Travel a bit, any you'll quickly discover that a couple drinks in the evening is basically normal in much of the world. I'm not arguing that it's healthy (it's not), but the median American really doesn't drink much - our Puritan values run deep.
For many of us, it's not about Puritanical values. We simply choose healthier behaviors.
It's true that the median alcohol drinkers in America doesn't drink much at all. The vast majority of alcohol is consumed by 10% of the population.
Drinkers tend to cluster with other drinkers, and non-drinkers tend to become less interested with attending gatherings that revolve around alcohol consumption. This can lead to misperceptions that either everyone is drinking a lot or no one is drinking much depending on which cluster you end up in. It's strange to hear some of my heavy drinking acquaintances insist that everyone drinks heavily, because that's what they see in their personal bubbles.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/americans-are-dri...
The reason Americans drink less alcohol at the median, is due to how American populations are heavily distributed in housing developments, in suburbs, versus the higher density & primate cities that you see in nearly all of Europe. We gather less frequently European-style, we don't walk or bus or train nearly as much, so the majority generally avoids drinking & driving. In the US if you're going somewhere, the odds are high that you're driving to and from; drinking and driving is an incredibly high penalty risk to take now.
Most "American Values" are basically just puritan ethics. In America, you won't see someone sipping a beer on the subway for the same reason you see someone take take a 4 week summer vacation, or a nipple on TV. Most of the quirky values that separate us from western europe (like hard work, temperance, abstinence, etc.) can be traced back to our puritan roots.
Are you including the US' views on sex and nudity and the puritan work ethic in that? Sex and nudity in films will make them get an instant R-rating, but murder will only get a PG-13.
The puritan work ethic is the reason Americans work themselves to death and judge the poor: "They obviously deserve it because they must not work hard." It's obviously circular reasoning, but "not working hard" is a moral failing in the US.
Hmm, I wonder where your desire to choose healthier behaviors came from...
He is suggesting your desire to be healthy comes from this.
Likewise, how does this have anything to do with religion (Puritanical heritage)?
That's why I never developed a taste for alcohol. I sometimes drink socially but that is very rare: 3-4 times a year, 1 or 2 drinks each time. That's about it.
...and husbands. Not all people who drink alcohol to excess are male.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233717660_Thirty_Ye...
It’s just that some groups find the honest research inconvenient so they try, largely successfully, to suppress it. The suppression behavior on certain sides of issues has been discussed by plenty of reputable people, including Steven Pinker in his book The Blank Slate.
These days in order to believe the results of any research paper I need to read it for myself with an incredibly skeptical eye for what is being left out, how questions were asked, etc.
The Puritans drank plenty. I suspect that many such misconceptions about them are derived from HL Mencken's (wildly inaccurate) quip that "Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy."
They were extremists by contemporary standards (an insanely low bar).
They barely waited until they stopped starving to start being jerks to each other and antagonizing the natives.
If you want to idolize early settlers idolize Rhode Islanders, they were basically successive waves of people who left Massachusetts because the latter was no place for anyone who let their conscience get in the way of their ideology (amazing how little some things change in 400yr) and they managed to maintain some of the best relations with the natives.
For whatever reason, I like sobriety. It's strange to me that people should think we need a religious motive to prefer sobriety, as though escaping or distorting reality is inherently preferable. Maybe I equally misunderstand the motives of the heavy drinker?
After a 3 or 4 drinks, the extroversion switch flips in my head and suddenly I want to stop and chat with just about anyone about any topic imaginable. This adds value to my life, and so I drink regularly and have a few at a time (not 10+ drinks a day though. That's probably more on the escaping reality level)
Sobriety is great and preferable 99% of the time to me, but your framing of "escaping or distorting reality" is founded on a trust that your senses and current mental processes are objective reality and that reality is desirable.
Going away from the psychedelics, if I want to have an afternoon where I'm more giggly and enjoying of food, chemical enhancement for that experience seems like way to go, same way someone would listen to music to get in a work mood.
Maybe. I'm unconvinced that this is the only way to achieve any kind of insight. In particular I'd be surprised if it outperforms a cup of coffee or a rhapsodical conversation for any type of insight.
> your framing of "escaping or distorting reality" is founded on a trust that your senses and current mental processes are objective reality and that reality is desirable.
How can a high be "more real" than what you perceive through your senses? That seems almost incorrect by definition, so I guess I plead guilty to the charge of believing that sober experiences are more real.
