You can spend your entire life minimizing risk, maximizing safety, and avoiding discomfort, or you can actually live. Either way you’re going to end up dead.
I interpreted the comment as a general statement about risk, not about alcohol specifically. Always trying to reduce your risk from bad things to zero is not a great way to live.
Lots of things will increase your risk of cancer, like preserved meats, sitting in car traffic, and sunlight.
Because the mindset behind the modern, health conscious version of abstinence does not stop at alcohol. It tells you to monitor and optimize every single parameter of your health, avoid any substance that may or may not damage your body, just so you can maybe live five more years - five more years spent doing what exactly?
It's a paranoid way of living and frankly people are likely doing more harm to their health by being so anxious about ingesting one nanogram of carcinogens than the carcinogens themselves.
I was diagnosed as celiac only a year ago. Many of my favorite meals and desserts contain gluten because I didn't know I was celiac. I can't have those things anymore. I do miss them, but I don't think I'm "not living" now that I have to avoid them
I'm just living differently and much more carefully about what I eat
as a recovering alcoholic I am so tired of people saying that abstinence is not living. Like... you can't enjoy life sober? And what am I suppose to do with a statement like that? Seems very unaware thing to shout into the ether (my uncle invented the ethernet)
I wonder what's the impact of abstinence in terms of not participating in social events that generate around alcohol consumption. Some cultures rely heavily on drinks for social bonding and such.
I know what the impact of drinking is on socializing before 10 AM. It just doesn't happen very often at all.
After a few drinks, the value of socialization drops considerably and a lot of it is just hanging around because you don't want to go home and feel the effects of the alcohol.
In my experience, a social life that requires drinks for social lubricant goes away very quickly if you aren't drinking. It's an extremely fine veneer of socialization, not real connections
I'm not an anthropologist, so I won't handle this topic with gloves. Cultures are a shared ignorance. They have to be this way, almost by definition, else they wouldn't have any appeal.
The way we discuss health today is different from even 50 years ago. The debate about alcohol isn't new, but things like fitness trackers and smartwatches are. People can now prove it to themselves in real time that "feeling like shit" is not "all in their head", and that it's not a matter of "just drink water" or "eat something".
On the flip side, this cultural step forward comes with a step back. There's a lot of money to be made with this health anxiety.
Moderation > abstinence in most things.