Well I don’t drink, never have and never will. … Suspicious is a pretty strong word to use for a group of people who you don’t know who simply don’t enjoy the things you do.
I think it is the perfect word to describe a bit of this:
and a bit of this
whenever I hear (what I, in all due respect, think to be) a frankly bizarre thing like “I don’t drink, never have and never will.” Well, *I *don’t pet animals. I never have, and never will. There are lots of reasons, the biggest one is I just don’t want to.
Lighten up.
"Lovemyfaith:
There are probably a lot of reasons I don’t drink, the biggest one is I just don’t want to. The one thing I do want to point out is alcohol combined with drugs, even simple sleep aid medications, can be deadly. Impaiment starts with the first drink.
This seems to verify my suspicions: you have an exaggerated caution around alcohol, one that is unwarranted by the facts about it. For instance, you say someone is “impaired” whenever they have a single drink - implying that just such a condition is negative, and that just *one *drink puts one at risk of
death.
It’s exactly this sort of attitude that makes me all the more suspicious when I meet tea-totalers who renounce all alcohol for non-medical reasons. This is especially true whenever those non-medical reasons also seem to be non-factual or non-rational reasons. It makes me wonder what made them endorse such strange beliefs about alcohol to begin with.
That’s a bit silly - just because a person isn’t into ONE type of enjoyment doesn’t mean they have NO enjoyments or something. And how do you know the person who ‘never’ drink doesn’t do so because they’re a recovering alcoholic to whom one drink is dangerous?
I tried to clarify that I’m not suspicious about people who avoid alcohol for medical reasons, and I consider alcoholism a medical reason.
However, the comparison to desserts is supposed to highlight how strange a claim the person makes when he or she says something like “Well I don’t [do some enjoyable activity, x], never have and never will.” Notice, this is a very different statement from someone who says something like “Eh, I don’t drink that much - I never like how it makes me fall asleep” or something like that - that makes sense to me.
Similarly, if someone says “Oh, I don’t want any cake tonight, I’m not much of a sweet-tooth” I understand that, and in many cases I am that person. That’s far different from the extreme “I don’t eat dessert. Never have, and never will.” If I hear that, it will provoke a strong “
Hmmmm” and a bit of
inside. Maybe that’s only me. There is a severity of attitude in the second that is absent in the first, and it is that severity that makes me suspicious. Likewise, anytime I hear someone say that I am going to furrow my brows and leave the person thinking they are just a bit off (unless I hear there is some principled reason why they consider this enjoyable activity anathema to them).
