A recent study reports that no alcohol is good for your health, which is terrible news for everybody who has a real job and wants to decompress.

Unfortunately, the news is true. Forget the French, forget your wine club, forget the beverage industry’s claims that beer is good after running. Not even a moderate amount of alcohol is worth the risk to your body. It turns out that sitting isn’t the new smoking. Drinking is the new smoking.

As someone trying to retire from alcohol, I am acutely aware of the pros and cons of drinking. Love champagne, hate a champagne headache. Love the margarita, hate the salt-bloat. Love the feeling of forgetting my problems, hate when I wake up from alcohol-induced anxiety at 3 o’clock in the morning and remember my obstacles are still there.

Adulthood is a tricky thing. Once you know that something has no upside, it’s hard to see anything but the downside.

NO WAIT THAT’S A LIE.

There are so many things we do that are bad for us — or just don’t work — and yet we do them, anyway. Think about your job.

Interviews don’t correlate to performance, but we compel candidates to dress up in their fanciest business attire and roll into our offices and ask a bunch of dumb questions like we’re oracles and can predict the truth.

Performance reviews are garbage and don’t get to the heart of achievements, outcomes or obstacles; however, don’t tell that to the boss who thinks he’s doing you a favor by sitting down with you regularly and giving you feedback.

Wellness plans don’t deliver. They try to reward us for being healthy — and some companies offer to cook us healthy meals in the cafeteria — while still forcing us to commute to work, shoving us into open-office work environments, and making us sit all day in long meetings that don’t need to happen.

It’s not hard to see why so many people ignore science and drink socially or excessively. Spirits are worn away by a society that doesn’t bend or flex to commonsense or science. And it’s hard to fight back against nameless and faceless people who run corporations that make our lives harder. Much easier alter reality for a few moments than to change our careers and our lives permanently.

But I’m done with short-term fixes that never entirely fix things.

Now that I know that alcohol is mostly bad for society, I’m trying to make better choices. It’s not easy, but I’d rather be brutally honest than pretend that “moderation” is okay. While I’m not going to wave the temperance flag and badger other people about their choices, I’m not going to let the beverage industries profit and win because I’ve lied to myself about the benefits of drinking. The same people who say that it’s never been proven that drinking is bad for pregnant mothers are the ones who tell me that moderation is okay.

Do I look stupid here?

So, these are the things I won’t lie to myself about: Smoking. Drinking. Eating meat. Pretending that HR/corporate methods are useful.

What’s on your list?

4 Comments

  1. Smoking is a no brainer. I drink on weekends, with dinner, and a good meal. I am slightly anaemic, so will keep eating meat. I have given up sugar – lollies, cakes, biscuits/cookies/bread. No matter what people say, Sugar is the antithesis of Evil.

    I won’t lie about HR/corporate methods being useful either.

    Neither will I lie to myself, or expect anyone else to lie to themselves about tolerating bullies.

    Nice article Laurie!

  2. I quit drinking about three years ago. It was a terrific decision for me because I proved for myself time and time again that I could not handle drinking moderately. I never wanted to quit drinking. But I have zero regrets about quitting.

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