Four years ago, on May 8, 2011, I woke up early in the morning and realized that I would never drink alcohol again in my life. The day before, we had celebrated my best friend’s birthday (hi, Kolya!) with vodka, shashlik, games, a guitar, and a lake. There had been plenty of drinking bouts in my life; this one was nothing special, but it was that very morning that I realized the idiocy called “drinking alcohol” had to be brought to an end.
I had tried several times to “quit,” with varying degrees of success: from one week (got drunk on Friday, hungover on Saturday, and then again the next Friday) to several months (wanted beer every day, but held out). But that morning the conviction was crystal clear, and I was 100% sure that yesterday’s shots of vodka were the last in my life.
Four years have passed. In that time I have not once wanted to have some vodka with a nice little snack. Or a cold beer with dried fish on a warm summer evening. Or some cold dry wine with a bit of cheese. Everything that for many people is a cult, a tradition, and for some the dream of the entire workweek, lost all meaning for me once and for all. It feels very good to be sober, to see this world in all its colors, to feel it. The mere thought that I might get drunk makes me nauseous. It will never happen again.
If you think you are not dependent on alcohol, try living a year without a shot or a glass. The suffering will start within a week. Can’t live a year? Then you are dependent. Please, don’t tell me about the aesthetics of consuming elite varieties of alcohol; to me it is all one and the same.
People sometimes ask me, so how do you relax then? Any physical and emotional tension can be relieved at the very least by a full night’s sleep. Besides that there is sports, culture, communicating with people close to you, creative work. And in general, the best thing is not to get tense in the first place.
Quitting alcohol brought positive effects: my health improved, my immunity increased, I started getting infectious and cold-related illnesses less often, my productivity increased, my sense of smell and taste improved. The interesting thing about smell and taste is that now, by smell and taste, I realized that beer is diluted piss and vodka is diluted alcohol, and that there is no “taste” there (in the normal sense). At 30 I feel healthier and stronger than I did at 20.
I want to write a separate paragraph about sharpness of mind, improvements in thinking. Since 2011 I have learned the programming languages Objective-C, Java, Python, Java Script, programming for iPhones, Androids, cloud services, and set up two courses at the university, which I am now teaching for the fourth year. My social skills, my skills in communicating with people, have improved. I started managing a team of up to 10 software developers. Ironically, in that same year, 2011, we made an iPhone app for Alcoholics Anonymous in the United States: AA Slogans.
In our office I banned bringing in, and especially drinking, alcohol. For several years now we have been celebrating birthdays and New Year’s with tea and coffee.
Over these four years I have understood two important things:
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The biggest mistake of my life was starting to drink alcohol.
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The most important event in my life was giving up alcohol.
May 8 is my second birthday.
Are there any negative effects? Yes, there are. My alcoholic acquaintances started turning away from me. Either I no longer have any common topics with them besides alcohol, or they think I am a cultist. But being sober is the best cult I could have ended up in. Thinking about the loss of relationships with some people, I came to the conclusion that this too is a positive effect, and I want to talk about it separately.
More than a year ago I gave up colored carbonated drinks. One winter evening I was meeting with university friends (hi, Tanya!). I shared my experience of quitting alcohol, to which they replied, so why are you drinking Coca-Cola then, it doesn’t do your health any favors either? And I decided to try. It turned out to be fairly easy too. For more than a year now I have not been drinking Coca-Cola, Sprite, or any other sweet carbonated drink.
A month ago I decided to give up media, blogs, and public pages. Global, national, and regional alike. I do not know what is happening in the country or the city right now. I left all groups and public pages on social networks. Besides that, I banned 3516 groups so they would not show up in my feed. This list grows every day by 3–5 groups. The motivation here is very simple: any media outlet provides, besides facts (and are they even facts?), a narrative as well — an explanation of one event or another. In other words: the news has already been chewed up for you and put into your brain. And since a great deal of this information is pouring in, you no longer have time to subject all of it to any kind of critical consideration.
People told me, come on, how can you do without the news, what if you miss something important for yourself. I thought about it: I ran back through previous news in retrospect and did not remember anything that important for myself. And after this month, nothing like that happened either, nothing that would have affected my life in any way.
But a lot of positive effects appeared. I have more time, which used to go into reading news and blogs. My mood has improved. My attitude toward people has improved, because now no one is putting into my head who is good and who is bad. Thanks for the tips, but Biblical truths about good and evil are quite enough for me to understand whether a person is good or bad. I no longer need the services of journalist-interpreters.
I satisfy my need for information with long forms: articles and books. Believe me, there are a lot of books, so I still have plenty of reading to do. And a book is not a dump in a public page or in the media. At the very least, a book has to be written. My choice is dinner at a restaurant, not fast food.
This thought came into my head: giving things up is cool. You cannot give up everything at once, but little by little you can try. For example, I need to sort out food, namely give up unhealthy food. And there will also be a very big job to do with thoughts: many thoughts need to be given up too.
Overall the formula came out like this: give up the bad, fill your life with the good. Give up alcohol, the company of bad people, give up the media. Recommended.