The Pattern
August 14th marks ten years since my last drink.
I’ve never written about it because, for most of those ten years, it didn’t feel like much of a story. I wasn’t hiding it, but I wasn’t announcing it either. Friends knew. Colleagues eventually figured it out. If we had dinner together, you probably noticed I ordered sparkling water, and that was usually the end of it.
Then, a few weeks ago, I was playing golf with Granger Tripp. We reached the turn, both ordered non-alcoholic beers, looked at each other, and had essentially the same reaction.
“Wait… you don’t drink either?”
He’s six years sober.
We’ve known each other for years. We’ve sat through the same client dinners, attended happy hours, traveled to the same conferences, and somehow neither of us knew about the other.
At first I thought it was funny. Then I started wondering how many other people I’d spent years sitting beside without knowing.
The Assumption
That question stayed with me.
I started reaching out to people I knew across the industry. I wasn’t trying to collect sobriety stories. I was trying to answer a much simpler question: had Granger and I stumbled into an unusual coincidence, or had we just discovered something that had been sitting in plain sight all along?
While I was deciding whether to write this, Ken Gilberg said something that stuck with me. Loneliness isn’t created by sobriety. It’s created by thinking you’re the only one experiencing it. Sometimes simply knowing someone else is in the room changes the room itself.
Kevin Weatherman told me nobody had ever cared what was in his glass. Doug Lauretano expected client relationships to change and instead found partners quietly admitting they had been drinking out of obligation themselves. John Whitmore realized the hardest part wasn’t quitting. It was getting over the feeling that everyone was watching him order sparkling water, when in reality almost nobody was paying attention.
What struck me wasn’t simply that the stories were similar. It was that they all described the same emotional experience without ever talking to each other. Everyone expected awkward conversations. Everyone expected clients to notice. Everyone expected relationships to change. Yet almost nobody could remember those fears ever becoming reality.
Looking back, I don’t think the interesting part was how many people had stopped drinking. It was how many successful, social, outwardly confident people had quietly spent years believing they were the only one sitting at the table ordering Diet Coke. The more conversations I had, the more I found myself asking a different question: if everyone remembered feeling this pressure, who was actually applying it?
Nobody pointed to a client who cared. Nobody pointed to a colleague who made them uncomfortable. Nobody remembered losing a relationship because they stopped drinking. Everyone seemed to carry the expectation that there would be consequences, but almost nobody could point to a moment when those consequences actually arrived.
That disconnect was difficult to ignore. The fear was remarkably consistent. The evidence for it was remarkably thin. Somewhere between our first conference happy hour and our hundredth client dinner, many of us had become convinced that alcohol was an unwritten requirement for belonging. Yet when I asked people where that expectation had come from, the answers were surprisingly vague. Nobody remembered a defining conversation or a particular experience that changed the way they thought. It had simply become one of those things everyone accepted without ever really discussing.
The Room
There was one place where almost everyone agreed the experience really was different.
In fact, one of the most interesting conversations I had was with a founder in our industry, because he put language around something I had felt for years but had never quite managed to articulate.
As the evening goes on, the room genuinely changes. Conversations become looser. Stories get longer. People interrupt each other more. The energy shifts in subtle ways that are difficult to describe unless you’ve experienced both sides of it. You can absolutely stay engaged, but matching that rhythm takes a little more effort than it seems to for everyone else. It isn’t dramatic. It’s just enough that, after a few hours, you realize you’ve been working a little harder to participate in the same conversation.
That observation immediately resonated with me because I had been misinterpreting it for years. I assumed I was becoming less social, when in reality I was simply getting less out of an environment that increasingly revolved around something I wasn’t participating in. Looking back, there were probably plenty of dinners where I left before everyone else, not because I wanted to leave the people, but because I had reached the point where the room and I were no longer having quite the same experience.
The conversation also made me realize how confidently we assign motives to other people’s behavior. Someone leaves dinner after dessert and we assume they aren’t interested in building the relationship. Someone skips the hotel bar and we assume they’re tired, antisocial, or have somewhere better to be.
Looking back, I’m not nearly as confident in those assumptions as I used to be. For years I thought everyone noticed what was in my glass. They didn’t. It’s entirely possible I’ve spent just as many years inventing stories about why other people quietly disappeared at the end of the night.
Off the Record
One thing happened while I was writing this that I didn’t expect.
Several people told me, privately and without hesitation, that they don’t drink. They shared their stories, their reasons, and their experiences. Then, when I asked whether I could use their name, some politely declined.
This surprised me, not because I thought they were wrong, but because it was the very feeling everyone else had just described. The assumption that being public about not drinking somehow carries more risk than quietly living with it.
I don’t judge that decision at all. I went ten years without writing this myself.
The people who have already stopped drinking aren’t the only ones quietly wondering whether they’re the only person in the room. There are others making that same calculation today, choosing to keep it private for reasons that probably feel completely rational to them.
The Unfair Advantage
One conversation kept pulling the lens back a little further.
One industry analyst told me that stopping drinking was never really the point. It was simply the first domino. Once alcohol was no longer part of the equation, he found himself rethinking everything else that had quietly become normal over the course of a career: sleep, exercise, stress, travel, family, work, and the idea that “working hard and playing hard” was somehow a badge of honor instead of just another habit nobody questioned.
I found myself agreeing with him, although it took me a long time to get there.
For the first year or two, sobriety mostly feels like subtraction. You’re the one ordering something different. You’re the one wondering whether anyone notices. You’re the one learning how to navigate rooms that used to feel automatic.
Somewhere along the way, though, the equation changes.
A few of us joked that we probably shouldn’t say this too loudly because it undermines the entire narrative. After enough years, it starts feeling less like a sacrifice and more like an unfair advantage.
The unfair advantage isn’t that you become better than anyone else. It’s that consistency compounds in ways you don’t really notice until years have passed.
You remember every conversation. You wake up the same person every morning. You never spend the first half of the day recovering from the second half of the night before. You show up to meetings, flights, presentations, and family dinners with roughly the same energy you had the day before. None of those things feels particularly significant on its own. Ten years later, they add up.
That’s not an argument against drinking. Plenty of people I admire drink. Plenty of successful careers have been built over client dinners and late nights.
It wasn’t the outcome I expected. I thought I was giving something up. I didn’t realize I was trading it for something else.
Ten Years
When I started making calls for this piece, I expected to hear different stories. Instead, I kept hearing different versions of the same one.
People who had quietly spent years believing they were unusual. People who assumed they were the only sober person at the dinner, the conference, the golf outing, or the happy hour. People who had built entire mental models around expectations that almost nobody else was actually imposing.
That doesn’t mean those expectations came from nowhere. Every industry develops its own social norms, and ours has always been built around relationships. Client dinners and entertainment matter. Hospitality matters. None of that changes because a handful of people order sparkling water instead.
What surprised me is how much of the pressure turned out to exist in our heads rather than in our conversations. That’s really the only reason I’m writing this now.
Not because ten years feels like a milestone that deserves celebrating, and certainly not because I think anyone should make the same decision I did. Everyone’s situation is different, and everyone should arrive at those decisions for their own reasons.
I just keep thinking about that moment on the golf course.
How many other people have I spent years sitting next to without knowing?