As if The Situation making $5 million this year wasn’t annoying enough, there’s even more good news for the cast of “Jersey Shore.”
John Cloud from “Time” published an article this morning proving that heavy drinkers outlive abstainers.
The story sited a study from a journal called “Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research” that followed 1,824 people from age 55 to 65 for 20 years to see who’d kick the bucket first. The findings: just over 69% of the never-drinkers died, 60% of the heavy drinkers died, and only 41% of moderate drinkers died.
And it’s not as though the “non-drinkers” are without healthcare or AA survivors:
“Even after controlling for nearly all imaginable variables — socioeconomic status, level of physical activity, number of close friends, quality of social support and so on — the researchers found that over a 20-year period, mortality rates were highest for those who had never been drinkers, second-highest for heavy drinkers and lowest for moderate drinkers.”
Cloud postulates why even heavy drinking, which is known to cause cirrhosis and several types of cancer, is healthier than the dry life. His most interesting point is that alcohol, when combined with human nature, acts as a social lubricant, and social interactions have been proven to have a direct, positive effect on mental and physical health.
It’s a theory that begs the question: If a behavior that’s been proven to be healthy for us is categorized as a vice, then why do vices exist?
We can all agree that the concept of “vice” exists so that we don’t act like Maryann the minotaur’s minions (“True Blood” reference). We can also agree that in most ways, human nature is animal nature, i.e. the point of everything is getting laid.
But thanks to our brain size and thumb placement, there’s a little more to it for us. The desire (and ability) to control our most primal behaviors seems to belong uniquely to human nature, although it’s not without its Darwinian benefits: to feed our families and protect ourselves, we need to have friends. To have friends, we have to control the instincts that cause us drool uncontrollably and get in bar fights.
Thus, vice, as we understand it, stems from our need to control our instincts. But what we naturally want still drives us. The “Time” story has 20,401 Facebook likes for a reason. Maybe we could all benefit from making our “guilty pleasures” a little less guilty and more transparent.
Here, I’ll start. My three favorite vices:
- Vanity: I’m a stylist and personal shopper. Vanity pays my rent. I also enjoy “The Rachel Zoe Project”, reading about plastic surgery, and the resilience of cosmetics sales in our most recent recession.
- Lying: When I first found out about lying I was so overjoyed I proudly asked my mother, “Did you know that you can tell anybody anything you want and they’ll believe you?” This obviously didn’t turn out to be true, but on the Proust Questionnaire, I still choose “honesty” as the most overrated virtue.
- Cheating: I’m a sap and I’ve never cheated, but there’s a reason the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy should have been applied to French marriages, not the U.S. Army. (Read “The Examiner“‘s story entitled “In France: Why Cheating Husbands are good for Marriage.”)
The evidence that vice is in our DNA is everywhere. Vice is our choice cut for entertainment. We crave it so deeply that we spend more cash and time on it than almost anything else. “The Jersey Shore,” “The Rachel Zoe Project” and Don Draper are culturally beloved because they speak to our most primal nature.
The Situation is making $5 million this year because we’re rewarding him for living out our trashiest, most embarrassing impulses, not because life ain’t fair.
To me the most salient point of the “Time” article is that even healthier than the heavy drinkers observed in the study were the moderate drinkers.
I spent Friday night at Coney Island gorging myself with cheese fries and then Saturday night sneaking a six-pack of Bud Light into “Piranha 3D.”
If I did that every night I’d be an unemployed, valueless space-leach. But if I never did it, I’d be deeply depressed and on my way to an early death.
Why do heavy drinkers live longer than abstainers? Because they’re living closer to their natures. They’re less repressed, and they get laid more.
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