Thinking about drinking

Yes, alcohol is risky, but I'm still going to drink. All the time.

This is how risk averse I am:

In high school, crazed with hormones, I convinced my girlfriend to insert a sponge contraceptive. As a backup to the condom I always wore. I believe I also pulled out. And if that weren’t enough to prevent getting a woman pregnant, I also wore my hair like this:

So I’ve been nervously reading studies showing that drinking alcohol increases my odds of dying. I’ve suspected alcohol wasn’t good for me ever since high school when peach schnapps made me blackout so completely that I did not remember telling my friends about the sponge thing.

But it felt scarier when the Surgeon General suggested that Congress pass a law slapping cancer-warning labels on booze, and when the World Health Organization declared that “no level of alcohol consumption is safe.” Plus, I had my own data showing me this. For different articles, I’ve tracked my sleep on many devices – Oura ring, Whoop band, Apple Watch, yelling “Are you awake too?” to my lovely wife Cassandra. The data was clear that drinking, especially late at night, disrupts my sleep and skyrockets my heart rate. I think of this as “working out while sleeping” but I suspect that’s not how it works.

None of this is surprising. Of course teetotaling is better for you. I’ve never had a single friend who Darjeelinged himself to death. When I tell my doctor how many drinks I consume per week he never responds, “Not enough!” and hands me a prescription for Jack Daniels.