I think that all the reasons for and against drinking are rationalizations for a genetic disposition to drink or not drink. I don’t drink very much, because it has no appeal to me - and not getting drunk, even having a beer. Beer sits in my refrigerator for upwards of six months untouched, because Coke just seems better. My father and brother are the same way. My wife likes a glass of wine before dinner every so often, and sometimes a drink near bed time, not very often. Her father likes beer with certain foods. I’ll take wine if she is having it, but I would never think about having it myself. I think I’ve been drunk twice in my life, but the experience was not so negative as to have any impact on my drinking.
I was also one of only two people in my extended living group in college who never smoked dope - not for moral qualms, but because it never appealed. I can justify it as not messing up my head, but smarter people than me did it with no ill effects, so again I think this is just an in-born tendency.
Drinkers and non-drinkers - do you take after family members in this?
The difference is that I never said that it was a mystery to me why people like to indulge in pomposity and sarcasm. WeRSauron wasn’t expressing any genuine curiosity quite so much as just taking an opportunity to talk shit on some drinkers and feel superior to them. Much like you were feeling towards me when you posted the bon mot above, I would imagine.
I just love this sort of absolutist claptrap. News flash, sport, that “mild relaxation” that you feel while drinking? That’s known as “drunkenness.” So if you’re drinking to experience a feeling of mild relaxation, you’re abusing alcohol and its benefits.
Or you’re not, and neither is the person who drinks to get more “relaxed” than you do.
I don’t like the taste of any alcoholic beverage. They all taste nasty to me. I can tolerate lager beer and expensive tequila for some reason but they just taste way less shitty than the rest. I hate being drunk but I can hold my liquor pretty well considering how rarely I partake.
So why do I drink? Sometimes business calls for it. If I am at a dinner with a client, particuarly in parts of Asia, having one or two drinks is part of the deal. Obviously you don’t have to but it beats looking like a freak beacause you are one of the 1% of the population that doesn’t imbibe. I hate having to explain that, I don’t have an alcohol problem and I don’t abstain for religious reasons, it’s just that I don’t like it. I don’t like chocolate either so go figure.
Being around drunk people when you are sober is painful. I really hate that. I just don’t stay around at parties past the first couple of hours.
I have to agree that college students or anyone in their early 20’s getting slammed is not necessarily alcoholism. I was one of them and look at me.
Look. Alcohol is a food. Just like anything else, excess can lead to problems. Too many Big Macs leads to…well, you’ve seen the movie. Too much sex leads to some horrific, I’m sure. Too much anything can be bad. If you habitually overuse anything, then you are abusing it. The OP relates his group getting “sloppy drunk,” and that is abusive by any definition.
Otto, your definition is disingenious, and you know it. There is a big difference between having a big meal and gluttony, and there is a big difference between having a drink and getting plastered.
I didn’t drink a drop of alcohol until my mid-twenties, so I think I can explain. Like you, I didn’t feel the need to drink to have fun, and thought it sad that other people didn’t seem able to have fun without alcohol. However, I’ve since realized that the fact that many people tend to drink when they want to relax and have a good time does not mean that they are unable to have fun without alcohol. Rather, drinking can be relaxing and fun so the two often go together.
An analogy: I used to live with a bunch of guys in a house. We’d have friends over, and sometimes we’d lie around on the couches, listening to music and talking loudly. We never sat upright in the kitchen chairs speaking quietly without background noise. Does this mean we were unable to have fun without couches and music? Of course not. It means we had a preferred way of relaxing, so we always did things that way.
Alcohol is like that. Having a few drinks is relaxing. Sometimes getting drunk can be relaxing. There’s nothing wrong with it, especially if not taken to excess. The problem is that if you don’t drink, being with people who are drinking is a lot like sitting at the kitchen table trying to talk quietly while everyone else is in the living room on the couch, laughing and yelling.
I drink, and most of the people I hang out with drink as well. Some drink for the taste, some drink for the effect, some drink for a little of both.
I’m one of the ones who drink for both, although there’s been many times where I wish I could turn off the alcohol and keep drinking the drinks because they just taste so damn good. Effect-wise, I like the mild euphoria that a couple of drinks give me. I’ve had some damn good talks when the people involved are relaxed and fearless, and you’re kidding yourself if you think that alcohol doesn’t help put you in that state. The problem is that it’s easy to progress from THAT state to the very drunk, icky state if you’re not paying attention.
Thanks for the replies so far! I have been able to discern quite a bit from what’s written.
What baffles me still is that I learned that alcohol is a toxin. When the liver processes substances, alcohol tends to be one of the first because of its toxicity. (Which is one reason among many, I learned, that people should not take medication while drinking: if the liver is busy processing the alcohol, the medication that also needs to be processed by the liver is put on hold, and if the person keeps taking the medication, it joins the unprocessed medication, which may build up to toxic levels.)
Although the “pleasant” affects of alcohol seem to be very apparent, are most people who drink aware of alcohol’s toxic or poison nature? I feel I could not imbibe something that is so obviously bad. I mean, something that can cause one to vomit or pass out cannot be good (and many of the people I know of who drink don’t seem to care about this point).
Or was the information I learned (as a peer health educator) overemphasizing the toxicity of alcohol?
What’s the big mystery? People have been drinking (in moderation and excessively) for thousands of years. As Frankie put it, “I’m for whatever gets you through the night.”
