We usually know roughly what we spend on alcohol. We might not add it up very often, but the bottles, drinks with dinner and last-minute orders are visible enough.
The harder cost to see is everything around the drinking. And the real cost can be much bigger than the receipt.
The direct cost keeps growing
Tolerance changes what a normal drinking night costs.
One or two drinks become more. We buy stronger alcohol, keep extra at home or add another round because the first one didn't do much.
Each increase can look small on its own. But when we look at a month or a year instead of one night, the total can be uncomfortable.
And it isn't only the alcohol. There could be delivery food, taxis, online shopping or other spending we wouldn't have made with a clear head.
Then there are the hours we lose
A night of drinking can take part of the next day with it.
We start later, avoid difficult work or spend the morning doing easy tasks until our head catches up. We might still complete everything, but it takes longer and uses more effort.
If we run a business or our income depends on how well we think and make decisions, those hours have a real value. We don't need to put a price on every minute to see that regularly losing our best thinking costs us something.
The opportunities are harder to count
We can't see the work we never started, the conversation we postponed or the opportunity we were too tired to notice. Maybe we stopped learning, creating, trying something new or taking a risk because drinking and recovering from it used most of what we had.
That doesn’t mean every missed opportunity was caused by alcohol. Heavy drinking can still leave us doing only what has to be done and very little more.
High income can hide the problem
If we can afford the alcohol, we may decide the money doesn't matter.
Being able to pay for something doesn't mean it isn't costing us. It might simply mean the alcohol itself isn't expensive enough to make us look at everything around it.
The mental energy alcohol uses and the mornings it takes don't show up on the bank statement. We feel them in how hard the week becomes.
Look at a normal month
It helps to look without trying to shame ourselves.
We can add up the direct spending if we want to. But we should also look at how many mornings started slowly, what we cancelled and which decisions were made while we were tired, anxious or drinking.
The point is to stop judging the cost by the price of the bottle alone. Alcohol may have looked affordable while it was quietly costing us a lot more than the bottles.
— Brent