With respect to "I'm assuming that reality is desirable"--yeah, if you think reality isn't desirable, then you're escaping, so I think you're [agreeing violently][0] with me here. I am guilty of the charge that I think escapism is bad and confronting reality is good.
[0]: http://joe.blog.freemansoft.com/2020/02/recognizing-violent-...
"Perceive" is the key word here. To draw an analogy, if your mind is a computer, your senses are raw data inputs, which your unconscious mind parses, filters, and transforms before the data is eventually passed to your conscious mind. Some hallucinogens give you a peek into this process - you get to see what's going on under the hood, so to speak.
Like a young child, you might find yourself enamored by the beauty of the simple greenness of a leaf.
These substances can teach you that there are many valid ways to "perceive" an event. It's not so much that what you perceive while intoxicated is "more real", but that it's an equally valid (and sometimes drastically different!) interpretation.
They're simple lessons that can mostly be learned without any drugs at all (meditation helps), but a proper trip can hammer a lesson home in such an immediate, visceral, enduring way that I'm not sure there's a sober equivalent.
Ego death is a hell of a thing to experience. We can talk about it and how some people can reach it through years of meditation, but LSD is a sure ticket to it and the value of it is in the qualia of the experience, not the knowledge of what it is.
Imagine your psyche is a factory you've built over your life and you're standing high above it supervising. Regular introspection is walking through the lines and tuning the machine. Ego death is a tidal wave knocking down everything you've built, adjusting to your new reality, and the rest of the day is watching as it all comes back together. There's a level of forced commitment and intensity of the experience that you can't simulate. I'm not claiming you'll reach enlightenment, but something more akin to the learning from tearing down and rebuilding an engine, except it's ~~you~~.
There are real gains to going through it if you're of sound mind.
Also, sometimes things are just really shitty and there's nothing that can realistically fix them and escapism actually is a reasonable choice.
I don’t buy this. Even when you can’t fix things (and I’ve been there) you can still process through your emotions and accept and make sense of your new normal. You don’t have to do it all at once, but that’s the only path to recovery—drugs and alcohol won’t get you there.
You understand the motives just fine. Reality for many people is some combination of boring, stressful, depressing, etc.
So yes, escaping reality is very much preferable to these people. And alcohol and other drugs are very effective at this.
To state the obvious, improving your situation so you don't want to escape reality would be preferable. But that takes a hell of a lot more time, motivation, resources, and effort than just cracking open that next beer.
To that extent, I've gone through some very hard times (for me anyway--not interested in comparing traumas), and for whatever reason much of my cultural upbringing suggested I should reach for some whiskey; however, ultimately I was just too aware that that wouldn't fix my hurt and that "the only way through it was through it" cliche was ultimately true. What really got me through was accepting reality and acknowledging that even though reality was painful, avoiding pain isn't the objective in life (or that's my moral philosophy, anyway)--enduring a trial well is life-affirming. Embrace reality, truth, etc even if it sucks.
EDIT: "everything in my cultural upbringing" -> "much of my cultural upbringing". On reflection, I think the philosophy which allowed me to be successful was largely traditional, Judeo-Christian philosophy which permeates much of American culture. Credit where due.
I would argue this isn't universally true. As I shared in another comment, I recently took a month-long break from drinking. For me it hasn't been difficult, but it's made life seem to explode with excitement and energy, just from taking alcohol out of my life. I think many people would benefit more than they expect just by cutting out alcohol for a month or even just a week.
And sometimes when you try anyway, the universe decides to punish you for it. Some people experience this multiple times. I don't blame them for wanting to escape reality.
I would not at all be surprised to see a strong correlation of people who are religious and people who never drink. Even "one drink a week" or whatever is a significantly different category than "zero drinks, ever."
Maybe depends on whether "would never drink again" and "basically never drink" are included in your definition of "never".
There are a lot of non-religious reasons people don't drink, and a lot of daylight between "one drink a week" and "zero drinks an ever". I fall into the "maybe 3-4 drinks per year" category. It could be more, it could be less -- alcohol just doesn't really occupy a different space for me than, say, pickles. I like pickles well enough, if one comes with my sandwich at a diner I'll eat it. But I only think to get a pickle from the jar in my fridge like once or twice a year, and eating pickles and drinking alcohol have about the same impact on my life and happiness.
