The Real Price of Every Drink (It Isn't Money)
Drinking's expensive. My last year it cost me twelve grand.
And I got every cent of it back. Lots of times over. Since I stopped, that is.
So this isn't a piece about money. If money were the real cost, quitting would be a budgeting decision, and you'd have made it years ago. You didn't, because some part of you already knows the money isn't the bill that matters.
Here's the frame that changed it for me. Everything you ever buy, you pay for in one of three things: time, energy, money. Money is the loud one. It's also the only one of the three you can win back. Time and energy are quiet, and they're gone the second you spend them. Worse — the older you get, the less of both you're holding. That's as obvious as the sky over your head, and we spend our whole lives acting like it isn't there.
Money first, because it's the easy one to argue. Grant it fully — €12k a year, whatever your number is. Real money. But you're an earner. You made it back. Money regenerates. Which is exactly why leading with money lets the drink off the hook. "I can afford it." Fine. You're arguing the wrong bill.
Now time — the one with no refund. A drink isn't just the spend. It's the block of time wrapped around it: the evening it eats and the morning it blunts. Do the sums on a single session — the hours drinking, plus a next morning running at half. Call it seven hours. Four nights a week, fifty weeks a year, and you're handing over the better part of a working year. Every year. There's no refund window on that. You cannot buy last Tuesday back at any price.
Then energy — the cap. A drunk evening is a restricted evening. A blunted morning is a restricted morning. Every unit of energy you pour into drinking came straight off your body and off your head — physical damage on one side, mental fog on the other. A drinker is a capped person. You quietly put a ceiling on what you were good for that day, and you called it relaxing.
And here's where most of these "cost of drinking" arguments stop: reclaim your time and energy. True — but it's only half the move. The bigger half is what you do with them once they're back. Not just pulling your time and energy out of the drink, but spending them better than you ever did. Ask yourself the honest question — what could I actually do if I had more time? Growth. Your health. The people around you. The work you keep saying you'll get to. Then point it there on purpose.
End of the day, you're the only one who can put a price on your own time and your own energy. Nobody else gets to. What you choose to spend them on is up to you. All I can do is tell you what mine looked like — before, and after.
Stop the flow. Do the work. Move on.
If you want to stop handing those two currencies over and you don't want to do the hard part on your own, the next Accelerator is filling — four live calls a week and my personal WhatsApp so you're not doing it in silence. Waitlist is below.
👉 https://www.habitsv2.com/accelerator
Onwards and upwards, Kevin
