Are We Really Having Fun at Bars or Just Escaping Reality?

Hey everybody, this is Nir Eyal. Thank you for tuning into the near and Far Podcast. We are going to be reading Are We Really Having Fun at Bars or Just Escaping Reality? This article asks us to reconsider our relationship with alcohol. Not that it's good, bad or ugly, but this just that we're mindful around the way we consume booze so that we make it something that we enjoy mindfully as opposed to mindlessly.

My name is Nick Gray. I'll be the co host on this episode and I do not drink alcohol. Nir took a break for two years off when he wrote this article and he's recently started re drinking alcohol but mindfully. So we just want to give a little shout out at the beginning here that we're not here to judge you or to lecture you on drinking, but to encourage you to think about are you really having fun or just escaping reality? Let's get into it. Are we really having fun at bars or just escaping reality? Welcome to the near and Far Podcast. My name is Nick Gray, but we're here with Nir, who's going to comment on one of his greatest articles that I'll be reading today called Are We Really Having Fun at Bars or Just Escaping Reality? Nir, you want to say hello to everybody?

Hey everybody, great to be here with you. And hello Nick. It's great to see you as well. And the way this works is that Nick reads through one of my articles. Nick, by the way, is a good friend of mine and the fantastic author of a wonderful book called the Four Hour Cocktail Party. It is a great read. You should absolutely check it out. Nick is here today with us to read through this article and then we're going to pause every once in a while and kind of comment on some of the research in the article and kind of some of the points and elaborate and share some of our personal experience with this topic.

I can't wait. This is going to be a fun one. Are we really having fun at bars or just escaping reality? Taking a hard look at how we socialize helps us spend time the way we truly want. The coronavirus pandemic gave us a pause to ask ourselves if we really should go back to the old way of doing things. For example, many people ditched their traffic snarled commutes from work, from home jobs. The pandemic also drastically altered our social lives. When bars, restaurants and most other venues shut down, many resorted to catching up with friends and family over video calls or by taking socially distant walks. While zoom calls leave much to be desired, it's worth asking whether the pre pandemic way of socializing over drinks was much better. Asking ourselves some potentially uncomfortable questions about the way we get together could help us make important changes now that the world is entering the new normal. Well, I'll take a break now and just say hey to Nir and sort of check in on this. We're about two and a half years after lockdown, and I find as well that people's drinking habits really have shifted. I found that during lockdown, my friends drank a lot. That's just for me. I don't know. I found a lot of people who drank a lot. And however I am finding in certain communities that I am in, this no or low alcohol lifestyle is really rising up, at least over the last year.

Yeah, I've heard it called sober curious that it's not. You're not committing to full sobriety all the time, but taking segments, taking snips of your life, and testing out where sobriety can serve you and where sometimes getting a little buzz may not be such a bad thing. It can actually be a nice social lubricant from time to time. But I think what has changed, you're right, is that by giving us the space to test what social interactions might be like without booze, I think many people have found that actually some experiences might be better sober. And so you're absolutely right. I think we've seen a lot of evidence coming out of the scientific community now that one, it looks like it's actually worse than we thought it was for the body, and two, that the benefits that we thought we were getting from alcohol turned out to be not to be that credible that, you know, we used to think a few years ago that, oh, there's resveratrol in wine, and so we have to drink, you know, dark wine, red wine is supposed to be good for you. It turns out a lot of that research is funded by the French Vineyards Association. Turns out not to be very good research. And so a lot of the benefits turn out to be not so great. The who, by the way, also announced, I think it was a couple years ago, that there is no safe quantity of alcohol. Yeah, I regret that. Yeah, that they used to say that, like, okay, a little bit's good for you. But now it turns out more and more we're seeing that it's a toxin and not. Not to bash alcohol again. You know, I'm not necessarily saying that people should stop drinking altogether, but it is something to think about. I mean, you think about how much money, time and effort people spend on buying organic this and, you know, healthy that. And yet we know that alcohol is a carcinogen. It is classified as a carcinogen. Yeah, we'll pay extra money for not only the booze, we'll pay extra money for the organic fruits. And that doesn't make any sense right there. Clearly, there's some things around alcohol that I think the general society doesn't appreciate, mostly in large part because alcohol is so well marketed. Right. Not just from the manufacturers, but societally, it's just such a part of interacting with people. You go out, you just expect to drink. And so maybe it's nice to test whether these assumptions around if it's really necessary and when it's necessary is always a good idea.

