try to get up to a 5x5 88# Turkish Getup. And I really need to get those in at least twice a week to keep making progress towards that goal. But my ideal workout schedule is a TGU day, followed by a day of swings and military presses, then a rest day. So maybe I workout M, T, Th, F, with Sa, W, Su off.

I can maybe have a nightcap of whiskey one night a week. But it can't be a day I worked out, because I get the worst DOMs in the world the next day. Or a day before a day I plan to work out, because then I'll have zero energy. So if I'm sticking to my goals, I have to plan when I'll have 2 days between workouts, and have my one drink the day after one workout, with an extra day of padding before the next one. With my ideal workout schedule that would be Saturday, and only Saturday.

Life often conspires to throw this off. Random responsibilities get hot potatoed at me, bumping a workout. Daughter infects the entire house with a virus from school. It's more important to do a home maintenance or a landscaping project.

Basically, while I know what I should do, I rarely do it, and almost always regret it to some degree the next day.

Me, I like the excitement it creates; it makes playing Stellaris and HOI4 even more fun than it is sober.

I never drank at all until past age 40, when the Borders bookstores started closing, the Barnes & Nobles began devoting floor space to toys and other kiddie crap, and the local public libraries got rid of most books except recent bestsellers, concentrating on providing internet terminals and daytime shelter to the homeless.

The decline of the big chain retail bookstores drove you to drink?

Since there were suddenly a lot fewer ways to pass the time.

I feel like people who really get his comments have had some alcoholism in there life. I personally can’t buy a bottle of alcohol without finishing the whole thing in 24 hours. I end up talking myself into having a glass of whiskey to relax at the end of the night and it’s all gone the next day.

Does seem like he’s on to something about finding new drugs. Humans do need a social lubricant. I think the evolutionary biologist would say it arised from a natural fear of strangers or something like that. In the modern world where strangers are not dangerous a relaxant is needed. Something ideally without long term health problems from consumption and preferebly with low or no risks of addiction.

I sort of want to write a reply here as a woke prohibitionists using their rhetorical tricks. Scolding people who drink fine and not wanting it banned because a lot of other Americans suffer from the abundant availability of alcohol.

He seems to be writing this from the perspective of someone who knows he has some troubling drinking issues. And isn’t quite capable of taking away the bigger negative side effects on binge drinking. Seeing other comments some people just get this because they do it themselves. And some write in a style where they don’t get it and likely don’t have the same issues.

It didn't make sense to me, but he never said how much he was actually drinking. If I buy a .7l bottle of slivovitz, it lasts me 2 weeks at least, usually. Is that sort of drinking actually harmful ?

Unfortunately, yes, small amounts of alcohol have a detectable effect on brain white and gray matter volume:

Specifically, alcohol intake is negatively associated with global brain volume measures, regional gray matter volumes, and white matter microstructure. Here, we show that the negative associations between alcohol intake and brain macrostructure and microstructure are already apparent in individuals consuming an average of only one to two daily alcohol units, and become stronger as alcohol intake increases.

Here "one unit" means 10ml of ethanol, slivovitz has 50% abv, so you're drinking 350ml ethanol per 14 days = 2.5 alcohol units per day. The paper I linked has a bunch of interesting figures (fig 3 in particular is nice), and they provide this useful comparison:

For illustration, the effect associated with a change from one to two daily alcohol units is equivalent to the effect of aging 2 years (or 1.7 years in the model that excludes individuals who consume a high level of alcohol), where the increase from two to three daily units is equivalent to aging 3.5 years (or 2.9 years in the model that excludes individuals who consume a high level of alcohol).

Going from 0 to 1 daily units doesn't have any measurable effect in that study, but going from 1 to 2 and 2 to 3 does. So with your 2.5 units/day, it's equivalent to an aging-related decrease in brain volume of around 3.75 years. Not world-ending in any sense, but still not nothing.

(I'm slightly confused by the study, since presumably the effects should depend on how long you've been drinking alcohol, and not just provide a flat decrease in brain matter, but I'm not seeing any such effect reported in the paper)

Additional analyses excluding abstainers (N = 33,733) or excluding individuals who consume a high level of alcohol (i.e., females who report consuming more than 18 units/week and males who report consuming more than 24 units/week) (N = 34,383) and models using an extended set of covariates (including BMI, educational attainment, and weight; N = 36,678) yield similar findings, though the variance explained by alcohol intake beyond other control variables is reduced to 0.4% for GMV and 0.1% for WMV when individuals who consume a high level of alcohol are excluded (Supplementary Tables 1 and 2).

