This is part of Quit It, a series of essays on stopping things—or not.
Four times out of five, when I tell a person that I don’t drink, that person responds by telling me how little they drink. Sometimes, they do this with a drink in their hand. It can seem reflexive, like saying “God bless you” after a sneeze. “I don’t drink,” I say, and bam: “I don’t drink that much!”
It plays like a call and response, but it’s not—at least not to me. I’m not implying anything by telling you I don’t drink. I don’t care if you drink. But I realize people aren’t thinking about me when I talk; they’re thinking about themselves. Many, it seems, have yet to learn the axiom “Compare and despair,” and so when someone reveals something about himself that could be perceived as an accomplishment, it’s provocative.
I offer this observation here as my humble way of asking you to try not to be provoked, or at least not turned off, because I, somehow, have gotten good at ridding myself of habits like drinking. This perpetual shedding has been a systematic pattern in my life for some 30 years, wherein bad habits (that is, habits that I don’t want—if you like ’em, keep ’em!) flake off like dead skin. The residual sense of power that results from all this overcoming can function something like a high—kind of like coke, except not, because I don’t do that anymore either. (But I get why you would!)
My addiction to quitting started in seventh grade, when my teacher read some meatpacking excerpts from Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle out loud in class. “I’m not eating meat anymore!” I announced to whoever was listening (likely no one). I stood by my word. It was surprisingly easy, even well before the time that supermarkets were equipped with freezer sections of meat alternatives. I appreciated having a thing to care about. Being a vegetarian contributed to the formation of an identity that I could wield like a prize—it made me stand out with the veneer of social consciousness. I learned to cook for myself and annoy the shit out of people with my decisions. By my midteens, I was well on the road to becoming the man I am today.
Quitting smoking was way more difficult than quitting meat. I smoked from about age 17 to 26. Actually, that’s a bit misleading. For most of that time, I didn’t merely smoke; I chain-smoked. Virtually always. I could go through three cigarettes while watching a 30-minute episode of The Simpsons on my freshman dorm-room bed. If I wasn’t smoking, I was waiting to smoke. I would rush out of movies and restaurants, gasping for nicotine, tar, and carbon monoxide.
I loved smoking, but I regularly felt the crush of addiction. There were times I wanted to quit, when I knew I couldn’t afford this habit as the price I was paying for cigarettes sprinted past the $10 mark following my move to New York. Well before that, in high school, I was so frustrated by my inability to control my habit that I threw my pack out in a Wawa parking lot, only to buy another pack at a different Wawa a few hours later. I wasn’t exactly in the belly of the beast, but I was floating in his trough.
The situation was not sustainable. I feared I was on the fast track to having Bette Davis’ 75-year-old skin at age 35. And then, not long after that, I would die. So I quit.
It was hell. I failed several times. I used bupropion (rebranded as Zyban to market the antidepressant’s side effect of helping people get over their smoking addiction). It sapped my energy and centrifuged my moods, but it did allow me to stop obsessing about cigarettes for enough time to allow the nicotine to leave my system. The rest of the work, agonizing inaction, was up to me. The first year was such torture that I routinely wished a tragedy would befall me so that I’d have a valid excuse to go back to smoking. I’ve never been so addicted to something as I was nicotine, and I believe quitting smoking will always be the accomplishment of my life. Maybe this sounds sad to you: All that work and suffering just to get where I was pre-cigarettes. From the outside, it just looks like a journey back to zero.
But in this case, zero isn’t nothing. Quitting smoking came from the quarter-life realization of my own mortality, which is to say that for the first time I was thinking seriously about the future and what I could do to possibly prolong my time there. Consequences—what a concept! Around the time I quit smoking, I began running because I wanted to exercise but was terrified of going to the gym and looking like I didn’t know what I was doing. (Later, a friend showed me the ropes.) Together, quitting smoking and running created an incentivizing system: I knew that if I had a cigarette, my lungs would feel terrible the next time I ran. Motivation. From the times that I failed—allowing myself one smoke, then smash cut to me tearing my way through a pack within just a couple of hours—I learned that I can approach this only from a black-and-white perspective. I’m either a chain-smoker or someone who hasn’t had a cigarette in more than 18 years. I’m nothing in between. Call it keeping momentum or settling into inertia, but I’ve found that I can follow a program extremely well. Permissive dabbling is just chaos to my mind.
Maybe the biggest thing about doing this was showing myself I could. In some nontraumatic ways, I didn’t feel as if I had agency over my own body as a kid. I was clumsy and often felt like I was at the mercy of my own drives, which tended to lead me to the pantry and away from exercise. Mindfulness was about as tangible as the topography of Jupiter.