Nice. I like that idea. And we're going to talk about some of our experience, your experience and my own experience with not drinking alcohol. But first, let's. Let's go back to the article for a couple of paragraphs. The Sober Test why do we go to bars? Of course, not everyone does, but According to a 2017 report, 51% of Americans aged 21 to 26 typically go to a bar at least once per week, followed by 42% of all millennials, 24% of Generation Xers, and 19% of baby boomers. Before rushing back to our local hangouts or standing in lines behind velvet ropes, perhaps it's worth asking what bars are really for. For many people, bars and booze serve as the original tinder or grinder, a socially acceptable way to shop for a mate. But not everyone in a bar is on the prowl. Some will tell you they go out for drinks just to unwind and have fun. That's certainly true, but is there a deeper reason? There's a simple test to find out. Two years ago, I decided to stop drinking. While giving up booze has had many benefits, one significant downside is that many things I had previously found fun now seem downright boring. Going to a bar or nightclub sober, for example, suddenly became exceptionally dull. I call this the sober test. To test if you actually enjoy something, you have to try it sober. If you only find it fun while under the influence, it's likely the substance more than the experience that you enjoy. I'm going to take a pause here to just share about my own experience. I recently stopped drinking. Not recently, but about two and a half years ago. And I did that because I got out of a relationship and I said to myself, I don't want to be dating and drinking for the exact thing that you call the sober test, I want to know, do I really have fun with this person or am I just having fun drinking alcohol and hanging out? That's my own little blurb.

Yeah, totally. I mean, so I gave up drinking two years before I wrote this article. I didn't talk about why I first gave up drinking. I gave up drinking because I went to a dinner party and I think I had maybe three drinks for the entire night, so not any kind of bender. And I wore this oura ring that gives you all kinds of information about your body while you sleep. And it was unbelievable. I'd never seen before what just a few drinks did to my sleep. That I went from a sleep score of 85 to 18. And I didn't feel like I had a bad night's sleep. I thought I was getting a good night's sleep because in many ways if you're a little bit buzzed, you feel like you're more relaxed, you think you're sleep sleeping better. But it turns out that the alcohol really does mess up with your deep sleep cycle. That it was all very low quality sleep. And so it wasn't very restorative. And I never knew that it could have that big of an impact. Even when it was just a few drinks, it wasn't a big deal. And so that's when I said, wow, this is actually affecting me physiologically more than I'd like. And then I think what was interesting is that as I wrote in the article, things that I thought were fun turned out to be just like you said, an excuse to drink. Right? Like an excuse to get out of our head here. And so that's where I came up with this sober test of wow. I didn't realize that most bars are just really boring unless you're on the hunt for a mate. Like the reason we. I think maybe I had it in reverse. I thought we'd go to bars to drink, but now I'm thinking we have to drink because when we go to the bar it's so frickin boring. We need something to do. So that's where I came up with a sober test idea.

Side note, have you ever been to a bar in the daytime when it's like super bright and the light, it just looks. I don't know, a lot of them look disgusting.

Yeah, it does look pretty sad.

Yeah.

Then there's a reason that. We'll talk about this a little bit. But there's definitely a reason they turned on those lights.

