Would You Give Up Wine For a Handful More Days of Life?

My response to a good doctor's equation on drinking and living

What if you could add six days to your life by quitting drinking? Would you quit? If could add two and a half months to your life by quitting drinking, would you?

It appears, now, that this is not some idiotic dinner party question.

Dr. Tim Stockwell, a psychologist and a researcher at the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research, recently told an interviewer that he can precisely determine just how much of your life you will forfeit if you drink alcohol.

According to Stockwell, two drinks per week across the course of a life will shorten that life by 3-6 days. One drink per day across the course of one’s life will shorten it by two and a half months. While five glasses of alcohol a day will shorten one’s life by two years.

So, my question stands: would you quit drinking those two drinks per week or one drink per day if it would lengthen your life by 6 -75 days, depending on how much drinking you gave up?

As anyone who has successfully maneuvered through middle age and is taking on “post-middle age” will tell you, life starts to become more precious. They begin to understand in the way no 25-year-old can, that the real enemy is time. So, I suspect you’d find responses to my question differ by age group.

Dr. Stockwell’s calculations are meant to underscore the recent set of declarations that “no amount of alcohol is safe”. Stockwell himself has been one of the leading lights attempting to convince people that alcohol (and wine in particular) have absolutely no health benefits, as numerous studies have shown. The Doctor is fully on board with the idea that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption.

But back to the question. I can only answer it for myself and to do that, I have to retreat to my own experience.

I’m a 61-year-old man who likes his cigars, used to smoke too many cigarettes, and enjoys a drink 2-3 times a week. I have a 10-year-old boy. My own father died at 60 when I was 16 years old. I’m here to tell you, that I really could have used him and his wisdom for at least another decade. The point is that being around for my son, Henry, is pretty important to me because I experienced the kind of psychological and developmental deprivation that comes when you lose your father during those early years.

On the other hand, I really like Pastis, particularly on a warm afternoon in July like today. I adore wine not primarily for its taste, but for the intellectual stimulation it gives me, for the way my consumption of it connects with places, people, and times I never knew, and because of that soft buzz that lingers with me even after just one good glass. I place the first sip of a well-made Manhattan that arrives at my steakhouse table before my first starter arrives as one of the top ten repeatable joys in my life. And the caress of a beer across my throat with buddies while sitting in the shade after a round of golf on a warm day is something I’d only give up to preserve access to a Pastis or drinking wine.

Here’s my thinking—and it comes with me staring post-middle age in the face and with a son who needs me for at least another 15 years: If the importance of what I’ll impart to my boy, if the support I can give him, and if the safety I need to provide him can only be delivered in the final two and a half months of my life that I won’t have because of my love of Pastis, then I’ve not done a very good job for the first two decades of his life.

This is, I admit, a weird calculation. And it’s a calculation of the type I think few will undertake, even with the wisdom recently imparted by Dr. Stockwell in their pocket. Yet, it IS a calculation. But I don’t think it will have the kind of impact that Mr. Stockwell and all the others of his mind hope it will. But perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps the trauma of the COVID pandemic has radically changed the way we do life math. Perhaps physical health will become a driver of decisions for those of all ages to the point of deciding those extra 6 days are paramount.

But for me, no, I would not give up alcohol for an additional 6-75 days of life.

I realize that in a decade or two I might find myself on my back negotiating with God for just a little more time and this entry of FERMENTATION will rise to the top of my consciousness. Nevertheless, for me, the equation is solved.