The Great Experiment
I had two and a quarter drinks in the last thirty days.
Before that, my normal month was around forty, and a bad one was closer to eighty. Ten on a weekend was easy, especially when you're up till 4am and in a good company, plus a glass or two here and there during the week — it adds up fast when you're not counting. I know the numbers now because I vibe-coded a little app to count them.
There was no rehab, no rock bottom, no announcement with a sunset photo. This writeup is mostly my attempt at untangling what happened, why the mindset shift, and how I got here.
The equilibrium
For twenty-smth years drinking wasn't a problem — it was a choice. At least that was the story I told myself. The more honest version is that there were two of me. The weekend Juriy wanted to dress up, go out, be seen, and descend into the madness with friends (that's genuinely what I called it, "descending into the madness together", and I meant it as a compliment). The Monday Juriy wanted to be great at training. CrossFit was becoming an increasingly important part of my life.
I spent years in talk therapy circling this exact tension and eventually filed it under "unsolvable, this is just my life". I wanted both. And to be clear — I wasn't confused about any of it. I knew the physiology: the sleep disruption, the recovery cost, all of it. But knowledge doesn't change anything when both sides of the scale weigh the same. I wasn't stuck because I lacked information. I was stuck because I was at equilibrium.
The shackles joke
I was the fittest guy among my friends, often top three on the gym leaderboard, and I had a running joke with a close friend: imagine how good I'd be without these weights on my ankles (referring to drinking).
My AI coach, annoyingly, pointed out what that joke actually was — a brag. As long as the shackles stayed on, the imagined version of me stayed safely imaginary and could never be tested. The chains weren't holding me back from finding out how good I could be. They were protecting me from finding out.
The wake up call
Then I signed up for HYROX NYC on a whim and it absolutely crushed me. My goal was 1:20-ish and I finished in 1:45. The fittest guy among his friends turned out to be bottom of the barrel among the fit fam at large. I knew very well that people who did better than me had one thing in common: they had better calendars. A race is built on a hundreds of hours of boring Friday-nights. My gym leaderboard was a small pond that gave me an illusion of fitness.
XENOM Dallas confirmed it a few weeks later. Different format, same story: somewhat good on the strength events, exposed everywhere the engine mattered. The sample size was getting bigger and so was the elephant in the room.
How we got here
It wasn't just fitness stuff. Looking back I can see how things were already shifting for a while.
Asia, the accidental experiment
Every winter I'd escape to Asia (Chiang Mai, Da Nang) for a month or two. Officially for the weather; actually to escape New York's gravity — the party scene, the late nights, the whole Saturday machine. Yes, I was literally scheduling my sobriety so I can prioritize training.
Here's what's interesting: I still drank in Vietnam. One or two cocktails with lunch or dinner, most days, so the monthly total was probably not far off a New York month. But there were no binges. And my recovery scores went from red to yellow, training compounded week over week, and I hit the best CrossFit Open of my life. Same volume of alcohol, completely different delivery. The binge was the poison, and I had the data to prove it. I knew this well and was already planning South America for next February as the next engineered escape. Apparently I could only access the healthy version of my life by leaving my actual life.
Vipassana
Somewhere in there, meditation started shaking the foundation. I got better at watching the cravings as sensation and story — the being-looked-at loop, the dressing-up loop — and some of that magic disappeared and the stories revealed themselves as just that. Not all of it, but some.
Aging
Underneath everything, the physics changed. At 28 a bender cost me Sunday. At 40 it cost Sunday, Monday, and—annoyingly—most of the Tuesday. Same purchase, but the invoice kept growing. I'd love to claim pure spiritual growth here, but a big part of this is just a guy facing the inevitable truth about life.
Community
Then HYROX and XENOM showed me a room full of people who were intense, competitive, even vain — and none of it ran through Saturday night. Before that, not-partying looked to me like absence, the gray life of someone who gave up fun. Seeing thousands of people actually living it reframed the whole thing as a different kind of vivid. I guess I needed to see and feel this side of life for something inside of me to start shifting.
Why do we drink?
I never said "I quit" — that always felt too final, too binary. You declare zero-forever, then have half a drink at some wedding, and boom — complete failure, might as well keep going. I've seen that loop. So I just... kept the door open.
Then—two weeks into fully sober—during the World Cup I ordered an IPA at a bar, because I missed the taste. I drank a quarter of it and discovered, in real time, that the taste was the only thing I missed. I no longer wanted to be drunk. I left the rest on the bar and felt completely done — no regret, no negotiation.
