Wil Wheaton posted a list of Seven Things I Did To Reboot My Life which might as well be subtitled, Because Now I’m in My 40s. For this guy, all of them hit close to home:
Drink less beer.
I love beer. I mean, I really love it. I brew it, I write about it, I design recipes of my own, and I’ve structured entire meals around what food will pair with the beer I want to drink. The thing about beer, though, is that it’s really easy to just keep on drinking it until it’s all gone …
Like Wheaton, I’m invested in beer culture: I like to collect the glassware and I’m always DTF local craft creations (especially pilsners, which are a terribly underrepresented minority in a world of IPA privilege). But also like him, I’ve lately discovered that drinking alcohol isn’t as easy as it used to be. A good buddy of mine — a friend I used to drink with as a teenager — recently told me he started cutting back on his evening adult-beverage intake because just a couple of beers puts him in a bad mood the next day. I’ve had the same experience, though the following morning I’m not so much grumpy as I am groggy and addlebrained. The reason, Wheaton points out, is due to our metabolizing alcohol as sugar, which means drinking two or three beers at dinnertime is like chugging two or three bottles of Mountain Dew right before bed and then expecting a full night’s sleep to ensue. Even after a pair of seemingly innocuous low-APV drinks I don’t sleep as deeply. As Wheaton says, “it turns out that drinking alcohol to help you go to sleep does not result in good sleep, but does result in feeling like shit when you wake up.” Hence I’ve joined the temperance movement, at least on school nights.
Wheaton’s whole post feels semi-autobiographical for me, from the endorphins produced by writing, to trying to make more time to read, to his preference for running over lifting weights. This is 40, I guess.