I mean, alcohol accounting for 0.4% of variance doesn't seem very important.

(I'm slightly confused by the study, since presumably the effects should depend on how long you've been drinking alcohol, and not just provide a flat decrease in brain matter, but I'm not seeing any such effect reported in the paper)

My first thought is that this implies reverse causality. If a snapshot shows the result without expect to duration, a parsimonious explanation would be that people with diminished brain matter tend to drink more rather than that drinking causes diminished brain matter. Feedback loops would be unsurprising as well.

Yeah that's what I thought too, but they super-duper promise they accounted for confounders:

We perform a preregistered analysis of multimodal imaging data from the UK Biobank (UKB)42,43,44, which controls for numerous potential confounds.

I probably have ten to fifteen bottles of scotch. If I don’t replace them, that will probably last me two years. Every once in a while, I’ll pour a drink (never more) if I’m in the mood. Or I’ll pour a drink or two if a friend comes over. I enjoy scotch but don’t understand the idea of binge drinking it.

I think some people enjoy the feeling of being tipsy (I know I do). However once you reach that stage your inhibitions are lowered and it's much harder to stop at the pleasant tipsy stage.

Also your body adapts to drinking by changing what BAC is tipsy and how much alcohol is required to reach that BAC as one drinks more.

I hear that, about finishing the whole thing. That's why I only buy enough at any given time to finish that night. Of course the downside is that ends up being more expensive. A 24 pack of whatever is more cost-conscious than doing one offs most days a week.

I can say I'm one who doesn't 'get it'. I like drinking, but not as much as the next guy I guess.

I feel like people who really get his comments have had some alcoholism in there life. I personally can’t buy a bottle of alcohol without finishing the whole thing in 24 hours. I end up talking myself into having a glass of whiskey to relax at the end of the night and it’s all gone the next day.

This is the same for me, but I'm a beer drinker. Part of why I only drink beer is that it's much, much harder (neigh impossible) to get physically addicted.

The way I avoid drinking is to just not buy any beer. If I buy a six pack, it's gone in 24 hours, and then I wish I had bought more. When I don't have beer I end up looking in the fridge anyway to see if maybe I missed a can somewhere the last time I looked. It's not great.

Something that really helped me was getting a garmin watch. It really lays bare how much of a difference even one drink makes. It doesn't have a "tell me whether I had a drink or not" mode, but it certainly could get one added based on how clearly it knows my sleep and recovery are worse on days I drink. My HRV and restlessness in sleep are drastically worse.

Of course I say this all while I'm hung over and feel too shitty to exercise because I drank too much yesterday...

It doesn't have a "tell me whether I had a drink or not" mode, but it certainly could get one added based on how clearly it knows my sleep and recovery are worse on days I drink.

The stress scores are amazing, one of the clearest indicators I've gotten in real time of the reality that a few drinks is doing something pretty gnarly to my cardiovascular system.

Are you me? I was about to write this same post. I also stopped buying beer. It's been less than a month, and I've done a few bouts of sobriety before (30-60 days worth, twice in the past three years), but after enough mornings after too much beer, I just resigned myself to not buying it. I'll drink if I go out, but if there are cans in the house, I'm going to find them and drink them.

I also stopped buying cannabis at the same time, mostly because getting high makes me want to get drunk, and getting drunk makes me want to get high.

And getting drunk makes me want to get drunk, and getting high makes me want to get high.

And doing either makes me want to consume really alarming quantities of industrial sugar/fat slop.

That's interesting. The more stoned I get the more I can totally forego alcohol. The downside is of course overeating.

Alcohol and amphetamines go together for me. But weed neutralizes that whole package.

I think it’s just a heavily common experience. 10-20% of the population probably falls into this grouping. And some probably limit the issue with kids keeping them busy.

It’s also very curious that 3 of our last 4 POTUS are sober. Bush was an alcoholic and fully gave up. Biden and Trump don’t drink. It’s almost like you get incredibly bored without alcohol to distract you and need to find major goals to carry yourself.

And fwiw I think a non-drinking potus is a bad thing. I think people are far more chill and get along with each other who do. It’s like being an alien who doesn’t follow the normal cultural rituals.