Yep. If used in moderation, alcohol is more likely to prolong your life than shorten it. Studies have shown that people who have one drink a day have a significantly lower risk of heart disease, for example, probably due to the fact that it thins your blood. (I believe there is a possible link with alcohol to breast cancer, but I don’t know how conclusive it is. Also, heart disease kills more women than breast cancer, so women still come out ahead over all.)
It’s just a mystery when they want alcohol with everything they do, yet even I wouldnt’ call them alcoholics.
Take the big boss around Albany? Well we gotta show her the bars. Never mind she doesn’t drink much.
Go golfing? Well, we’ve gotta have a beer on the course.
(Once)Have beer in the office fridge? My coworkers thought this was really cool…but then they have to drink a beer at 10:00!
My birthday party - must go to a bar. Even though I have no need of it.
It gets tiring after a while. And it is hard to be around a bunch of drunks when you’re sober. I think there is absolutely no problem in drinking in moderation, but sometimes, I’d like to go out with them, and see them for how they really are outside of work - not with 3-8 beers in them.
I know I can’t change them, and I wouldn’t want to. It just seems as though the non-drinkers don’t get any votes. And then they act shocked and horrified when I stick to my 1-drink, every time. The very last thing I am going to do, even if I drank a lot, is to get drunk or even buzzed in front of my boss.
I’ll chime in here to say that I must belong to that 1%. I haven’t had a drink in about 20 years, because I don’t like the taste or the buzz, and I hate to throw up. I probably have an addictive personality, so I don’t take enough of any substance to find out for sure. I first got drunk at 13, and by 26, I’d had enough of it to be able to decide I didn’t want to do it anymore. My father was an alcoholic. He never touched it until he was in his 30s. Then he never stopped. I’ve known other alcoholics, and it scares me to death. I’m not going there, and the way not to go there is not to drink alcohol. I’ve played music in bars for 30 years, and now I just loathe being around smashed people. I’m not afraid I’ll become an alcoholic. I can’t, because I hate being drunk so much that I couldn’t do it often enough to like it, and often enough to become so accustomed to it that I was unable to go without drinking.
I am never sanctimonious about it. I wouldn’t presume to tell anyone what to do or not to do, or give any morality or other kind of lecture. I’m not superior to anybody. I just never drink. My main motivation is “don’t become your dad.” If a person would disdain me for my personal choice not to drink, that person can get stuffed.
I’m going to get TheLadyLion in on this thread as chemical dependancy counelling is her profession but it really sounds like you’re decribing people with serious alcohol problems at the very leaset.
You know, WeRSauron, I just finished typing out a reply to your other thread about feeling socially unskilled. Well, this topic is kinda related. Alcohol isn’t nicknamed the “social lubricant” for nothing.
A few drinks will generally lower inhibitions and make it less intimidating to intiate a conversation. I’m by nature a pretty quiet person. If I have a couple of beers out with friends, I get chatty. It’s fun. Everything is just a little easier. That’s a big reason alcohol is popular at social events…
BTW, I’m talking about getting slightly buzzed, not getting wasted. That’s a whole different animal and produces many of the negative side effects you’re takling about.
Granted, red wine is just one type of alcohol, but it is alcohol, and the list of health benefits being shown recently is extensive, including Alzheimer’s, cancer, and heart disease to name a few.
Of course, like everyone said, everything in moderation, but there clearly appear to be health benefits to drinking some alcohol.
Well, we consume lots of things that are technically bad for us. There’s “toxins” in our meat and in genetically engineered crops. Caffeine is a drug too, one that can be toxic when overused. At least alcohol is a natural toxin. People have been drinking in moderation for millennia, and it hasn’t caused any serious effects. And in fact, drinking a glass of red wine a day has been shown to have a few health benefits. (Although you can get the same effect from grape juice, apparently.)
I drink once a week or so, because I like the taste of alcohol. I rarely have more than two drinks at a time. I think that if someone is consuming more than two drinks a night every night, like the OP’s sister, that probably is alcoholism. Which is a much different situation than moderate drinking.
Heavy drinkers are not necessarily alcoholics. Being at university and treeplanting during the summer, I’m literally surrounded by people whose weekly schedule involves drinking till they vomit on Friday nights, Saturday nights, or after their final exams. Are all these people going to be alcoholics when they’re older? No.
Still, it’s kind of strange that some people equate drinking with getting drunk with having fun. If you don’t drink, WeRSauron, no wonder you feel awkward in social situations. That’s why I never go to parties either; everyone’s just there, it seems, to get drunk. Poisoning yourself till you get sick and do stupid things you can’t remember? This is fun? This is relaxing?
You’d think this kind of thing ends after university/college. But after Elenia28’s post: maybe not, eh?
Sometimes I contemplate passing my secular self off as a Bible-thumping fundamentalist Christian to justify my teetotaling. Heh.
Everything is toxic. Black pepper causes cancer in high enough doses. I know about the toxicity of alcohol and that doesn’t stop me. Not that I drink regularly, as well, I’m not of age and neither are most of my friends, but there is that pleasant feeling of problems just going away. I don’t mean to say that I drink to avoid my problems, just a few hours were I don’t have to worry about grad school, my grades, my parents wretched relationship, the fact that my mother’s sick at least mentally, or a list of other things that I do deal with on a daily basis. It just turns down the mental static for a little while. I can also see how this could get addicting, but I refuse to let it, because I don’ t want to lose the ability to take a momentary break.
Oh, and I can get to this state with absolutely no effect in the morning. I don’t pass out, I don’t get sick and I don’t get hung over. Then again, I have a high alcohol tolerance. If any of those things happened, then I wouldn’t do it. I hate beign sick.