Re: Whether to Drink, and What is cool?

Someone recently asked:
"How do you avoid playing drinking games or drinking in general in a playful way without killing the party vibe and still be seen as cool?
I also need some advice about how you guys would handle these types of situations, especially when the girls are trying to get you to drink and tell you about your sexual experiences. "

And, here's my reply:

Here is the truth of the matter...

People Drink to get something out of it. Drinking is not the goal in itself!

People drink to escape, or to have fun, or let loose, or be more confident, or to be more social, or to have an excuse to act stupid. That is what people want!

Think about it for a little bit, because when you understand that, you realize that this question is really irrelevant. Drink or not drink? It doesn't matter. The question is, why are people drinking, and how can you get there - alcohol is only one path. Often, a path for the unimaginative.

There are many ways to escape, have fun, let loose, be more social, etc...

If we take the specific example of your party. The girls clearly wanted you to let loose, have fun, and say something stupid and embarrasing. And they wanted to do the same. That's the point - not the drinking. Doing stupid stuff brings people closer together. And there are many ways for you to get to that destination.


So, I'm going to take a detour for a second and tell a little story.

I was just watching , Uta Hagen's Acting Class video series. (A very cool video by the way). One thing that she mentions is one mistake that many bad actors make. They are on stage doing an activity and they put too much importance on the activity, and not enough on the interaction of the characters.

Let's say the set is a kitchen with two actors fighting about money. While they fight, they wont be standing still. (No one ever just stands still.) But, instead they will be doing something like putting dishes away, or munching on an apple or fiddling with the tablecloth, or something.

And Actors make two mistakes. They either do nothing, and just look like robots delivering lines. Or they get too involved in the activity, so that washing dishes is more important than the fight about money.

Uta's suggestion is that you walk around a kitchen doing things, but none of it is important. You might pick up a dish and start to put it away and then start fighting and forget about it and put it down again. Or you might fold the table cloth 10 times.

Why? Because the activity isn't important. What's important is the interaction between the characters. And that's what I'm getting at here.

Why am I going off on such a tangent? Because this goes way beyond just drinking.

You know that you are creating amazing interactions when the activities fade away into the background. You know that you are really engaging someone when nothing else in the environment matters. THIS is what people want. They want to be swept away by another human being in a real human moment!

Imagine a conversation so good that she doesn't even remember that she's holding her drink. Imagine sitting down for dinner and two hours later, you realize that you still haven't touched your food. Imagine walking down the sidewalk and forgeting where you're going because you were so immersed in the experience.

Apply this to drinking or anything else. Imagine playing your drinking game and you pick up the glass to drink and then start telling a story, and everyone laughs and they are so swept away that everyone forgets you were going to drink. You can literally do this for hours. People don't care if you are drinking. The want to have fun, and be swept away.

Perhaps it is a girl waiting for a bus on the sidewalk. Her bus comes and you say "You should get on the bus. Actually, it reminds me of this time..." and you start into a story and she's engaged and all of a sudden her bus pulls away and she says "oh well, I'll catch the next one."

That is the power of charisma. You can literally get away with anything.


Here's another tip. The most confident people define what's cool. Nobody really knows what "cool" is. It's either what we decide it is, or what someone else decides it is. There's no objective "cool".

And, the younger someone is, the more easily influenced they are about what is "cool." A great example of this is the episode of South Park with Paris Hilton




Actually, watch that video ten times and then everytime your friends ask you to play drinking games, just think of Stupid Spoiled Whores and laugh. You decide what's cool. Make it up. It's your reality.

Best luck and drink or no drink... have fun.

-Daniel