I think people are far more chill and get along with each other who do.

If it's social drinking, a glass of something over a couple of hours, sure. If it's boozehound stuff? No, not as much as the drinker thinks. They tend to get much more trashed, faster, and are boring/annoying/scaring the less drunk people around them. "I had such a great time, I can't remember a thing that happened!" is only fun for the drunk, not the people who had to clean up the broken shit and vomit after them.

It’s almost like you get incredibly bored without alcohol to distract you and need to find major goals to carry yourself.

That's a heck of an inference to draw from N=4. Especially since one of the guys in question is named George Bush, Jr. Gotta think that he might have gone into politics regardless. And why arbitrary draw the line at the last 4? Given that the pct of teetotalers in the US has apparently remained steady in the 30-40 pct range for 80 years, why not the last 15?

It’s almost like you get incredibly bored without alcohol to distract you and need to find major goals to carry yourself.

As someone whose normal alcohol intake rounds to zero, I have no idea what the rest of you are talking about. Being drunk is awful. My head hurts, I can't think or talk straight, I'm super sweaty, plus a few other random pulls from the Grab-Bag of Unpleasant Symptoms! There's like this teeny thin line where I've had just enough to disinhibit myself, but not so much that my body starts going haywire that's pleasant, but it's just about impossible to maintain for more than about 10 minutes at a time. I enjoy the taste of a few beers, wines, and whiskies, but barely ever drink them because the side-effects of the booze are so unpleasant.

That's not the normal reaction. Are you Asian? Could it be ALDH2 deficiency?

I am not asian. I have not had medical testing done to determine if there's a genetic component. But I do notice that I dislike most mind-altering substances. I've gotten stoned a few times and disliked it each time, and generally disliked the feeling that psychotropic prescription medications (e.g. vyvanse) had on me. Maybe I'm just ornery and/or literally don't know what's good for me. IDK.

Being drunk is awful. My head hurts, I can't think or talk straight, I'm super sweaty, plus a few other random pulls from the Grab-Bag of Unpleasant Symptoms! There's like this teeny thin line where I've had just enough to disinhibit myself, but not so much that my body starts going haywire that's pleasant, but it's just about impossible to maintain for more than about 10 minutes at a time.

Maybe you are consuming too much at once

For reference, the amount of alcohol intake I find pleasurable in an evening is [two fingers of whisky / a glass of wine / a beer] consumed slowly over a 2- to 4-hour period. Anything more turns unpleasant quickly.

Yeah but that's the thing with alcohol. Need to consume your way through initial discomfort into a tolerance that allows for responsible, pleasurable drinking.

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It’s almost like you get incredibly bored without alcohol to distract you and need to find major goals to carry yourself.

This is certainly a creative way to spin what would seem to be an unalloyed positive into something that sounds vaguely negative.

And fwiw I think a non-drinking potus is a bad thing. I think people are far more chill and get along with each other who do. It’s like being an alien who doesn’t follow the normal cultural rituals.

This to me feels like it fits in the same camp as people who say they'd be more likely to vote for someone that they could have a beer with. I get the sentiment, but it just seems to be a pretty terrible way to think about national leaders. I've had drinks with many people and not once during (or after) those encounters have I thought to myself that the person I was drinking with should be given control of a nuclear arsenal, or the ability to alter the fate of nations. I would in fact be much more comfortable handing that responsibility off to some sort of hypothetical stone cold sober ubermensch, whose only joy in life was found by bettering the lives and futures of his people.

A drinker will drink with anyone even their worst enemy and get along. While finding human connections. I don’t think they are capable of some of the worst aspects of todays culture wars.

Drinkers will also smash glass bottles into each others heads over imagined insults, frankly you sound like an addict trying to excuse their drug of choice.

A drinker will drink with anyone even their worst enemy and get along.

Yeah - so long as the booze is flowing, and even better if the other person is paying to keep it flowing. Put that drinker with their worst enemy without booze, and what human connections do they find? What human connections do they maintain after they sober up and need to go hunting for the next patsy to buy the booze?

Personal confession: I've had strangers, guys who were plainly dependent on booze, try to ask me to go to the pub with them and I knew it was only because they thought they could get me to pay for their booze in exchange for 'male company'. It was not about "finding human connections", it was "get someone to buy my next fix because I drank all my money today and have nothing left". I'm not the type, even in my younger days, who gets asked by random guy "hey can we go for a drink" because I'm just simply that attractive.

