Aging with Awareness by Giving Up Alcohol

I turned 50 this past June. As a gift to myself (and as an experiment), I decided to give up alcohol for a year. My original thought before I turned 50 was that maybe I’d make this commitment for the rest of my life. But as I got closer to the milestone birthday, I became increasingly anxious at the thought of never drinking again. I mean, I come from the birthplace of rum, so the anxiety makes sense, right? I thought so too.

Giving Up Alcohol for My 50th Birthday

It wasn’t that I had been drinking a lot to begin with. Some weeks, it was just a beer or two while recording episodes of the podcast I’ve cohosted for years, Pub Theology Live. Some weeks I drank nothing at all; other weeks I had a few back-to-back nights (and days) of heavy drinking that I wasn’t proud of. It didn’t help that I’d also recently fallen in love with gin after decades of not being a fan—turns out I was drinking the wrong brands. (Hello, Roku Japanese craft gin and Whitley Neill Rhubarb & Ginger gin … welcome to my life, and gone too soon.)

My motivation was more health-related than anything else. I wasn’t getting any younger, and it was taking longer for me to recover from the negative side effects of drinking. Plus, all the latest research about alcohol’s impact on the brain and body was consistently clear: It’s bad for us. Even the traditionally touted benefits of red wine are not enough to outweigh the potential long-term damage of drinking more than a single glass at a time. And who drinks a single glass at a time?

My plan was to wean myself by increasing my number of dry weeks every quarter. It didn’t go as well as I’d hoped. I always managed to rationalize a few drinks during dry weeks, so I decided, starting June 1, 2024, I’d quit alcohol cold turkey. I’m the kind of person who can will myself through anything, but it’s quite the journey for me to settle on the “anything.” What can I say? I’m a fickle beast.

The summary of this experiment so far is that I haven’t consumed any alcohol since June 2, 2024. Why not my birthday on June 1, you ask? An epic 50th birthday celebration is why. How epic, you ask? Well, I discovered that a Patrón tower is a thing.

Missing Alcohol

It didn’t take long to notice how much I missed drinking. I miss the deliciously complex and nuanced flavors of craft beer—except IPAs, which I have never liked, will never like, and will always judge those who do. I miss how a couple of glasses of chilled-just-below-room-temperature red wine complements a perfectly medium-cooked filet mignon. I don’t do winter anymore, but when I did, nothing beat the warmth of that first swallow of a neat bourbon or whiskey, or a heavy-handed pour of rum in my Christmas eggnog. I mentioned my thing with gin, right? And brunches just aren’t the same without mimosas.

The times I miss drinking the most? Crowded events where I can’t hide—alcohol served this introvert well. I attended a wedding a few months ago, and the only person I knew was one of the grooms. Making small talk without help from the bottomless open bar was torture. Social lubricant or social lifeline? Can I carry on a conversation with strangers? Of course I can. Do I enjoy it for the first hour or two when I’m completely sober? Hardly ever.

I also miss drinking during times of emotional overwhelm after I’ve sat with the pain and discomfort and grief and anxiety for a while, then consciously decided I wanted to numb myself.

My first and only real nearly-didn’t-make-it struggle with alcohol came after my wife died several years ago. It took everything I had to keep myself present enough to work and parent. Some nights—most nights, and some days—I just needed a break from the flood of feelings. I knew things were bad the time a winter storm forced me to cancel a Pub Theology Live gathering and I decided to have a dry night. It took me four hours to talk myself back from drinking before I fell asleep exhausted from the effort. I still drank the next night. Having to parent and be an example for my then-14-year-old daughter might’ve been the only thing that pulled me back from the edge.

Cultivating Awareness as We Age

It’s so easy to find ways to numb and distract ourselves from ourselves besides drinking: recreational legal drugs, hard illegal drugs, dating, relationships, sex, kink, social media, television, food, sleep, exercise, shopping, volunteering, solving other people’s problems, spiritual practices … the list is endless, and as you can see, not everything on it is inherently bad. I personally and professionally advocate for some of them as tools for dismantling systems of oppression: Rest is anticapitalist resistance; nonmonogamy and kink disrupt patriarchy; exercise is stress relief and embodied healing; social media can be a powerful platform for anyone to speak truth to power; spiritual practices reveal more of us to ourselves. It’s never the thing—it’s how we use it.

Those who profit and benefit from oppression depend on our continual numbing and distraction. As long as we feel good—or better yet for them, feel nothing—we’ll turn a blind eye to the bad. As long as we get our online orders cheaply and quickly, we won’t have to acknowledge the layers of human and environmental suffering it took to get them to us. Is my generation the last that remembers when we had to actually go outdoors to get anything? I’m not against progress, and I acknowledge how it has benefited those who, for a variety of both mental and physical reasons, aren’t able to just get up and go out. But when the harm of progress outpaces the good, we are left with a broken system and a suffering populace.

The path to healing the world goes through us. It means facing ourselves and how we contribute to global injury when we don’t. Facing ourselves—being honest with who we are, our desires, and what we need to heal from—is one of the scariest, hardest, and most courageous things we will ever do. It’s also never too late to start. At 50, I think of myself as just beginning my middle-aged period with probably more self-work ahead of me than behind me. (FYI, I won't begin to think of myself as old 'til I'm at least 80.) I’ve found the work best done in small increments—the single steps on a thousand-mile journey. Otherwise, it’s too overwhelming.

Accepting Personal Responsibility

I never thought I would be a get-off-my-lawn curmudgeon in my later years, if for no other reason than I know the dangers and damage wrought by maintaining lawns. Yet as I get older, I find myself becoming increasingly wary of the speed of progress—how it enables the worst of us, and how it rewards us for avoiding personal and collective healing work.

I’m already tempted to say I’ll do my part for another decade or so, then check out—I mean retire—and rest on my laurels. But as long as I’m alive, I have a responsibility to help make the world a better place while I’m still a part of it. We’re either healing or hurting the world—ourselves and others. I usually reject binaries in favor of both/and, but I don’t see another option.

Will I ever drink alcohol again? I don’t know. I’ll keep you posted. If I do, I’ll endeavor to make it about gently savoring flavors and experiences, not distracting and numbing myself. Non-alcoholic gin is a thing, so I might be able to have my cake and eat it too. The Buddha proved millennia ago that asceticism is not the path. I will still have my cake.

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