Drinking is many things: flavor, ritual, occasion, intoxication, identity, a fix for a social anxiety — turns out I still cared about taste but intoxication? Not so much. The anxiety bit is definitely still there and is something to work on.
Why not just moderate?
This is the question everyone asks, and I asked it myself for years. Why not be a reasonable person — skip the binges, keep 1-2 cocktails at dinner?
Honestly, I'm still processing this part. The dinner glass was real — it tasted good, it felt good, it was part of a ritual so deep I didn't even know what it was for. It made conversations easier. None of that was delusion.
But here's what I noticed after the shift: most of what I liked was the ritual, not the alcohol. Sitting down, ordering something, the evening becoming an occasion — turns out a Topo Chico in a nice glass does like 80% of that job. The social part is the one real loss, I won't pretend otherwise. Without a drink it takes me longer to warm up at a dinner table, and some nights I feel that.
And the buzz itself? I just stopped enjoying it. That's the part I can't fully explain yet. But once being tipsy stopped feeling good, the cocktail had no job left to do. There was never a moderation battle to win — the thing I would've been moderating just wasn't there anymore.
It's not dead, it's observed
I gotta be honest, the drinking identity is still very much alive in me. Hence why this is a great experiment, not a eulogy.
I pass a bar, see people laughing over drinks, and there's an immediate flicker of memories and associations — twenty-smth years of mostly good times. Incredible times, in fact. I see an ad for a gorgeous Junmai Daiginjo and I can almost taste that delicate sweetness and flavor, plus all the labor and dedication that went into it. I'm not burying any of that and I don't want it to die. It sits there, I observe it, and some days I miss it the way you miss anything that was huge and formative and mostly fun.
The current policy is that taste stays and state goes. A few sips of serious red wine at a good Italian restaurant, handled the way you'd handle something potent — conscious, rare, deliberate. Not an every-weekend default. And you never need a 2nd drink.
The Perks
The body stuff, real quick, because this post isn't really about it: sleep got better fast, training feels easier, I'm more hydrated.
My watch tells the whole story in three colors. New York weekends were red. Da Nang was yellow — two cocktails a night kept it yellow, I just mistook yellow for green because I'd been living in red. Now I'm mostly green, and when it breaks (late dinner, short night) the reason is actual information instead of the same old suspect.
Removing alcohol didn't make me perfect; it removed the loudest variable so I could finally see the quiet ones. This alone is huge: I no longer wonder if upset stomach or bad sleep or shortness of breath or smth else is due to the booze. I can now tackle other life factors separately.
And then there's the money. Cocktails in New York run twenty-plus dollars now, and at my old pace the drinks total at dinner often exceeded the food one.
Meeting your partner
This is the part I didn't see coming. My partner doesn't drink — never has, she's allergic — and for years I'd pitch her on what she was missing. I'd explain that drinking with someone is descending into the madness together, both of you consciously boarding the same delusion, and that it's a real meeting point. I still think that's true, by the way. I won't pretend drunk connection is fake.
But it meant that at dinner, two drinks in, I was joking at her from a plane she couldn't board. I kept inviting her down into my madness, and it never occurred to me that the actual move was to come up to her sobriety.
Now we sit at the same table on the same frequency. The connection isn't one big descent anymore — it's dozens of small moments per dinner that used to get blurred over. I'm more present with her than I've ever been, and that alone might be worth the whole thing.
Fuck fitness
Fitness triggered all of this, it motivated me. But let's forget fitness for a second because there's something bigger here.
For twenty-smth years I told myself I was choosing fun, but you can't really choose when you can't say no. My Monday was powerless to my Saturday. My whole training life orbited around alcohol's aftermath, and I called that balance.
What I got back isn't a better 5K time, it's choice. I can enter any room, any wedding, any Saturday on any setting I want, including the old one. The door is still open. I just don't walk through it, and not wanting to is the actual superpower here.
I'm forty years old and I have never once seen my real ceiling. It feels like discovering an overclock setting on a GPU card I've been running under-clocked for years. Finding out is the whole point now.
Worth trying?
Look, I'm not recruiting. The other side can honestly be boring AF at first, while you learn how to "walk again". But if you've been drinking for years and never once stopped, I think the experiment is worth running. Thirty days, no "quitting" or anything, just to see what it feels like. You might meet a version of yourself you've never hung out with sober. You might even like them.
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