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Bush and Biden are rather well known for getting along with people and finding human connections. As are, honestly, most successful high-level politicians.

All else aside, I think the trend of people that didn't have any apparent drinking problem proudly announcing that they've quit drinking and feel so much better is really weird. I'm really not clear what they're optimizing for or what they're experiencing that is ostensibly so much better in their post-alcohol phase. I guess Andreeson spells it out a bit:

Since I stopped drinking, I feel much better. I don’t need as much sleep, but my sleep is better. I’m more alert through the day. I’m cogent and focused at all times. I have more energy when I exercise, and it’s easier to control my diet.

I can buy the sleep portion of things and sleep certainly has downstream effects, but I also think that you have to drink a lot for these to be all that noticeable. I drink more than I probably should, but do no meaningful experience any problems with energy for exercise or controlling my diet. Are the people that say that they feel much better sans drinking just even heavier drinkers than me or are they experiencing the world very differently?

As irritating as people that make drinking their identity are, people that make not drinking into an identity are even more irritating.

I'm really not clear what they're optimizing for or what they're experiencing that is ostensibly so much better in their post-alcohol phase.

Some of it is probably the zeal of the convert, but some of it could genuinely be trying to help others like them. "Hey dude, I was like you. I was drinking, and drinking way too much. I didn't believe all the warnings or the do-gooders because how the fuck could they know what drinking was like, they didn't drink. I never believed all that shit that not drinking was so much better. And then I got sober, and I'm telling you it's true, and I'm telling you that you can believe me because I'm not one of the do-gooders, I was right down there just like you are now".

All else aside, I think the trend of people that didn't have any apparent drinking problem proudly announcing that they've quit drinking and feel so much better is really weird.

One of the major points in the Huberman episode he references is that even occasional drinking has long-term negative effects on mood. This was a surprising thing to me though it prompted me to stop drinking altogether, around the same timeframe, and I can say similar things: overall a positive. It wasn't hard to do, but never tried it before as I didn't think of myself as suffering any ill effects.

people that didn't have any apparent drinking problem proudly announcing that they've quit drinking and feel so much better

This makes sense on an intuitive level if you assume HBD (in a less CW application) is correct. Alcohol is basically poison and causes widespread if minor damage to every system it touches, and if you're a descendant of a culture or lineage of teetotalers then you might not have the same degree of resilience to/recovery from the holistic harm dealt by booze (HBD isn't necessary for this, variation amongst individuals is an equally plausible explanation).

sleep certainly has downstream effects, but I also think that you have to drink a lot for these to be all that noticeable

Speaking only for myself, I went through a period of heavy (.5-1L of cheap bourbon daily) drinking some time ago. The main reason I stopped was the general malaise that I felt, but the thing that kicked it over the edge for me was how frequent my more intense nightmares became when I would crawl into bed wasted. I still have this problem now, more than 6 drinks in a day (with very little correlation to how close to bedtime I've been drinking) is almost guaranteed to have me visited that night by the very worst my unconscious mind has to offer. As a result I don't really drink that much, when I even bother to in the first place (still enjoy the sensation of being drunk, but I have enough consistently bad dreams already that it's just not worth being haunted by myself, the hangovers have gotten significantly worse as I've gotten older too).

1 litre of cheap spirits a day probably didn't do your liver any favours either, and if you managed to escape fatty liver be very glad (as well as the excess calories going to belly fat, the worst place to have it).

Absolutely, though it wasn't a full litre every day, or even most, that was more of a weekend thing. I was drinking at least 500ml daily. Colossally stupid of me in hindsight, but at the time I wasn't exactly thinking about my liver, more concerned with drowning my sorrows and committing slow motion suicide (narcissistically, I thought it was kind of tragic and cool). Hindsight makes that seem laughable to me now, but at the time I very much felt that I was in a complete dead end in my life. My coolguy self-affirming mantra has since changed from "live slow, die whenever" to "live purposefully, die after around 30,000 days".

How much are you drinking?

I certainly notice some effects when I stop drinking. I have a sleep and heart rate monitor and it is easily apparent how much alcohol affects my sleep.

Also while some people (like my doctor) consider me a heavy drinker, in some of my social circles I'm a light drinker.

