I’m zoominating on the high-speed train from Barcelona to Valencia as I write this.
In between looking out the window at the countryside (sun, olive orchards, power line towers, factories, occasional ruins of medieval forts), I also making sure to regularly check what’s happening on the Internet, so you know, so I don’t miss out on something important.
A few minutes ago, this led me to a surging Reddit thread:
“Why do you not drink alcohol?”
Millions want to know, and millions more want to answer.
This thread caught my eye because I myself don’t drink alcohol, and haven’t for the past two years. Why?
Some top Reddit comments apply to me, some not:
– “I drank my lifetime supply” (I definitely did drink, regularly, for years, but having had my fill isn’t what made me stop.)
– “Getting older” (A part of it. With age, drinking just made me feel in general less healthy, though it was probably always true.)
– “Blackouts” (This was actually significant. I noticed that even moderate drinking started to make me not remember what I did the night before, and this scared me.)
– “Tastes bad” (Just add some water to it.)
– “Alcoholism runs in my family” (No. My dad is a lifelong teetotaler and my mom tends to start crying if she has a glass of wine.)
– “I don’t like who I am when I drink” (I like myself much better when I drink.)
So much for crowdsourced wisdom. It’s okay… but there’s one reason I didn’t see anybody on Reddit mention.
The fact is, over the past two years, not drinking alcohol become a part of my identity.
For me, not drinking was at first a health-related experiment… then a kind of on-off habit.
But whatever reasons I initially had have become completely secondary to the fact that now “I just don’t drink.” It’s not something I have to think about, pressure myself to do, feel I need to justify myself over.
Maybe there’s a lesson there?
The way I see it, if you want to make an appeal to people, then identity is as powerful of an appeal as you can make, and much more powerful than any kind of benefit or promise or warning.
This works with yourself as well.
Make something a part of your identity, and it becomes a non-issue to do it regularly, cheerfully, even in the face of hardships and obstacles.
There are intermediate steps, like I said. First experiment, then habit.
But my train’s a-nearing Valencia. So let me just say:
I don’t know if you identify with the sentiment, “I write. It’s just something I do.”
Writing has benefits, as you may know. It also has costs — time, thought, or blood, like Hemingway apocryphally said.
But writing can become just something you do, regardless. And then good things happen.
If you’d like to start an experiment with writing regularly, and maybe make a habit of it, and even an identity one day, then I can help. For more info: