Malört Liquidity
On the value of a stiff drink
You don’t know how to drink, your whole generation. You drink for the wrong reasons. My generation, we drink because it feels good. Because it’s better than unbuttoning your collar. Because we deserve it!…
Your kind with your gloomy thoughts and your worries, you’re all busy licking some imaginary wound.
It’s clear to me that the anti-alcohol people are winning — non-alcoholic beer (??) consumption is rising, my New York friends are twiddling their thumbs trying to figure out what to do that doesn’t involve drinking, and apparently the entirety of my X feed is full of people that, as a result of more than a millenia of evolution, have become convinced that a couple of pints of Guinness will destroy your entire body. Even Bud Light consumption is still down 40% from its peak.
(Well, maybe that one wasn’t the crusaders’ fault. Turns out you probably shouldn’t alienate your market share and make them question your preferences when your product has no moat beyond “I like beer”, you know?)
Alcohol has a long and storied history in the literary world, and as an acolyte of Hitchens, I’d be remiss if I didn’t offer my own liquidity theory regarding my consumption companion. (For further reading: Living Proof).
Pick a decent product and stay with it. Upgrade yourself, for Chrissake. Do you think you are going to live forever?
If liquidity is the friction between theory and reality, then hypocrisy is the friction between morality and reality. Alcohol can be considered “life liquidity”, in a sense — it eases this friction between what we think we are and what the world around us perceives us as, which is enjoyable and necessary at times to not strain ourselves too much. Of course, alcohol is also an amplifier — why people act hypocritically while drinking is because it paradoxically increases this friction dependent on the interplay between your tolerance and rate of consumption. It’s a stimulant and a depressant, after all, a true sign that you are operating in the liminal space between your thoughts and actions.
It’s not a coincidence that this website is titled “Malt Liquidity”, because a little bit of hypocrisy and a friction in society is a good thing. It creates profit opportunities and drives social interaction. A purely theoretical world would resemble something like academia, where petty squabbles over nothing take up a significant mindshare in the individuals involved, while a purely real world looks an awful lot like a game of Civilization.
Alcohol is a good way for smart people to ease up and get out of their own heads (and get over themselves.) I have no idea if John von Neumann’s favorite hobby was actually drunk driving, but he certainly loved to drink and chat into the late hours of the night and crashed a lot of cars.
When your brain is consistently running and solving the real-time process of everything you happen to focus on, dampening that reflex is not only good for your own sanity, but also lessens the amount you test other people’s patience. Tolerance, beyond genetics and build-up, is also correlated with intelligence. Boozing after work is very much a white collar phenomenon, of course, because drinking is expensive, but when you’re dealing with heady stuff all day, it’s better than loosening your tie.
This creates a couple of counterpoints, of course. First, drinking with a purpose is objectively not the best thing to do. It’s a shitty solution, first of all:
The plan was to drink until the pain’s over
But what’s worse — the pain or the hangover?
I think anyone who’s hit the bottle after rough news can confirm that overwhelmingly, you’re left with both in the morning, and it opens the tail possibility of actually having a drinking problem, which is partly why I hate “dry January” and other arbitrary challenges. Drink or don’t, it’s no matter of mine, but reactionary sobriety is an endless struggle, which is why Alcoholics Anonymous says “you’re always an addict”. Sobriety is a continuous state of being, not something you do for a set amount of time, and the AA line is an incomplete way of framing the fact that forcing yourself to not drink is a pretty miserable thing to do, because there’s the unsavory implication that the reaction to the hypocrisy that exists at the core of human behavior was too much to handle. I don’t avoid hanging out with sober sober people because I can’t drink around them, but because it just kind of bums me out that this is the social environment we have to coexist in.
The other counterpoint is that, for alcohol to not be a societal problem, the level of intelligence and social malleability has to increase over time. People need to build camaraderie, but that doesn’t happen when groups stay insular or the purpose of drinking is reduced to numbing oneself and milling about. All happy hours are not created equal, but facially the right to consume is. Increased incidents due to alcohol is a sign that society is regressing, which you might notice while driving home late from work sometime.
One of my favorite quotes (and an AA line, if I remember correctly) from the Sopranos is there is no chemical solution to a spiritual problem.
This goes both ways — while drinking won’t cure your ills, quitting without a reason won’t either. If you do not know why you need to cut your drinking, then it won’t fix anything about your life (though it is the easiest way to lose weight). Of course, it is poison, but human bodies are incredibly resilient. Quitting drinking to fix your life is the same as taking an SSRI to fix your depression (see: The Philosophy of Depression). It isn’t that simple, there’s more to the story, and you’re not going to see a clear causal result. You can’t use a physical benefit or data to realize an emotional or spiritual outcome.
With younger generations who are just entering the workforce, I see a large gap between alcohol consumption habits — almost as if none of the zoomers ever learned how to drink. Especially post-MeToo and remote learning (thanks to Title IX as the Atlantic of all places highlighted), the potential of drunken, hypocritical behavior being misconstrued and completely derailing one’s life introduced a disastrous tail risk into campus life, rendering colleges a very humorless, unfun place. When you try to define the precise line between “drunken mistakes” and “criminal behavior” in law and also create an arbitrary manner of interpreting unreliable evidence (because, well, people were drinking), you get a mess of contradictions that leave every party unhappy and unsatisfied with the kangaroo court version of justice. Complex systems cannot be reduced to rules, and the brain is the most complex system.
There is no such thing as a drinking problem in your early 20s, because 23 year olds have not figured out everything about society. Getting drunk and making mistakes and regretting choices is a part of life, whether or not you choose to participate. You have to decide for yourself what the problem is and when it arises — some nerds with a textbook amount of what a “healthy amount of booze” provides no more insight than financial media does about why stocks move. It’s inherently absurd to think life and fun is solved to that extent. I see this social awkwardness reflected in the generation gap between those who will only show up to networking events if there’s booze and those who have no idea what to do when the networking event is mostly about booze. Unlike suits, this white collar gap cannot be pristinely tailored away.
To make life fun again, people need to be allowed to explore and mess up. Climate is not a solvable system, nor are stocks, nor are social interactions. You can make educated guesses, but variance is innate to the process of time moving forward. Things are bound to go wrong in unexpected ways. What you can do is simplify it to a consistent method of acting. Don’t order stuff you don’t need and return it for free, don’t bet too much on a trade, stop after the second martini, and relax. A couple drinks aren’t going to kill you…
Such wicked thoughts are almost verboten in our new, therapeutic, upbeat, boring idiom, where there is always some mediocre jerk who knows what’s best for you. I remember going to Aspen about a decade ago to cover the Bush-Thatcher summit that coincided with the invasion of Kuwait. The town sponsored a reception for the press, held at the top of the ski lift on the summit of a perfectly nice mountain. When we got up there, pointlessly beautiful and white-toothed girls offered drinks. I thought a gin-and-tonic would meet the case nicely. “Sorry, sir,” I was told with faultless politeness, “but that would be inappropriate.” When I queried this, I was told that gin-and-tonic was much more potent at that high altitude. “In that case I’ll have a double,” I said flippantly, and was rewarded by a millimetric contraction of the flawless but phony smile.
…but a shot of Malört just might.