[PAPER FLIPPING]
There is no big story about why I
stopped drinking or about the last drink I had.
A lot of friends have been talking
about drinking less or taking months off drinking.
A semi sobriety had been a trend for a while.
With articles written about it and
fancy minimalism non-alcoholic bars opening in Brooklyn,
I thought I would see if I could stop for a while to sort out
the relationship between what I actually wanted
and what I was just in the habit of doing.
I thought it would be a month or two maybe.
It's now been almost a year and a half.
I am lucky that my relationship with alcohol
is not a serious addiction and that I
have been able to approach this as a casual experiment as
opposed to the profound battle that many people fight
every day.
Nevertheless, making this change has had major effects
on many areas of my life.
Often, in ways I didn't expect.
Many of the friends whom I thought would be judgmental
have been supportive or found it to be no big deal, while others
have seemed to take it surprisingly personally.
It made me realize how much my parents and I depended
on drinking as a relational language
and reminded me of the generational differences
in our attitudes.
It helped me to value certain friendships more deeply,
while also making me cognizant of situations
in which I had depended on a few drinks
as a way to ward off awkwardness.
I admit there were some benefits I thought about
before I made the choice.
I'm in my 30s and wanted to slow down on the physical aging
process, and it is true that my skin
got better and my overall physical health improved.
I got annoyingly enthusiastic about high intensity exercise,
I slept better, and got up earlier.
I generally had more energy, and I
felt less anxious, but strangely enough,
when I made this choice, I didn't
think about how it would affect my finances.
Drinking was, of course, something I spent money on,
but I had never quite considered it on its own.
In my budget spreadsheets, it was lumped in with food
or going out.
While I've often had success cutting out
specific expenses for a period of months,
dining out, ordering in, buying new clothes, and yes,
buying coffee instead of making my own,
this experiment with not drinking
was never intentionally a financial one,
and I didn't immediately consider that it might also
be about money.
Although, I don't believe I ever quite
had a serious addictive relationship with alcohol.
I have certainly made many poor, impulsive financial decisions
while under its influence.
One of the things I enjoyed most about drinking
was the permission it offered.
The way in which silenced my internal doubts.
It was wonderful in the moment to get a little drunk and order
extravagantly at a restaurant, to have a few drinks at brunch
and then go shopping for unnecessary luxuries
like pricey skincare or to have a bunch of wine
and lie on my couch and buy things on my phone
that were on sale but that I didn't actually need.
Of course, purchasing alcohol itself
was one of these choices, and each drink made
it easier to not really think about the expense
of the next drink.
I don't know exactly how much money I
saved when I stopped drinking or how much it came from not buy
an alcohol versus how much of it came from not being enabled
by alcohol to make other irresponsible purchases,
but I do know that I had more money left
at the end of the first month of this experiment
than I usually did.
Enough to increase my weekly contributions to my savings
account by about $150 a week or $600 a month,
an amount that seemed embarrassingly large to have
come only from drinking, but that,
when I thought about how drinks add up,
didn't really surprised me.
The amount wasn't enormous, but it made a difference,
and the difference, like all financial choices,
went from seemingly small to pretty big
and a surprisingly short amount of time.
The effects weren't all savings though,
as much as it might be easy to assume
the simple equation of drinking less equals spending
less money.
When I went to my favorite bars now,
I then ordered more food than I needed to with the idea
that, since I'm not drinking, I can afford
to eat whatever I want and need to justify my presence
at the bar by buying something.
Most of us are motivated by treats and like rewards
for sticking to a plan.
I going out budget was reduced, but not
as much as it might have been, because sometimes my reward
for not having a drink was to order an expensive entree.
And although I no longer made stupid financial decisions when
under the influence of alcohol, the money
I had freed up from not drinking sometimes
got spent on the same kinds of things
I would have bought on a drunken whim.
Look how much money I saved not drinking, I told myself.
I guess I can buy these shoes if I want to.
It fit into my budget because I wasn't spending
the money on drinking, but I would
have saved more money if I hadn't
bought either drinks or shoes.
In general, neither the positive outcomes
nor the difficulties of choosing to not drink alcohol
have been at all what I expected.
I went into this choice not thinking about money
and ended up with a suddenly but significantly changed
relationship to it.
At the same time, it's made me aware of my tendency
to just find a different way to spend extra money
and that some of these ways, tipping 30% as a rule
to bartenders who serve me soda water all night,
are better than others.
Overpriced mocktails at mocktail concept bars.
The financial aspect of cutting out booze was a surprise,
and much like a life without booze as a social mechanism,
it's something I'm still learning to navigate,
both easier and harder than I expected.