All right, so back to the Sober test. The same test can be applied to all kinds of activities and even to your relationships. Do you still enjoy your time with that friend or lover when you're both sober? And while I hate to be a buzzkill, you may find that other things you thought you genuinely enjoyed are mostly just an excuse to drink. Take spectator sports. Can you get through nine innings of a baseball game sober? Ever tried watching golf without a drink? Good luck. Of course, some sports fans love the intricacies of the game enough to get through it dry. More power to them. But I sure couldn't. I wasn't alone. One study found 40% of spectators at baseball and football games are on the sauce. Another poll found that 8 out of 10Americans watch sports on TV at home with a drink in their hand. Many people can't dance unless they're drunk. Fellow members of the Self conscious club have been having trouble letting loose for thousands of years. The Roman philosopher Cicero said more than 2,000 years ago, almost nobody dances sober unless they happen to be insane. What about karaoke? When was the last time you got on stage sober to sing a cringeworthy rendition of Don't Stop Believin? Hmm. I wonder why that is. Of course, there's nothing wrong with any of these pastimes. I'm no prohibitionist or killjoy. Sports, dancing and singing are wonderful and we should all enjoy them more often, not less. But if these activities are inherently fun, which I believe they can be, why do so many of us need to drink to do them? Something's amiss. Too often, what's really driving us is a need for escapism promoted by the multi billion dollar liquor industry that relies on selling and illusion. Yeah, I mean, it is a multi billion dollar industry. There's nobody out there that's supporting sobriety. Really. They're certainly not a multi billion dollar industry.

No, no, there isn't an incentive to. Nobody's making money on you not drinking. I don't want to be super cynical about this. Right. Just because somebody has an incentive doesn't mean it's necessarily a nefarious incentive. That doesn't mean they're trying to exploit you. But it also is worth asking ourselves, are we doing this behavior mindfully or mindlessly? Again, I don't pass judgment on drinking. In fact, now since this article, I've started drinking again. Not. I mean, I'm much more cautious about or much more thoughtful, I should say, about when I drink and when I don't drink. And I use this sober test to know whether it's Something that is an activity that I would only enjoy with alcohol. I think that's what's really been the revelation for me is that I've raised my bar for how I want to spend my time. That if I only enjoy that activity when I'm not sober, then I probably don't really enjoy that activity. I think that was a big revelation for me. Whereas now, as opposed to saying, no, I never drink, there are activities that I can enjoy with or without a drink. For example, I went to brunch with a bunch of friends and we were having a great time. And I can honestly tell you that that glass of champagne that we had at brunch, it was somebody's birthday, it made an already enjoyable activity even more enjoyable. Whereas for me, you know, I've been married now for 20 years, going to a bar without a drink sucks. It's only with a drink that going to a bar is bearable. And so it's made me really think, like, you know what? Maybe I should figure out how to deal with my FOMO and realize that bars aren't really my thing anymore. And that's okay.

Remember our podcast last week where we talked about that same idea with the phone, where when you were more mindful of what experiences you wanted to use, it's almost like this is arguing for the same thing, to be more mindful of your drinking experience? Is that the correct thesis?

Yeah, you're absolutely right that it was when I took off those two years from drinking, and then I actually found, now I think it's a healthier approach now that it's not a complete excise of this activity from my life, like you said. So the article we read last week was about digital detoxes. Saying I'm not going to touch my phone at all is actually not as good of an answer as saying, I'm going to moderate my tech use. That people who moderated their tech use had many more benefits psychologically and in their life in general because they learned how to moderate, as opposed to saying it's black and white, it's absolutely yes or no, and there's all kinds of benefits to that. One of the benefits, I think, is that it doesn't tie you necessarily to an identity, right? That if what happens to many people who say, I am this, I am a teetotaler, right? I never, ever drink. If they do slip up, right, in for a penny, in for a pound, then, oh, it's called the what the hell effect, right? Once you break the seal, ok, and the floodgates open, which is pretty dangerous. And also it doesn't teach you that skills of moderating if it's just no all the time. And look, I think there's some behaviors and for some people that it should be, this is my identity. Absolutely not. I never, never, never for some behaviors. For some people it's probably a good idea. But again, it's the right tool for the job. That maybe, maybe, at least for me, I think maybe it's a better approach to say it's not never, never, never. It's only in certain occasions, as per this sober test that we talked about earlier. What about for you? Because you, you gave it up for a couple years and where are you now?

