People face racial discrimination every day.
I face a different kind: alcohol discrimination. Try living in Australia and not drinking the sinful liquid of broken dreams.
You’ll be abused.
The masses will outlaw your happiness.
While on the dating scene a few years back, I faced it first hand. As soon as I told a Tinder date I didn’t drink, they’d walk out the door. Eventually I got the hint …
So I took up drinking again.
The almost-marriage from heaven
One woman I met at a startup event took the cake. I wanted her bad.
She was my type — and extremely entrepreneurial. Turns out she had a thing for me too. The friendship turned into a romance.
“Shall we formalize this with a proper date?”
She said yes. I became starry-eyed. I went to wild lengths to set up a special date full of a series of activities fit for a Hollywood romance.
All was going to plan. It came time to wow her with a cocktail bar I found. It was a new style of bar that didn’t have an obvious entrance and was secret to most Australians.
We got there. Mind-blowing cocktails oozed out of fancy glassware. Magic tricks took center stage.
I was ready to marry her.
The waiter came and we ordered. I got multiple medium-priced red wines. She got cocktails. We drank the night away.
A few drinks in I started to slightly slur my words. The filters came off. I told wild stories. I shared intimate moments. All seemed great…
Then I went to drop her home and she said “we should just be friends.”
I was devastated.
I drank the evil alcoholic liquid to make the night a success. It backfired. The obvious culprit was the wine. From then on I swore off alcohol again. It ruined something I desperately needed at that time in my life: love.
My now-wife disagrees with what happened. She says it was probably my body odor. After she met me she told me the bad news.
“You stank when I first met you. I’m surprised anyone married you.”
Thankfully, through painful dog training, I no longer have body odor issues anymore. I never walk out the door without my wife’s sniff test.
Alcohol perhaps wasn’t the only thing that ruined the would-be marriage to the startup girl.
Socializing with alcohol is a cover-up
Entrepreneur and author of Do Epic Sh*t, Ankur Warikoo, says “If you are comfortable dancing in public without alcohol or drugs, you are at peace with who you are.”
That describes the opposite of my old self, perfectly. I wasn’t comfortable being a 30 year old male that couldn’t find love while all my friends were getting married and making babies.
Alcohol helped cover up the awkwardness, the feeling of being exposed, the disappointment. Alcohol was a band-aid on my love life that kept falling off in the shower when I got home, lonely once again.
As I’ve got older, I’ve found it’s easier to socialize without alcohol.
All the circus tricks and drunk clown faces are removed. People get to see the real you, and when they do, it superglues people to your life faster.
“Drunks have a problem with reality, not with sobriety”
My friend Genius Turner once said this.
In my 20s, I ran around town as an out-of-control drunk. I got so drunk I’d drive my BMW 100 mph down 24 mph streets with kiddy crossings.
All to impress strangers or the dumbasses in my car egging me on.
The truth was I didn’t want to face the raging fire going on in my head. I had deep, undiagnosed mental illness. Alcohol helped warp my reality so I could escape it. It worked for a while until things came crashing down.
Only once I dealt with my mental illness did the need to drink disappear. I no longer needed liquid confidence to get through the day.
Photo by Blake Wisz on Unsplash
Drunk equals moronic behavior
One night I was a drunk passenger.
My friend and I drove a girlfriend’s VW Beetle down a tight side street and scratched thirty cars in a row. We drove the VW home and showed her.
She laughed. We drank more shots. Her parents went crazy and took the car away. She could no longer get to work … and it eventually cost her job.
We laughed some more. Drinks followed.
It might sound funny to read this sort of nonsense, but it’s actually just a sign of moronic behavior.
Drinking alcohol makes us morons. Took me 30 years to learn that.
Alcohol isn’t fun
The dumbest thing about drinking is people think they need it to “have fun.” I mean, imagine thinking that life can only be fun with alcohol.
- Fun in life is achieving your goals
- Fun in life is finding true love
- Fun in life is writing online
Fun isn’t pissing all over the public toilet seat, screaming at randoms, and vomiting at the end of the night.
Someone needs to rewrite this story of fun that society teaches us.
Alcohol steals your tomorrows
One way I got over drinking was to think about tomorrow.
If I had a writing day or a workday after a night of planned drinking, I used that as a deterrent.
“Tim, how can you perform at your best tomorrow if you’re hungover?”
That question hijacked so many dumb drinking nights. Yes, alcohol gives you a few hours of high energy and fearlessness. But the next day you feel like crap. And often, you feel low on energy for days after one drinking session.
Is it worth it? Nope.
Health expert Dan Go says the older we get the harder it is to recover from a night of drinking. So this moronic alcohol life isn’t going to get easier, either.
If you want to do something with your life you need high energy, not alcohol-fuelled days where you walk through life like a zombie.
If you find yourself on the side of the majority, it should be an alarm bell
I understand alcohol is seen as a part of everyday life. Most people will disagree with everything I’m saying. I can feel the hate. But who cares.
I don’t want to be normal and live a mediocre life. I value every minute of the life I got given back after a 2015 near-miss with cancer.
To do what I do requires energy. I’m an energy hacker.
There’s no point copying the majority and drinking myself stupid. That’s how I got stuck in a dead-end 9–5 job in the first place, where I had to kiss executive ass cracks with a brown grin on a daily basis.
Nope. No more. The majority are wrong. Alcohol is stupid.
I know how to make people lose their minds
Whenever I tell people at social events that I don’t drink they lose their minds. Last night I went to Jewish Passover. I’m not Jewish or religious, but I attend every year to learn about a different culture at my chef friend’s house.
After we read Hebrew, drank the salty leaves, and talked about the Israelites and the parting of the sea, it was time to celebrate.
Everyone poured red wine. I didn’t.
“Sorry, I don’t drink. Do you have water?”
For the next hour I fielded questions. People treated me like an alien that urinated without genitalia. This is my kind of fun. I get so many laughs out of telling people I don’t drink.
At the end of the night, the host told my wife I was the life of the party. The host said it’s my I-don’t-give-damn attitude that guests found appealing. It made them rethink aspects of their own life.
Sobriety is an untapped superpower.
Alcohol makes you dumber than a plank of wood
Alcohol damages the brain. According to new research, it changes brain chemistry and can even cause dementia.
Alcohol is making you dumb. Stop being a dumbass.