A light night of drinking for me is 4-6 drinks, usually spaced out over 2-3 hours. A standard drinking night is more like 10 drinks, and a heavy drinking day is about 15-20 drinks over the course of an entire day.

I don't notice the effects of just two drinks, enough so that I'd rather just not drink than have only two.

The main benefit of me going sober for a few weeks is that it seems to lower my tolerance back to more normal ranges.

How much are you drinking?

I'd say my modal day is two beers. Having four or five standard drinks isn't uncommon, particularly if I'm dipping into barrel-proof whiskeys or barrel-aged stouts. On a football Sunday, I'll go quite a bit higher, maybe 8-10 standard drinks over the course of a day.

From stress score and sleep metrics, I see only a transient stress effect from a couple beers and no impact on sleep. Going up to four or five has a large stress score impact and adversely impacts sleep. The heavier days depend on timing and spacing of drinks. Even if I'm hungover, I'll get up and run in the morning, but the performance hit is large if I had ten drinks the previous day.

So maybe this is just a dose thing and I'm underestimating how much people are drinking when they say, "quitting drinking made me feel better". If I was slamming ten drinks a day, yeah, I'd be a lot better if I stopped.

So maybe this is just a dose thing and I'm underestimating how much people are drinking when they say, "quitting drinking made me feel better". If I was slamming ten drinks a day, yeah, I'd be a lot better if I stopped.

I thought this might be the case, which is why I gave my numbers. I drink an unhealthy amount, so when I stop the effects tend to be easily noticeable. I'm also only in my early thirties. From everything I've seen and everyone I know, the effects of drinking get worse with age. I have mild-moderate hangovers these days, a decade ago I didn't really get hangovers at all. My friends that are a decade older get knocked out for a full day.

Quitting my current level of drinking in my forties seems like it would be extremely noticeable.

It seems like being too much of a purist, who can't handle the dirt of life, the underside, the night, the darkness. Someone who can't handle the smell and sight of shit in the toilet.

Here is where I say "Go fuck yourself, that horseshit about being the tough realist who knows the underbelly of life and the real grit and dirt is that same old 'tortured artist' bullshit which makes mediocre wannabe rockstars start a heroin habit because all the great artists are crazy in some way or druggies or drunks".

That's unkind, but the "non-drinkers are stuck up perfect guys" reeks of an excuse about "so what if I piss myself and vomit all down the front of myself, that's real life bitch". Next thing is a quote from Fight Club, right?

The non-drinkers are the ones mopping up the puke afterwards, they see plenty of shit and clean it up.

I drink, but I have to restrict myself because the way I drink I know it's bad for me, I don't make any "social connections", and there's alcoholism on both sides of the family for several generations back so very easy to get addicted and end up down that path. That's why I find the pretentiousness about seedy bars and the real side of life annoying. Drunks are drunks, they're not some cheap guru with the inside track on the reality of experience. They reek of shit and piss and vomit and stale booze and cigarette smoke, you're right about that.

What do you care what other people do or don't do for fun and enjoyment? If they don't nag you to stop drinking, why need you nag them to start?

I think you nailed it with the "fog". It was hard for me to really gauge where my drinking was at for a long time, before I started having frank and honest talks with my doctor. I had friends that could finish a half bottle of whiskey in a night, and this would only result in them a semi functional drunk and a bit hungover the next day. I would look at them and be like 'thats insane, I don't drink that much' and think I'm fine. I don't know many of those friends that continue to do that, so maybe that should have been an answer in itself.

I find myself kinda agreeing with the take of either drink nothing, or drink enough to feel something. I don't like to be drunk, I do like to be a little buzzed. But I can see that the difference between me and a serious alcoholic is in that slight difference in preference. Having a drink without the buzz feels pointless to me. But to maintain that buzzed, or tipsy feeling over multiple hours is where the quantity comes in. Two to three drinks in the first hour to feel tipsy, and then one or two drinks every hour afterwards to maintain. Usually its on the 'more drinks' side of those numbers if I haven't recently gone without drinking for a few weeks, because my tolerance has gone up. So that easily ends up being 10 drinks over the course of 4-5 hours.

I do like the social lubricant aspects of alcohol. There are some sober people I know that don't seem to need any social lubricant, or if anything they get too lubed up from alcohol. To those people I feel like "you don't need to drink, but please let me drink around you so I can be on your level". I don't think I think any better of someone for throwing up from alcohol. If anything it downgrades my opinion of them. When I throw up I consider from alcohol its kind of a failure to me, it means I drank too much. But I'm also not really willing to hangout with people in the first place if I think they are stuckup.