Yes. So I gave it up for around what, June or April of 2020. I haven't had a drink yet. And it. I find that for me it's easier to be all or nothing. And I go through phases in my life. I'm going to give one example. When I was starting my last company, Museum Hack, it was involved in nightlife and we worked with museums and, and I tried to tone down my drinking because I had to wake up early on the next morning. It was really hard for me. When I'd have a couple drinks at night and everybody would try to get me to drink, they'd say, oh man, I haven't seen you in two years. Come on, have a drink with me. So I'd say, okay. And then the next night, oh man, it's this birthday, come on, you gotta have a drink. It's my birthday. I'd say, okay, I gotta have a drink. Well, finally I said, look, I'm not gonna drink until I hit a million dollars in sales for my business. And that was my goal. And I found that setting that goal to one, make myself better and improve myself, and two, that my friends could rally behind really helped me. So that all or nothing thing still works for me.

Interesting. Yeah. And I think you are the kind of person when you were in that situation that actually an all or nothing approach would really help because temptation was so prevalent for you because if you didn't have a good. So when I wasn't drinking, here's what I would say when people say, well, why don't you drink and say, oh, I'm X month sober.

Right.

I wouldn't say like, oh, alcohol is actually super bad for you. Right. That's a great way to lose friends. I would say, oh, I'm. I'm a year sober. And then that shuts everybody up because they assume, oh, you must have been an alcoholic. Well, I was never an alcoholic. I just didn't want to fight with people about, you know, giving them an excuse. And so by saying like, oh, this is my. This is. This is a clear line. I am sober. Again, like using this sort of identity or having this clear, like, you know, test that you have of. You have to reach that number of sales, it kind of shuts people up. And so I think that, that in a way can be very effective, especially if you're constantly dealing with this temptation. So I could see why you did that.

Yeah. Yeah. I think it was like the peer pressure of it. Yeah.

Do you think you'll ever start. Start drinking again or what would it. I mean, did you. What do you see in the future?

Wow, this is really. This is an interesting. We're going off the article, by the way. That's a good small, small sponsor plug. If you are enjoying the near and Far podcast with me doing these interviews with near, we've been taking a little bit of time every week to read some of Near's best articles. Will you do us a favor and leave a review? In any podcast app that you are listening to, please leave a little review. It really helps to get more listeners thinking about productivity and reading the near and Far blog. Send near an email if you enjoy this format and we will keep it up. Well, about myself, Nir, for your question, what would it take for me to start drinking? I'm not sure exactly. I find that I am focused on my own book called the Two Hour Cocktail Party. And I'm trying to get to 500 people to host a party. And so I find that for me, that is my rallying cry, that is my number. That is the thing that I'm focused on more than anything else in life. And I think for me, knowing myself, how much I love having a glass of wine with fish, for example, how much better steak tastes with a glass of red wine, that there are certain things that are better with alcohol. And yet I do know how it affects my sleep and how it affects my health. So for the moment, I've made the decision that some other things are more important. And I think I'll just wait. I think I'm just. I'm not in a rush right now.

Yeah, I love it. That's fantastic. All right, shall we continue the article?

Yes, yes, yes, let's continue. Is it fun or is it escapism? Just because an activity isn't fun sober doesn't mean it doesn't serve a purpose. If the sober Test revealed that something you thought you liked is not intrinsically fun. Maybe you're drawn to that activity for another reason. Perhaps when you combine the activity with alcohol, it becomes a permissible way for you to avoid reality. Forget about your problems for a while, and act in ways you can't without booze. Bars and booze makers are happy to serve you a cup of cheer. In fact, bars are designed to be boring if you're sober, providing all the more incentive to keep drinking. Think of all the ways bars are built to get patrons to imbibe. They turn down the lights because studies show doing so gets us to drink more in less time. The music is so loud that it not only impedes any conversation below a shout, but but also impairs our hearing. If you can't have a conversation, what else are you going to do? Drink. Of course, every aspect of the bar design, from the counter height to the kind of stools or chairs, helps to draw in people and keep them guzzling. Despite all the obvious and not so obvious ways, bars are built to send as much drink down our throats as possible, the onus is still on us. The businesses are giving patrons what they want, a socially acceptable way to get out of their own heads. And that's okay to an extent. People have been changing their states of consciousness for a long time, whether through meditation, ayahuasca ceremonies, prayer, reading books, or watching tv. Using an activity to get out of your headspace and into a different reality for a while is fine. But let's be honest about why we do it rather than give it a bogus veneer.

