How sober should a writer be?

A perfectly valid comment, no critique.

The way I see it / choose to live my life, not that it’s the “right” way: I enjoy certain things, like wine, in moderation that may have some detrimental health effects. However, a glass of wine and a nice sunset is something that brings me a lot of joy. I’d argue that a certain degree of “ah, fuck it” is psychologically healthy which can improve overall health.

I also have a bourbon and cigar on Sunday nights, usually paired some Jazz or an old movie. Sometimes I put butter on my bread even though it’s “bad” for my arteries. Let the chips fall where they may.

I don't think alcohol-lowered HRV is particularly meaningful for health outcomes. HRV is lower when you're sick; the causality probably goes the other way.

You are absolutely right. But those of us who live in 3rd world dictatorships are here for the fun time, not the long time. The more we live the more we experience corruption, inflation, infrastructure failure, war, water shortages, etc... Hard to do anything productive sober.

> if you care about your health : fully

If you care ONLY about your health

I've had several relatives live to quite advanced age drinking more than a person should so I'm not particularly interested in theories about how my heath demands teetotalism. Great if it works for you or you personally need to do it, not everybody does.

I have a watch that measures HRV and have seen nothing that seems a signal linked to behavior.

There are associations, but correlation is not causation.

I recall reading an NYT article about the relative health risk of various drinking levels. It seems that light drinking does not have much of an effect on longevity:

> For those who have two drinks a week, that choice amounts to less than one week of lost life on average [1]

Could it reduce quality of living without reducing lifespan? I suppose. But I had been led to believe, by many news articles, that drinking even one drink a week was going to do me lots of harm.

My takeaway from this is that news outlets like to get clicks by telling people surprising and terrible things.

1: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/15/magazine/alcohol-health-r...

Reductive

Whilst enjoying all of the above from time-to-time (though we call Adderall 'speed' in Europe and don't give it to children) my top productivity booster is total, multi-month sobriety.

> A lot of us are drinking less, but I’m not sure we’ve really come up with a suitable replacement yet - socially speaking.

I have had interesting experiences with low (but not micro) doses of LSD. It felt way more interesting than alcohol and way more safe and you can be much more functional than with alcohol while having a great time.

But the effects are way too long (~8 to 10 hours at low doses) to be a good alcohol replacement at social settings.

> I have very little desire to read a novel centered around drinking or drug use in 2025. That subject has been covered pretty extensively

I like this reasoning. If a character in a book does drugs then the story isn’t interesting, if a character in a book doesn’t do drugs it is.

Myriad of reasons, control being one of the central. By ingesting substances, one can directly influence their inner world, and for many, that possibility alone is priceless. Additionally, most of the popular substances feel good on the short term. Alcohol, for example, lowers stress, and inhibitions in general, so it's easier to strike up a conversation, or to share a vulnerable secret and feel good about it, or to start dancing. So, drinking specifically is attractive in many ways, mostly short term.

>Why would anyone with a brain poison themselves voluntarily?

Getting back to this, some people also hurt themselves, with the specific goal of hurting themselves, or to attain something by it, or to give expression to their feelings. Specifically, I'm meaning self-harm here. And substance abuse can be partly done for self-harming reasons. And therefore it's very bad taste to assert that people doing this "don't have a brain". That's denying part of human experience, which no good person ever did in human history.

Don't get me wrong, it's absolutely valid not to support people harming themselves, or to not understand, or relate as to why they are doing it. But since you see that many people are doing it, you can suppose that it's something you don't understand, rather than all of them being stupid.

Hmm... I do a decent job at new, exploratory library code with a glass of wine. Not business logic, not exacting data invariants, nothing I would ever ship to production, but exploring interfaces for a library? Yeah. Asking "What does this really need to do? How do I really wish that I could write the calling/collaborating code?"

I wouldn't trust logic I wrote with alcohol in my system, or any tests that I wrote with alcohol, but getting at the heart of "Why does this library need to exist? What should it actually allow?" is enhanced a tiny bit by a mildly-altered mental state.

Over time, I've decided that it is because I get chatty with wine, and designing a library interface feels like a conversation between me and future engineers who might use said library. And then I stash it away to read and reconsider while sober.

So the Ballmer peak is real?