How sober should a writer be?

https://yalereview.org/article/crosley-how-sober-should-a-writer-be

by samclemens • 10 months ago

43 59 10 months ago

yalereview.org

laptopdev• 9 months ago

Well, I know how sober a driver should be...

b_e_n_t_o_n2• 9 months ago

Not sober at all

I write my best code a little tipsy

free_bip• 9 months ago

So the Ballmer peak is real?

user_78323• 9 months ago

I thought that he was associated more with coke?

Though both of them can combine for a very interesting experience, or so I've heard...

(Nerd snipe: cocethelyne is uniquely cardiotoxic, and is somehow even worse than cocaine. Even amphetamine salts are "healthier".)

estimator72922• 9 months ago

It really is

matwood3• 9 months ago

So the Ballmer peak is real?

Haha...when I used to golf, 2 beers (American swill, no fancy high alcohol types) was the optimal amount. It was just enough to make me relax, which is so critical for a good golf swing.

npteljes3• 9 months ago

I think that people feel that it's real, especially when under the effect. But I highly doubt its real efficiency, and especially its sustainability on long term.

But, it feels good.

chao-2• 9 months ago

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.

colechristensen4• 9 months ago

A touch of alcohol turns the overthinking volume down which often leads to more productivity and better code. A not so uncommon ADHD experience. In university of course also sometimes I would do my programming drunk and the result would regularly be that it worked but the solutions would be very odd.

Standard ADHD meds often lead to playing Factorio for 17 hours in a row and forgetting to eat.

b_e_n_t_o_n2• 9 months ago

I think its good for enhancing taste, fluidity, and creativity, obviously not good for strict engineering but that's not all we do...

conception• 9 months ago

Intoxication is basically the “temperature“ setting on a writer.

garbagewoman• 9 months ago

Reductive

speedgoose• 9 months ago

If you get a watch that measures heart rate variability (HRV), you will notice that alcohol is significantly reducing it, which is associated with a lot of things you don’t wish to yourself. And it doesn’t have to be a lot of alcohol.

So how sober has a simple answer if you care about your health : fully sober.

golson_kindmind• 9 months ago

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.

herodoturtle• 9 months ago

HN poetry right here.

Thanks for sharing.

matwood3• 9 months ago

I agree with you completely. I think what the US is seeing now is a rejection of the binge drinking culture (which is a good thing), but going to the other extreme.

I also see a lot of over indexing on minutia. For example, worrying about drinking a couple glasses of wine, but then never exercising and sitting at a desk for 18 hours/day.

There's also the mental health aspect that you spoke about.

colechristensen4• 9 months ago

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.

ycombinete2• 9 months ago

This is a logical fallacy called Survivorship Bias.

vasco• 9 months ago

if you care about your health : fully

If you care ONLY about your health

yohannesk• 9 months ago

But is that even true? If you get enjoyment out of a drink in moderation, that affects your mental health which in turn affects your physiological health no? So maybe it's not healthy for all individuals to abstain completely. I don't drink except on holidays/events with friends or family where I can get the effects in 1 or 2 beers haha

loeg• 9 months ago

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.

FromTheSteppe• 9 months ago

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.

apparent• 9 months ago

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...

freetime22• 9 months ago

I have very little desire to read a novel centered around drinking or drug use in 2025. That subject has been covered pretty extensively - and the writers who explored it have mostly either found moderation in their later years or paid a significant price.

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 would be more interested to explore that.

Edit: To be clear, some of my favorite writers were very heavy into drugs and alcohol: Kerouac, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, etc. I’m not criticizing their work - which again are some of my personal favorites - but if you read their biographies they often don’t end well. My thinking is what would these novels look like if written in 2025 and not set against the backdrop of substance abuse.

pjerem4• 9 months ago

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.

mysecretaccount• 9 months ago

What is "low but not micro"? 80ug?

ssl-32• 9 months ago

How socially-suitable is that?

I think a key part of freetime2's quoted excerpt is the part that relates to social acceptance.

Right now (well, not exactly now, but tomorrow-now) I can pop into any random over-21 bar near me and buy some drinks for myself and whoever else happens to be around.

And that will be perfectly OK, socially-speaking, according to anyone I'm buying a drink for, and the bartender, and anyone who sees me behave in this fashion.

Even leaving aside such notions as legality and length-of-trip: LSD is a long, long way from reaching that level of social acceptance, don't you think?

anal_reactor2• 9 months ago

I love LSD. It's the only thing that makes my depression go away, even for a brief moment.

jrflowers4• 9 months ago

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.

zer00eyz2• 9 months ago

A surprising number of my colleagues over the years have been know to dabble in all sorts of things to "enhance performance".

Adderall: at one point in time I think half the engineers in the bay were popping these. They were practically free and available everywhere during the dot com bubble recovery.

Weed: A good number of JS engineers I know are just miserable people to work with till they smoke a joint.

Drinking: From casual to alcoholics, drinking culture used to be huge in many bay area offices. This has died down... still there but more discrete.

LSD: there is a shocking amount of this, your average dev team likely has someone who micro-doses if not more...

Cocaine and MDMA have gone the way of the dodo: fent made them mostly non starters.

specproc• 9 months ago

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.

matwood3• 9 months ago

my top productivity booster is total, multi-month sobriety

For me, it's early morning workouts. If I have time to do jiujitsu at 7am, then my entire day is super charged. I've tried with other sorts of workouts, but I think there's something about being put under that much stress first thing in the morning that makes the rest of the day feel like easy mode.

babblingfish• 9 months ago

I found free public versions for some of the essays in the compilation.

Show Mr. and Mrs. F. to Number—[1]

The Crack-Up[2]

[1] https://fitzgerald.narod.ru/zelda/shownumber.html

[2] https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/f-scott-fitzgerald-...

scotty793• 9 months ago

How is drinking even a thing? Why would anyone with a brain poison themselves voluntarily?

npteljes3• 9 months ago

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.

scotty793• 9 months ago

control being one of the central

I could agree that inebriated, fried brains are easier to control by the rich. Sale of alcohol was always a mean of controlling populace and extracting wealth from it.

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.

Ale those things are super easy, when the culture doesn't force you to drink first to allow you to do them.

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".

Self-harm is never smart.

gsf_emergency_4• 9 months ago

I'm sure some of you here comment only when you are drunk. What are your expert takes? (Not asking for a friend)

In particular, how do you feel when you do that? Mildly elated? Slightly cheesed-off but still cheery?

How sober should a writer be?

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