Yeah. So this, to me, is a big incentive to evaluate when and how you drink. Because for me, I hate being a sucker. Right? I just hate it. And so when you think about all the things that the alcohol industry does to get you drinking, to me, it pisses me off. I don't like to be manipulated, right? I write about how consumers are manipulated and coerced into behaviors they don't like. And I have a very high ethical bar for how this should be done in a way that gives people what they want, what they don't regret. And if there's one product that people constantly regret consuming, it's alcohol. You always hear people say, oh, I drink too much, and people constantly regret. And of course, but for some reason, it's not cool to point a finger at all the bad things that the alcohol industry does to us, that it's considered antisocial to not consume or to even question the ways that, like, you Know, like I wrote in the article, that bars are engineered. This is not by mistake. Folks like, they are engineered over hundreds of years now, they've figured out how to get you to drink as much as possible and they don't care if it's good for your life or not. That's not their business. Their business is to sell more booze. So it's really going to be up to us. And again, I drink now. I enjoy a buzz from time to time. It's great. There's nothing wrong with it unless it's done mindlessly, unless it's done to escape reality. And of course, I'm not even talking about full blown alcoholism, which is, which is a terrible disease. I'm just talking about over consumption in a way that we later regret. That's what I'm trying to minimize is regret that if you, if you consume or you don't, that's not really important. It's not, it's not that binary. It's about whatever lifestyle you've chosen for yourself. Is that something that you will look back on and say, that was good. That was something I appreciate. So, yeah, when I celebrate a glass of champagne with friends at a birthday brunch, I'm glad that happened. It was a joyful experience. But if I go to a bar and I realize that I drank too much and I spent too much money and then my health suffered for it, and I didn't even have all that much fun without the booze, then I know that's probably a decision I'm going to change in the future.

Choose better fun. Knowing that some things we do are more for escapism than for fun, we can ask ourselves two things. Number one, why do I need this escape? The craving for distraction is caused by an internal trigger or negative feeling that we wish to escape. By naming the preceding internal trigger, we can identify when we're feeling something that won't be solved by escaping reality. Did you have a grueling week at work and just want to blow off some steam? Have at it. Or maybe it goes deeper than that. Maybe this bad week at work wasn't a one off and your job hasn't been bringing you enjoyment or satisfaction recently. In that case, escaping reality in a bar isn't going to solve the problem. It may be time to take action rather than trying to numb the pain. Are there better ways? As the pandemic has shown us, there are other things we can do with our time and money. There's an entire world beyond the bar. For example, the US National Park Service reported that May 2021 saw the highest ever number of recorded visits to Yellowstone national park for the month of May. Other national parks saw similar spikes in attendance. After months of being confined to indoor spaces alone, people were rediscovering that the outdoors can also provide an escape without chemical enhancements. Perhaps the next time you're reflexively finding yourself drifting toward a watering hole, you'll find something more creative to do than drinking. Maybe you'll ask a friend to go on a walk and talk through a local park. How about joining a sports league to meet other singles and play together Instead of mindlessly staring at the action on tv, Perhaps you'll take a dance lesson so you'll know what you're doing on the dance floor. By understanding our deeper motivations and understanding why we really do what we do, we can make sure we spend our time in and our lives the way we want to. This has been a reading from the near and Far blog of Are we really having fun at bars or just escaping reality? Something from that last part, near really made me think about my own journey of not drinking. I will say this about not drinking. There is no easy way to turn off and almost immediately go into relaxation mode. There's nothing that I have found that was as effective as. As the. I'm sure, I'm sure there's other substances out there that I could explore. But the chemical way of having a drink to immediately shift from in stress zone to sort of this relaxation, you really have to work for that in the sober lifestyle. I was curious if you had any thoughts or something else.