Some of it, though, genuinely comes from causing the mind to operate in a rather different mode and make connections and "leaps of understanding" that it just can't do under normal circumstances. It essentially forces a sort of "educational learning-difference" on you, and if you manage to muscle through and learn how to solve a problem in that state (and get the empirically correct answer), you've essentially allowed your mind to come up with a totally different approach to a problem it would never normally take.
Having previously been one of those programmers chasing the "Ballmer Peak", it definitely was more than just an XKCD joke; the joke worked because it was documenting a real phenomenon that's been known for ages. Several recreational drugs, like alcohol, marijuana, can also be used as "performance-enhancing" drugs in the same way things like Adderall can; it's down to careful dosing and discipline - you have to carefully stay in the "eye of the storm" and not get too inebriated, and you also need to exercise a careful awareness of how the drug's effects can "lead you astray" (i.e. something like Adderall can give you a rush of manic hyperfocus, but it's easy to waste this on irrelevant details, instead of focusing on something productive. There have been plenty of comedic stories of people taking Adderall and … instead of doing their homework, doing something daffy like carefully organizing all the books on their shelves … by color.) So you have to be aware of the drug's "biasing" effects and carefully wrangle your behavior during it.
All that said, I definitely recommend against long-term use of alcohol in particular, just due to the chronic toxicity of it. For a while it's great, but over time, it really starts to wear you down, and do more harm than good. Eventually you're so damn tired all the time, that any productivity gains from mental breakthroughs are wiped out. If it was used on rare occasions for breakthroughs/inspiration, it might be viable, but using it as an anti-adhd/procrastination drug (for which, anecdotally, it was very effective) just isn't sustainable, long-term.
Maybe it’s a southern European thing, but I can’t imagine eating a heavy meal without the acidity of a red wine, for example.
A fruit smoothie that keeps all the fiber and hence is more filling and hence causes you to eat less sugar by way of eating less fruit overall is fine. A smoothie where you filter out the fiber or otherwise eat excess amounts of sugar would not be.
Occasionally a glass of wine or cider is nice, but that's not every day - we usually finish a wine bottle in a week or two using the preserver.
Not at all. It's expensive and very harmful. Why would I drink alcohol when I can enjoy a meal out with friends without drinking at all?
“It’s cheap, and we all live to be 80 anyways. Why wouldn’t I casually drink alcohol while I enjoy a meal out with friends?”
New Zealand was culturally very different, where excessive drinking was strongly encouraged in the social groups I saw in my early 20s, and across a variety of social groups as I got older.
2. If you have a drink every night out with friends you build a tolerance to it, and you put stress on your body for no gain.
3. Dehydration, sleepiness, and worse sleep and cost are big downsides
4. You can have better, cheaper effects with edible weed.
https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2009/great-directors/aki-kaur...
Some of us can't even stand fermented breads, let alone a light wine.
The only people I've met (in real life) to date who can't stand the taste of alcohol are children and people with Asperger's, I assume because bitter tastes are a sort of sensory overload for them. Purely anecdotal and could be a complete horseshit theory, but I'm just curious.
I am a supertaster however. That likely is the cause of my distaste for alcohol.
I’m curious, what do you tell your doctor when he/she asks how much you drink?
Not for me, I just hate the taste of alcohol, would much rather a can of coke.
This is possibly the reason why studies say "moderate drinking can be healthy".
The problem I have with it all, drunk people tend to affect other things: destroying public property, drunk driving (destruction of private property and death (sometimes death of sober people at wrong place, wrong time)) fights and injury (go check what an EC/ER looks like on a Friday night for hospitals in these countries), domestic violence, rape, animal abuse, emotional drunk spirals (can lead to suicide or relationship damage), financial destruction (lemme buy all you fine oaks 100 shots on my tab)..the list goes on.
Nah, skip alcohol if you can. I makes small men feel like strong men, and strong men feel like small men and creates a vicious cycle to cope with those false emotions, resulting erratic/impulsive/dangerous behaviours. Rather meditate, go to bed early, use cannabis (not daily) and make sandwich.. I've not seen a single instance where alcohol has improved someones life, mentally or physically. Alcohol is a false remedy that fills your hearts and minds with a false view of the world. Step away for a while.
Same goes for streaming/internet consumption, tv/news, caffeine, nicotine, porn, fast foods, religion, politics. All those things blend into a horrible mindset. Step away, introspect and modify your own behaviour/culture, reflect about who/what you are. It's a worthwhile experiment and costs nothing (in fact, it will save you time and money).
