No alcohol, no coffee for 15 months. This is what happened | Hacker News Reader

No alcohol, no coffee for 15 months. This is what happened

medium.com

(Disclaimer: I enjoy coffee and alcohol but am not addicted to either.)

Hmm, call me cynical but somehow I'm always disinclined to believe these perfect results. For once, I'd like to read - I gave up alcohol and turns out I was wrong. So I went back to 2 beers a week I ended up much happier.

(Aside: You can psychoanalyze my comment to fit any narrative you want, but I think I'm pretty good at introspection.)

Everyone has different experiences, I largely stopped drinking about 6 months ago because I was sick of the hangovers. I don't have issues with the awkwardness of telling people I'm not drinking if we're in a group and people are drinking, but it sure is annoying if you're hanging out with just one other person at night when coffee isn't really an option. Hardest part was the fact that I like me some craft cocktails. I kind of wish there were more tea places open late.

Don't really want to give up coffee though.

I stopped drinking over 4 years ago after a few years of drinking less and less. I've been on and off of coffee for months at a time (I still get back to it when I need to power through work until the next break).

The most surprising thing was how uncomfortable it made others who drink when you go out with them.

"In order to spend $1000 on alcohol I only have to spend $33 everyday. Assume that I have 2–3 cocktails every other day (which are $10 each without tip), including some wine bottles every month for at home I can easily spend $1000."

2.5 * 15 times per month * $10 each + 20% tip = 450. "Some wine bottles" don't add up to $550 extra. I'm sure you save some but it can't be anywhere close to this high. Even if you include standard bar food in this you still wouldn't crack $1k. And at that point you're just not going out, not just giving up alcohol.

Yeah, the author's heading over that paragraph and the paragraph itself conflict. Within the paragraph he mentions that he has $1000 more in his bank account after two months, not one.

There are a bunch of confusing parts. For example:

"Some might think that this is heavy alcoholism, but trust me when I say that having 1–2 drinks everyday in New York is more than normal."

"More than normal" can read as a conflict with the beginning of that sentence (he drinks more than what is considered normal), or, and perhaps more likely, he's illustrating that his level of drinking is normal, if not more normal than most other people, which seems to contradict the meaning of the word "normal".

Or maybe it's 4:30 PM on a Friday and my brain is just fried and I'm over thinking things?

What he's saying is that NYC has a huge drinking culture (small apartments, lots of street activity) where a LOT of social activity revolves around bars. In my experience, 1-2 drinks daily would be considered moderation.

It's definitely a place where you have to learn how to moderate yourself. It is indeed quite easy to blow through $1000 in a month on alcohol related socializing, even if you tend towards the cheap places. Alcohol begets all other sorts of consumption (cabs, transit, extraneous food, pool/foos, etc).

I understood what he was trying to say, but the sentence itself was worded in a confusing way.

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