Yeah, it's a great point. And maybe that's why we shouldn't drink for that exact reason, that it's a shortcut, that maybe it's not supposed to be easy, right? Like we have emotions as signals to tell us intuitively to feel things should. I mean that's the reason we have emotions in the first place, right? When we had that. That spidey sense almost of I'm feeling something, I'm not really sure why, what's going on in my life that I should bring attention to that, to that feeling. That's why they're there. So in a way, numbing your feelings is a fantastic way to not get those signals, right? If you're feeling sadness, if you're feeling doubt, if you're feeling fear, if you're feeling stress, they are trying to tell you to change something about your life. But of course, if you feel stuck, if you feel a lack of agency, if you don't feel in control of your life and you can't change those things that are causing you emotional heartache. Those internal triggers we talked about earlier, then it feels really good to drink it away, right? Because that's a great way to numb those emotions. Then of course you can get into some very, very unhealthy behavioral patterns. So maybe the. You're absolutely right. There isn't another solution and maybe there shouldn't be. Like, maybe that's part of healthfully dealing with these sensations as opposed to trying to escape them. And this is what I call the definition of distraction is trying to escape those uncomfortable emotional states by doing something that we later regret versus using those emotional states. What high performers do is they, they have the same emotions, but they use them as rocket fuel to propel them towards traction rather than trying to escape them or numb them with distraction.

Some of the things that I found that, that similarly helped with that were like stretching, foam rolling and meditation. All activities that take a rather significant amount of time. I like your reframing of that.

Yes. If that works great. I would, however, caution in a way against that. I think what I'm advocating for is solve the actual problem or come up with a coping strategy that makes that emotion not debilitating anymore. So I know people who are addicted, and I don't use that word lightly, that has a very specific definition, but they are addicted to some of these self help practices. You can get addicted to meditation. And in a way, meditation can also be a distraction. If the way you deal with your problems is to always go into a corner and meditate as opposed to dealing with those issues, dealing with the family stress, dealing with the way you feel about a world gone crazy, the way you deal with financial insecurity, whatever the case might be. If you don't deal with those sensations and your solution is taking a drink or watching TV or scrolling social media or meditating or exercising them away, that's also a problem because you're not actually fixing the issue, right? I mean, we see this in the fitness world all the time. Everybody knows that. Fitness fanatic, that works out way too much. And you know what they're running from. We roar them, say, oh my gosh, wow, what a great marathon. Good for you. But you know what they're running from? They're running from their problems. When it becomes to an extent that you're hurting yourself, you're not giving the time to your family, your friends, your finances, all the things in your life that you also need to pay attention to. And instead, when you feel crappy, you exercise or you meditate your problems away. That's also not a good answer. You can also get addicted to those type of behaviors. And remember, any analgesic. Any analgesic, anything that removes pain is potentially addictive. So it's not just, you know, booze and drugs that's addictive. Anything that removes pain. And there are cases, There are cases of people getting addicted to water. Like literally, people can get addicted to water because it takes their mind off of having to do other stuff. So it can be a tool. We just don't want it. We have to also recognize that it's not the end all that the end all is actually solving and dealing with these issues that are causing the internal triggers in the first place.

Really fascinating. Well, listener, if you haven't already, you can download a free indistractable workbook off of nir's website. You'll learn about all about the hidden psychology driving us to distraction. You'll also receive Near's weekly newsletter with his latest articles. You can unsubscribe anytime. Check that out@nearandfar.com this has been an episode of the near and Far Podcast where we are reading some of Near's latest articles. If you have a request, tweet it at near and maybe he'll read your article suggestion. This has been Are we really having fun at bars or just escaping reality? Please leave a review on the podcast app that you listen to. Near reads every single one of them. Thanks for listening everybody.