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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
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 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 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.
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.
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