Five Years Ago, I Came to My Senses and Quit Alcohol
I realized I was killing myself and becoming an NPC, which made me reconsider some life choices.
The summer I turned 21, I got drunk for the first time.
I was in San Francisco for the summer interning at Dropbox. Dropbox has quite the drinking culture: every other weekend, the entire intern cohort would squeeze into a tiny apartment, stock the place up with beers, and play drinking games all night long. The world would get fuzzier as I became progressively more inebriated, but I enjoyed the process since I was having so much fun.
It was an abrupt introduction to alcohol. I recall my last day in SF that summer: the morning of my flight, I stumbled my way to the airport hungover and half lucid. I have no clue how I got back home in one piece.
After graduating college and moving to the Bay Area, I drank infrequently, but whenever a social event had alcohol in the picture, I had a bad habit of drinking too much. There’s a joke that one drink is just right, two drinks is too many, and three drinks is not enough. That embodies how I handle my limits.
I’d take a shot of tequila, feel nothing, and pound a few extra shots since “nothing was happening.” Some time would pass and as I became less lucid, I’d utter a few regrettable remarks and forget how the rest of the night went.
You have to cut me some slack. I was an impressionable person in my early 20s. I wanted to fit in and have fun, and alcohol seemed like an easy way to socially blend in.
Then COVID hit. I left the Bay Area and I had a bunch of time alone to reflect on how I wanted to live my life.
Why did I quit?
The fact that I didn’t know my limits was bad enough, but I would come to realize that the act of drinking was already pretty bad. Bad enough that I concluded that this needed to stop.
I was slowly killing myself…
I’ve blacked out more times than I’d care to admit. If you think about it, being drunk is quite terrifying. Parts of your brain turn off. You lose control of your thoughts, despite trying your hardest to stay lucid. It’s as if you’re thinking someone else’s thoughts. It’s how I imagine dying feels; it’s totally different from falling asleep.
I realized that every time I got drunk, I was slowly killing myself. It’s scary when you can’t recognize or trust your own mind.
…for literally no good reason.
The stupid part is that I never even enjoyed drinking. I only did so at social events when alcohol was freely available. The tech industry in Silicon Valley has a drinking culture, so it’s actively tolerated, if not encouraged.
I drank to fit in and trick myself into having fun. But the truth is that I wasn’t having fun. By drinking for social validation, I was living someone else’s life. It wasn’t a real choice of mine, and deep down I didn’t want to live my life pretending to be someone else.
How did I stop?
It was pretty easy, actually. I made a declaration to myself to pause all drinking for 5 years. After that duration passed, I’d give myself permission to reevaluate. At the beginning, it was remarkably easy to enforce, since it happened during the COVID lockdowns.
Otherwise, I employed a few identity/mindset shifts:
I can have fun and fit in without alcohol. Alcohol doesn’t make you braver; it makes you stupider. Alcohol doesn’t build social status; it reduces your social awareness.
It’s more important to be high-agency and make my own independent decisions, rather than “going with the flow.”
I want to prove to myself that I can say no to people. If you only go on autopilot, you’re nothing more than an NPC.
I don’t want to destroy my body and my mind. That prospect is scarier than any perceived benefits of alcohol.
With the proper mindset, it became easy to just stop drinking. Whenever I was at a bar, I’d just have a mocktail. At parties, I’d simply socialize while sober. For me, this was all mental.
Miscellaneous thoughts
My life is better, and my mind is definitely clearer. Avoiding alcohol is arguably just as important as writing, when it comes to being a clear thinker.
Quitting alcohol has definitely tested (and validated) my ability to resist social pressure and take ownership of my choices.
You can definitely have fun without alcohol. If anything, it’s quite amusing being the one sober person in a room full of drunk people.
People are remarkably respectful of my choice not to drink. For that I am grateful.
Scott Galloway has an interesting perspective around society’s shift away from alcohol. His claims that the pendulum has swung too far against alcohol (“the worst thing that’s happened to young people is the anti-alcohol movement”) and pushes for people to drink more and make more “bad decisions.” Otherwise the loneliness epidemic persists, and young people aren’t pushed to take social risks. As a chronic over-thinker, I believe he does have a point. Is the trade-off worth it? For now, I’m still a teetotaler, but I do need to take this into consideration.
