Why this country star suddenly quit alcohol at 45 (it’s a huge scam)
It’s natural to lie to yourself when you have a problem with alcohol.
I know I did, in multiple ways.
I lied that alcohol wasn’t actually that bad for my health even as it was clearly starting to damage my body inside and out.
Then I lied to myself that “strategies” could help me limit my drinking long-term. Silly garbage like, “I’ll only drink on weekends (it’s a trap), I’ll only have one drink a night (never works for long).” That sort of thing.
But I also lied to myself that alcohol was imporant for me creatively and career-wise.
Sure, I would come up with some pretty unique writing and business ideas when I was drinking, but nothing my brain couldn’t have drummed up on a nice nature walk or in the shower instead.
The latter is one of the more insidious ways we restless, creative types trick ourselves into believing that alcohol enhances our lives.
It’s such a scam.
The ‘alcohol enhances creativity’ lie
Take country music star Chris Stapleton for example.
For the longest time, he felt that he needed to drink not only to be creative but to build credibility in his field.
I feel this.
When I started in journalism, it was still very much a hard-drinking profession.
The internal narrative was: if you don’t take part, you’re probably destined to be an outsider.
Stapleton touched on this in a recent interview with GQ Magazine, where he perfectly deconstructed the lies that you:
- Need alcohol to be creative
- Need alcohol to be credible in your career
Here’s what he said:
“When you’re younger, you feel like you have to do certain things in order to occupy some of these spaces, to make yourself feel like you’re legit.
“You want to feel things.
“You want to be able to write about things authentically.”
But then he deftly shifted the narrative to other professions to reveal the silliness of it all:
“If somebody working a different kind of job drank themselves to death in the name of being better at that job, it wouldn’t make sense to anybody.
“We wouldn’t say, ‘Oh, he must have been the greatest electrician who ever lived.’”
The body pushes back
Stapleton also accepted what I, many of the sobriety writers on this site, and many of the celebrities I talk about in my publications Famously Healthy and Famously Sober, eventually have to when they hit a certain age.
Once you get into your 40s, you can’t pretend alcohol isn’t killing you anymore.
Your body starts pushing back.
As I wrote about in this piece about a 40+ actress who also kicked the booze recently, there are usually two choices at this point.
You either listen to your body and make a change, or you continue your final spiral into the earth.
Here’s what Stapleton told GQ:
“I didn’t have to go to rehab, but from a 45-year-old-man health perspective, a doctor’s gonna look at me and go, ‘Hey, man, probably cut out the drinking,’ and I’d be like, ‘Okay, cool’.
“I like to tell people that I got into a drinking contest with myself in my 20s, and I lost.”
Different routes, same destination
I didn’t go to rehab either, nor did I talk to a doctor, get therapy, join AA, or anything else like that.
All I did was:
- Download a bunch of audiobooks
- Tell my wife I thought I had a problem so I’d be accountable to at least one other person
- Build strategies and systems that kept my novelty-seeking, ADHD mind and body focused on healthier pursuits
You know yourself better than anyone else.
What would work for you? Maybe you need to talk to an impartial third party. Maybe AA is the answer.
I can’t speak to most of those other options, but what I will say is that the route is less important than the destination: an alcohol-free life filled with happiness, energy, productivity, and self-respect.
Learn from Chris Stapleton and countless others and don’t let alcohol’s silly lies about creativity and career take you on a detour.
Folks, thanks so much for reading! If you enjoyed this piece, please give it a clap or two so others can find it!
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