So, quitting smoking was a triumph of will that I didn’t realize I had, and it inspired more abstinence. I weaned myself off drinking half a dozen cans of Coke Zero a day in the mid-aughts. I quit weed a few times—at least once in my late 20s because I was worried about my memory, and once in my late 30s, because every time I got high, I had these 10-minute freakouts in which I was suddenly struck by my profound failure as a human harmonized with a feeling that the world was ending. Maybe these were panic attacks? I resumed smoking weed when I felt better about myself, and I haven’t seen them return.
In late August 2020, I attended an outdoor party, one of the few I went to that summer. I brought a bottle of prosecco with me and probably had about half of it when I realized that I was tipsy, and I didn’t like that feeling. I never liked alcohol. I always preferred marijuana. But peer pressure wore me down and turned me into a social drinker who sometimes went overboard. Throughout my drinking tenure, which lasted longer than 20 years, I would tell people that if I never drank again, I’d be totally fine. Alcohol dulled me—the opposite effect of weed and psychedelics. I’d dabbled with mushrooms and got a sense of mastery of my mind and, by extension, my life, so when I told myself that night, I don’t want to do this anymore, I was determined to stick to it. I figured it would be easy, but I had no idea how easy. It was like hanging up a phone. One day, I was someone who drank, and the next, I was someone who didn’t.
Undoubtedly, the social context helped. Were it not for COVID and the resulting quarantine, I don’t think I would have had any reason to stop drinking. For years, my social life had been centered on alcohol—at bars, restaurants, shows, wherever. When that social life shriveled, so did whatever inherent social pressure to keep the drinks flowing. Parties, like the one at which I had my minor epiphany (epiphamini?), were few and far between. Not drinking had nothing wrapped up in it to make it more difficult for me. It was simply … not drinking.
Much like quitting smoking and exercising formed an interlocking system of obligations and rewards, not drinking fit into my next paring-down endeavor: intermittent fasting. After reading encouraging research about the practice’s potential, I slowly integrated it into my lifestyle, starting at 12 hours of fasting, then in a few weeks moving on to 14, then 16, then 18, where I’ve (give or take) stayed for nearly three years. The first month was excruciating; the 35 or so others have been mostly fine. I’m very strict and allow myself only water during my fasting window. Drinking alcohol socially at night (when I almost always did) is simply incompatible with intermittent fasting. If I were out at a bar till midnight (a conservative curfew, for sure), I wouldn’t be able to open my window until 6 p.m. the next day on my current schedule. No thanks!
I used to allow myself black coffee and tea, but as you probably won’t be surprised to learn, I’ve quit caffeine now too. I was drinking about a liter of cold brew a day (I made it myself using Toddy’s “system” and cheap coffee) and figured that that couldn’t be good. Among other things cited on caffeine’s effect on sleep in Michael Pollan’s This Is Your Mind on Plants, he notes, “None of the sleep researchers or experts on circadian rhythms whom I interviewed for this story use caffeine.” Good enough for me! In 2023 I tapered it off week by week for about a month. Unlike the relationship between smoking and running, and drinking and fasting, I thought maybe quitting caffeine would make fasting more difficult, since on most days, all I had to taste during my morning-to-mid-afternoon abstinence was black coffee. But really, that too was fine. I don’t miss it very much on a druggy level—I feel perfectly awake without it—but sometimes I miss the taste of a good cup of coffee. But then I worry about deviating from my “all or nothing”–ness and watching my life slide into immediate disarray, with all my hard work undone. So, abstinent I remain.
God, reading this back, it sounds psychotic when I put it all together. Clearly, I’m great fun at parties. Everyone loves a quitter, right?
I realize that in one way I’m supplanting one set of rules (obeying my body’s various drives) with another (resistance from those drives that leads to abstinence). Yet I relish the sense of agency over myself. I like that I can become something—a smoker, a drinker, a cold-brew fiend, that guy in the bathroom stall announcing that we should do one more bump (I was perhaps him for a moment)— then completely revise who that person is by simple yet challenging refusal. I know that “willpower” is a frequently derided term by experts, and often conceived of as a myth, but whatever it is that’s allowing me to keep telling myself no is only growing the more I do it, like a muscle.
And so I stay quitting. What’s next? Dairy? (I’ve dabbled.) No screens an hour before bed? (I’m considering.) Sugar? (I really should, but I enjoy life too much. Talk to me in a year.) Writing in the first person? (Never.) As long as there’s something to quit, I have the potential to feed this addiction of mine, which will inevitably lead to the ultimate quitting: death. See you in health.
