When I first became sober eleven years ago, the line I heard most often from old drinking companions was: “You used to be so much fun!” At first, I honestly believed them. Yes I used to be fun. I had been a spirited drunk, the first on the dance-floor, the man who could stretch a mildly amusing anecdote into a raucous tale of comedic exaggeration. There I was, the very embodiment of a boozy raconteur fun distilled into human form.
That’s what I told myself, anyway.
The truth was: I was deeply unhappy. I used revelry as a way to mask the creeping recognition of malignant trauma. I believed that fun was performance: the loud laugh, the daring dare, the clever comeback. Fun was something manufactured, something flung outward as distraction. It wasn’t until I stopped drinking that I recognised just how much emotional labour had gone into appearing fun, and how little joy I had actually experienced.
In day to day life, sobriety gets interpreted as accusation. People don’t tend to hear “I don’t drink,” they hear, “I disapprove of your drinking.” They don’t hear choice – they hear judgment. How do we talk about things that aren’t conventionally regarded as ‘fun’ without sounding like pious pricks?
Here’s something I’ve slowly come to understand: the politics of fun is fundamentally about not noticing. I’m not just talking about ‘drunk’ fun either – so much fun is learning how to switch off noticing certain things. It’s a conspiracy of selective blindness. Alcohol helped me blur the boring, soften the painful and gloss over the inconvenient. Sobriety, on the other hand, is the opposite of that. Sobriety is noticing – often against your will.
When I stopped drinking, the world sharpened. I suddenly noticed that A+E departments weren’t mysteriously chaotic on Saturday nights – they were flooded with intoxicated people who had fallen, crashed or fought. I noticed that many of the people I had grown up with – perfectly average ‘social drinkers’ – might more honestly be described as functioning alcoholics. I noticed how many relationships quietly revolved around the highs and lows of alcohol use. I noticed that behind many of the funniest people I knew lurked deep wells of avoidance, anxiety, grief and violence.
Alcohol was the soft-focus filter on reality. By removing it, reality became uncomfortably clear.
This great ‘noticing’ I have been continuing to experience has not been limited to the effects of substance misuse. No, it has affected me on a profoundly personal and political level. I started to notice that most of the things we buy or use are mined, farmed or produced by an invisible underclass of peasants. That’s not fun. I started to notice that so much of the world is actually built by slave or exploited labour – that’s not ‘fun’ either. I also started to notice endless war machines producing millions of displaced people wandering the world looking for sanctuary – so I volunteered to work in refugee camps. That, my friends, is definitely not fun.
So what can we do? You can’t just demand that everyone stops having fun any more than you can dictate what is or isn’t fun. I don’t have the answer. The problem is – so much of life for so many people just isn’t fun. In order to have fun, you have to not notice the trafficked people building your ‘wellness holiday retreat’ or serving your wine. You have to not notice that the economic heart of so much fun is that someone somewhere is losing out.
Now, before anyone feels judged – let me be clear: I don’t care what people choose to do with their bodies, their evenings, or their holidays. I don’t hold some puritanical moral high ground. I don’t deliver sermons. I am not the ghost of Christmas Temperance. I choose sobriety because I like it. I like noticing things. It suits me.
I’ve been trying to balance ‘noticing’ with ‘fun’ and believe that I’m much more fun now than I was as a drunken jester. My attention is real. My presence is not performance. Unfortunately, some of my former drinking buddies disagree – chiefly because I no longer serve as supporting cast in the theatre of their intoxication, but that’s just the way it is now – I can’t go back to ‘not noticing’.
It’s actually really challenging for me to live in the UK, given that so much of UK life revolves around substance misuse and existing in a state of ‘not noticing’. Fun now – for me – is clarity. It’s noticing. It’s connection. It’s feeling it all rather than numbing it away. And if that makes me “no fun” to the still-blurred, then so be it. I’d rather notice.
As always, my a’th kar!