…e problem of how to get drunk.” The damage done by alcohol is profound: impaired cognition and motor skills, belligerence, injury, and vulnerability to all sorts of predation in the short run; damaged livers and brains, dysfunction, addiction, and early death as years of heavy drinking pile up. As the importance of alcohol as a caloric stopgap diminished, why didn’t evolution eventually lead us away from drinking—say, by favoring genotypes associated with hating alcohol’s taste? That it didn’t suggests that alcohol’s harms were, over the long haul, outweighed by some serious advantages. Versions of this idea have rece…

One of the most fun parts of this is that – people who want to decrease their drinking often speak of how they wanted to change the social effects of alcohol in their life: that they were interacting with others dysfunctionally because of alcohol, that they were spending time and energy on things that didn’t really matter to them, that they got into unsafe situations… There is a weird idea in this paragraph that maybe one should avoid the impaired cognition and organ damage but not miss out on socializing like people who drink. I like it.

…and also make us more sociable. At a talk he later gave on wu-wei at Google, Slingerland made much the same point about intoxication. During the Q&A, someone in the audience told him about the Ballmer Peak—the notion, named after the former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, that alcohol can affect programming ability. Drink a certain amount, and it gets better. Drink too much, and it goes to hell. Some programmers have been rumored to hook themselves up to alcohol-filled IV drips in hopes of hovering at the curve’s apex for an extended time. His hosts later took him over to…

Well this is a real embarrassment for everyone involved.

…e the presence of other people. Having combed through decades’ worth of literature, Creswell reports that in the rare experiments that have compared social and solitary alcohol use, drinking with others tends to spark joy and even euphoria, while drinking alone elicits neither—if anything, solo drinkers get more depressed as they drink. Sayette, for his part, has spent…

I’m liking the self-help-y clarity of this piece. Don’t drink high ABV drinks, don’t drink alone…

…njoyed by previous generations. Almost all of the heavy-drinking women Glaser interviewed drank alone—the bottle of wine while cooking, the Baileys in the morning coffee, the Poland Spring bottle secretly filled with vodka. They did so not to feel good, but to take the edge off feeling bad. Men still drink more than women,…

I would love to read a historical survey of “self-medication” – the concept, the popular understanding, the manifestations…

…e proliferating in many groups. Even drinking in bars has become less social in recent years, or at least this was a common perception among about three dozen bartenders I surveyed while reporting this article. “I have a few regulars who play games on their phone,” one in San Francisco said, “and I have a standing order to just refill their beer when it’s empty. No eye contact or talking until they are ready to leave.” Striking up conversations with strangers has become almost taboo, many bartenders observed, especially among younger patrons. So why not just drink at home? Spending money to sit in a bar alone and not talk to anyone was, a bartender in Columbus, Ohio, said, an interesting case of “trying to avoid loneliness without actual togetherness.” Last August, the beer manufactur…

I used to go out and drink a beer while reading a book or journaling to have an excuse to eavesdrop aggressively. This still felt like an amelioration of my loneliness even if it’s obvious that lots of other things would have been better if I could have managed them.

…ng else, especially spirits and (perhaps the loneliest-sounding drinks of all) premixed, single-serve cocktails , sales of which skyrocketed.Not…

Oh, I disagree with this – this is what you pick up when you’re trying to accommodate a group with varied tastes but you don’t want the fuss of mixing individual drinks for everyone. My generation is somewhat bifurcated around the taste of hops, so it’s not surprising to see people reaching for the non-beer equivalent of a beer variety pack.

…uently, others drank less often. But the drinking that increased was, almost definitionally, of the stuck-at-home, sad, too-anxious-to-sleep, can’t-bear-another-day-like-all-the-other-days variety—the kind that has a higher likelihood of setting us up for drinking problems down the line. The drinking that decreased was mostly the good, socially connecting kind. (Zoom drinking—with its not-so-…

I am considering proposing a freeze on my household’s ordering food delivery for the same reasons… There’s probably also an interesting parallel to make about video games?