Dankind

I will never quit drinking and the reason I will never quit drinking is that I have met the people who have quit drinking and I have met the people who own Nvidia and I have determined that these are the same people and I refuse to become one of them. I was at a wedding last month. There is a man at the bar — open bar, free top-shelf, an actual once-a-year situation — holding a club soda with a lime and explaining to a trapped cousin that he hasn't had a drink in 14 months and feels clearer than he has ever felt. Three feet away there is another man, same vest, same haircut, explaining to a different trapped cousin that he sold all his value stocks 14 months ago and rotated into the Magnificent Seven and feels clearerthan he has ever felt. I am watching this happen in stereo and I realize they are running the same script. They woke up one morning, decided the previous version of themselves was an embarrassment, and have spent every conversation since narrating the upgrade. The sober guy says "I'm just being intentional about what I put in my body." The growth guy says "I'm just being intentional about what I put in my portfolio." Neither sentence means anything. Both sentences are immediately followed by a 22-minute monologue you did not ask for. Both men have a Notion doc. Both men have a podcast pipeline. The sober guy listens to Huberman. The growth guy listens to All-In. They are the same podcast. They are recorded in the same kind of room. They are produced by people who own the same espresso machine. The sober guy has read Annie Grace. The growth guy has read Hamilton Helmer. Both books are fine. Both readers will mention them within the first eleven minutes of any conversation. Both readers have annotated their copies with a pen they bought specifically for the annotating. Both readers genuinely believe they have access to a framework the unconverted are too sedated to perceive. The unconverted, in this analogy, is me. I am sedated. I am sedated with a bourbon, neat, no ice, which I am drinking at the bar three feet from both of them while they describe my future to themselves. Both groups have lost the ability to be in the same room as their former tribe. The sober guy cannot go to a bar. The growth guy cannot look at a 10-K. Both have constructed elaborate explanations for why this is growth. Neither will admit they miss it. The sober guy misses being drunk. The growth guy misses the imagined future in which his deep value thesis worked. Both miss the version of themselves that was wrong about something in a way that felt alive. I will tell you what scares me. What scares me is that the trajectory is real. There is a version of me, ten years from now, holding a kombucha at a wedding and explaining to a cousin that I haven't had a drink in 14 months and feels clearer than I have ever felt. There is a parallel version of me holding a phone with my QQQ position pulled up and explaining to a different cousin that I rotated out of pink sheets and into AI infrastructure and feels clearer than I have ever felt. Both of those versions of me are vested. Both of those versions of me have a podcast. Both of those versions of me would be unbearable to my current self, which is the only version of me I am willing to be in a room with. So I will keep drinking. I will keep buying ugly little stocks that nobody wants. I will keep being wrong in interesting ways. I will keep arriving at weddings with the wrong opinions and leaving with the right ones. I will keep saying "I don't know" when I don't know, which is the one sentence neither of the converts at this bar has used since 2022. I am not anti-sobriety. I am not anti-growth-investing. I am anti-posture. I am anti the specific human gesture of having figured it out and needing you to know. The bride just walked past. She is drinking bourbon. She is laughing at something her grandmother said. She has not mentioned a single book. She has not mentioned a single position. I think I am in love with her, briefly, in the way you can love a stranger who has demonstrated, in a single glance, that she has retained the capacity to enjoy a Saturday. The husband is somewhere. I do not envy him. I envy her. I envy the unselfconsciousness of a woman drinking bourbon at her own wedding while two men in identical vests three feet away explain abstinence from two different things to two different cousins. I order another bourbon. I tip the bartender 30%. The sober guy looks at my drink. The growth guy looks at his phone. I make eye contact with neither of them. I am, by their standards, lost. I am, by every standard I care about, the only person in this room who is actually here. The DJ is playing a song from 2009 which is, I have come to understand, the last year either of these men experienced an unexamined moment. I have been wrong about a lot of things in my life. I have held stocks that destroyed me. I have made bets that did not work. I have woken up not entirely sure how I got home. I will keep doing all of these things, because the alternative is the man with the club soda or the man with the Nvidia screenshot, and I have looked at both of them carefully, and I would rather be wrong forever than be them for a single afternoon. I am drinking. I am holding ugly stocks. I am, by every metric the converts use, slowly destroying myself. I am also, I notice, the only one laughing.