Wow, unless you have a weird definition of "drink", then those are truly massive amounts of alcohol. Like Huberman would say, this is called "alcohol use disorder".

Those wouldn't be considered particularly outrageous amounts in many Finnish university student circles (assuming you are a big guy). Not daily, of course but for parties / weekend.

I saw that podcast when it came out! Huge fan of Bert and Tom.

It might be thrown off cuz I've generally switched to low carb beers and hard seltzers that are in the 4-5% alcohol range. Back when I was drinking heavier carb beers in the 8-12% range i was definitely drinking half as many. I do drink hard liquor as well, and maybe that is a better gauge of alcohol consumption. Though its not like I'm measuring out shots, and I usually mix the liquor with the light beers. My numbers might be 20% lower if I assume my liquor consumption is more accurate, and the lower alcohol drinks I normally have aren't a "full" drink per can.

But yeah in general I am aware that I consume an unhealthy amount of alcohol, its something I hope to work on one day. Op seemed to be surprised that people could have drastic improvements in their life by just quitting alcohol. I wanted to let Op know that yes, you can have drastic improvements if you are drinking an unhealthy amount to start. And based on ops response, they aren't quite at the level of an obviously unhealthy amount of drinking, so the effects are probably less noticeable for them.

Not germane to the discussion, but can you explain Bert Kreischer for me? I like Tom fine, think he's quick and pretty funny, most of the rest of the deathsquad guys are pretty okay at least to me, but Bert has always been a guy I just don't get. He feels to me like he isn't a real person, I've always felt like he's some kind of cutout for a PR company whose name no one knows (Bent Pixels maybe?). Am I just a hater? I'm okay with having an irrational dislike of a comedian, pretty easy for me to just not consume content that rubs me the wrong way.

Its kind of hard, on paper I really should be a fan of Tom more.

Bert isn't fake though. He is the real life thing that marketing companies try to imitate. And a real life party animal doesn't get that way by being a stable normal human being.

I maybe like something about his energy. "life of the party" is not an exaggeration. He is the embodiment of the energy and excitement of a party. I like that energy.

If I got to hangout with Bert and Tom separately, I'd choose to hangout with Bert for a night of partying, and then hangout with Tom two days later after my hangover. I'd reminisce with Tom about the fun I had during the Bert party.

Fair enough, maybe my personality is too neurotic to find "the life of the party" attractive. Thanks for letting me ask in a place I'll get a straight answer, fans and haters alike would rattle off the weird inside baseball stuff that I know and don't care about, which can be fun and funny but is counterproductive to getting a straight answer. Sounds like it really is just a me thing.

20 5-6% beers is still an incredible amount.

I think a large contingent of people at the parties I go to drink that much at parties but don’t drink much at all other times. It’s definitely binge drinking but I don’t think it’s that unusual. Alcohol use disorder sure, but it’s common at parties in my experience

depends on bodyweight and proof

All else aside, I think the trend of people that didn't have any apparent drinking problem proudly announcing that they've quit drinking and feel so much better is really weird. I'm really not clear what they're optimizing for or what they're experiencing that is ostensibly so much better in their post-alcohol phase. I guess Andreeson spells it out a bit:

I do not have a drinking problem, but part of that is that it runs in my family, and I take some care about it. If a buy a bottle of whiskey, I will have 1-2 glasses a night until it is gone, taking maybe 4-6 nights. But I notice a significant difference in QoL stuff between those 4-6 day spans and weeks where I don't drink at all. It amounts to maybe a 10-15% overall difference in a general "how good do I feel?" sense. Some combination of better sleep, less stress on metabolic systems, etc.

A few people have mentioned bottle are we talking 5ths or handles or pints?

I am talking about 5ths.

Personally, I've never noticed a large difference. But maybe it's psychosomatic - I've never deliberately resolved to quit drinking, so maybe people who make a Thing of it end up manifesting the difference, like the No Nut November guys who claim to unlock telekinesis.

I can buy the sleep portion of things and sleep certainly has downstream effects, but I also think that you have to drink a lot for these to be all that noticeable.