One of the “tells” of this class of alcoholic is drinks stashed all over the place to facilitate this round the clock buzz.
Ten drinks isn't that much hard liquor: it's about 450ml. That's a little more than a can (392ml).
Sure, the volume isn't unfathomable. But most people drinking a Mickey (13 ounces ~ 9 drinks) would render them useless.
First, tolerance to substances is more physiological than simply learning to hide it.
Second, consider one drink an hour ten eight hours. You’d barely be inebriated. It wouldn’t be particularly drastic.
> Functional tolerance refers to a phenomenon where a person can ingest significant amounts of alcohol – either at once or slowly over time – and not appear to be intoxicated. A person who has developed a functional tolerance to alcohol may be under the influence of alcohol without it being noticeable, thus allowing them to participate in certain daily activities in a manner that appears normal to others.
This is also what TIPS, the training given to bartenders, teaches [2]. Finally, to the point about spreading out the drinks. Yes, this is how people consume large amounts of alcohol daily. I maintain that someone who barely drinks or never drinks will be incapable of doing their job after 4 hours, even after spreading out the drinks. They certainly shouldn't drive a vehicle.
[1] - https://americanaddictioncenters.org/alcoholism-treatment/th... [2] - https://www.tipscertified.com/
> When someone is colloquially termed a “high-functioning alcoholic”, they may be able to carry out daily tasks of living [trimmed] without exhibiting the full range of clinical impairments commonly associated with alcohol use disorders.
The sources listed in the article further breakdown different types of tolerances and their effects. For example source 5,
[5] https://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/aa28.htm
> Tolerance means that after continued drinking, consumption of a constant amount of alcohol produces a lesser effect or increasing amounts of alcohol are necessary to produce the same effect (1). Despite this uncomplicated definition, scientists distinguish between several types of tolerance that are produced by different mechanisms.
They then list the details of "Functional Tolerance", "Acute tolerance", "Environment-dependent tolerance", "Learned tolerance", "Environment-independent tolerance", "Metabolic Tolerance".
To imply that Functional Tolerance is synonymous with all forms of alcohol tolerance is incorrect, and it's incorrect to say that's "the" modern view on alcohol tolerance.
Source [6] is a book called "Understanding Why Addicts Are Not All Alike Recognizing the Types and How Their Differences Affect Intervention and Treatment" which should tell you that generalizing all alcoholics into a single type is probably not the most correctly accepted modern view on alcoholism.
It's high, but not even close to some of the historic records. In early 1800s the per capita consumption was roughly equivalent 90 bottles of whisky per year. And that counts a lot of non drinkers in the denominator.
1.5 ounces per drink
1.75 L per bottle (assuming a handle)
33.814 ounces per liter
59.175 ounces per bottle
39.450 drinks per bottle
3550.5 drinks per year
9.720 drinks per day
What counts as an "American drinker"? Apparently only 24M of our 330M population. That's 7% of the population.
So the average of the top 0.7% Americans consume 10 drinks per day. Since averages are heavily affected by the outliers at the top, you're looking at probably between 2-3 per 1000. I absolutely believe that many Americans consume the equivalent of 10+ light beers per day.
What's more surprising to me is that only 24M Americans count as "drinkers". Our college population alone is 17M.
The reality is that some stuff is power laws, some stuff is normal, some stuff is bimodal, etc. The more useful mental exercise is to try to learn what the actual distribution for something is, instead of assuming, and then try to dig in a bit more to figure out what causes might lead to that.
Power laws tend to arise when you have some amount of network effect and an iterative positive feedback loop. That shows up in popularity, wealth, etc. But things like, you know, height, are not a power law distribution.
Alcohol consumption does have some steep curve to that, but it's not clear if it's actually a power law. I assume its driven by both addiction times tolerance. In other words, if you couldn't build up a tolerance to alcohol, I'd expect something like a linear distribution reflecting levels of a addiction. But the more you drink, the higher your tolerance, so the more you need to drink, which leads to something more like quadratic or higher.
The irony here is that these folks consume 60% of all alcoholic beverages. These are the whales of the industry. Makes you want to rethink the adult drinks market.
If these numbers are correct, the top 10% of alcohol drinkers consume the equivalent of 10 drinks per day: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/25/think...
The unit for a single drink is a fixed measurement, so someone pouring a tall glass of wine or a very stiff drink could be consuming 2-5 “drinks” in a single glass, but regardless the consumption is extremely high.