I'm not a heavy drinker when I do drink, up to 3 or so drinks in one session at most, and more typically 2, and I'll say that I definitely notice the sleep benefits when I stop drinking. Just 2 drinks in an evening tends to make my sleep highly restless, while also making me feel dehydrated before and after sleep. The dehydration tends to lead to more drinking of water, which leads to more peeing which also leads to shorter sleep/more awakenings at night.

So I think people are just experiencing the world very differently from you.

This is very much an aside, but your comment reminds me of my experience with melatonin, which I was convinced for a very long time was pure snake oil. I have not once experienced any sort of sleep aiding effects with melatonin, whether that be help falling asleep or help staying asleep or help getting more restful sleep, and I tried it many times at many different periods of my life. So I was convinced that it was just a society-wide placebo. More recently, seeing just how many people report sleep benefits from it, I've come to be convinced it's just that different people experience that chemical differently, and I'm one of those people for whom it does literally nothing.

Yeah. I had assumed melatonin wouldn't do anything for me. But I've been taking it, and it absolutely has an effect on me.

Tangentially - and I mean very tangentially - if you have any experience with those rhino erection pills? I had one recently and I was surprised that it seemed to work. I'm not entirely certain. Think a somewhat delayed effect, if there was one.

One of the tricks with melatonin is to take a low dose. It's a signaling hormone rather than a drug, so it doesn't work properly if the dose is too high, and most commercial brands are too high dose and don't work (at least not for me). 1-3mg works well in my experience.

I've tried a large range of dosages over the years, including taking 1mg pills and chopping them in half to get half dose and taking multiple 3mg pills at once and many in between, and I never noticed any impact that was different from not taking anything. I think it just doesn't work for me.

I wish the debunking of the pro-alcohol studies was more substantiated. Sure, the experts think selection effects and lies explain them, but how? Those criticisms are not new. What other harmful substances give positive results because of selection effects? How could the occasional lie overcome a seemingly a large disadvantage in healthyness?

The main problem with the debunking of pro-alcohol studies is on the meta level: it's what the medical and public health establishment wanted to do anyway. The claim “the best amount of alcohol to drink is no alcohol” is no better substantiated, but apparently it is gospel -- because, again, it's what the medical and public health establishment wanted anyway. Even if the debunkings are correct, that just leaves us without information, unless there's a reason to accept a no threshold effect with alcohol as the null hypothesis.

Yeah, that's what I worry about, that they never liked alcolhol (and as the saying goes, you can't trust a man who doesn't trust himself with a bottle) , and those studies were always a thorn in their side, and they have finally found a fruitful line of attack.

From his next post:

It really is striking/shocking how completely this whole area of scientific research has collapsed. This is part of the generalized replication crisis that’s ripping through science. More to come on this. TLDR is it is no longer crazy or even particularly controversial to say that most of what we know as science is simply fake.

Oh boy, I sure hope they didn't dynamite the entirety of science to get rid of a few pesky alcohol studies.

Oh boy, I sure hope they didn't dynamite the entirety of science to get rid of a few pesky alcohol studies.

Medical,nutritional... odds are even it's fake.

you can't trust a man who doesn't trust himself with a bottle

I don't drink, but keep a handle of liquor in the cupboard just so guests don't think I'm someone who can't keep alcohol in the house. Never realized it was a saying.

"Always carry a flask of whiskey in case of snakebite, and furthermore always carry a small snake." -- W. C. Fields

lol loved this

It is now pretty definitively clear that no amount of alcohol is good for you. Andrew Huberman recently summed this conclusion up on his podcast; the topic made me so enraged I never listened to the episode, but I did read the notes.

Seems like anything that feels good is bad.

Andrew says “the best amount of alcohol to drink is no alcohol” — imagine someone who both hates and loves humanity that much.

Since I stopped drinking, I feel much better. I don’t need as much sleep, but my sleep is better. I’m more alert through the day. I’m cogent and focused at all times. I have more energy when I exercise, and it’s easier to control my diet.

I think drinking is good for taking the edge off , like smoking. This does not mean you have to give it up. Just don't consume to excess.

Coming home last night, I remembered another good thing about tipsiness. When my buzz is in the "sweet spot", when I have to make the hour-plus walk home in triple-digit heat and tropical humidity, or brutal cold winds, or pouring rain, it feels like those conditions are being experienced by someone else (like an NPC) and I'm just observing from outside dispassionately, avoiding obstacles but still enjoying the exercise!

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