Drunken Honesty

“Never date the girl you lost your virginity to. It’s just a bad idea, son.”
This was advice I received from a none-too-sober friend of mine a few days ago. In my experience, there are hundreds of types of drunks, only one of which you should pay any real attention to. In this case, my friend was the philosophical self-aware drunk that surfaces on rare occasions. I have not seen, nor will I probably see my friend in that sort of drunken state ever again.

That is one of those few comments that gets a laugh when you first hear it, yet is the deepest piece of advice that can be given. It’s like when you tell your friend about how bat-shit crazy his girlfriend is. It’s humorous, but you are telling the blatant, unadulterated truth. With some people, you only see this honesty when they have lost hold of their tongue in a drunken rant.

I am going to go out on a very tiny limb now. I am going to directly argue with a professional arguer, my philosophy professor. He said that you should usually take a drunk’s words with a grain of salt because it is not truly them; That they lose control of their reason and let emotions and desires direct them. I think that fundamentally as people, we are nothing but bundles of emotion and desire. When the reason is stripped away, we hear all those words that get held back in regular conversations. Without their reason, that barstool turns into a soapbox.

This is one of the main reasons I pay special attention to people who seem to be giving out advice like it's candy. There's a lot of worthless babble that comes out of their mouths, but when their true feelings, their uncensored soul is on display, it is quite interesting. The old idiom “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all” falls on deaf ears. It’s nice to treat others like that when they garner your respect. By no means am I telling you to go to your boss and call him out as the jackass he is, but don’t be afraid to show someone their place in social situations, where you’ve weighed the risks.

I make a conscious effort, maybe more so when I’m sober, to be completely honest with people (when intoxicated, I can’t help it). The first step to a genuine relationship with anyone should be complete honesty and openness.

It is in this regard that I think our society has grown afraid of asserting individual opinions. I don’t want to say that we have starved ourselves of honesty. In fact I think that the honesty has only been cut off, left only to be heard by our closest friends and families after pulling a 9-5. A lack of criticism has created a haven for shitty art. Call me old fashioned, but I still think it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there. Don’t try to avoid asserting what you think. There will be rough spots, but if you nod your head and take your place in line, where do you end up?

So here’s some advice: be honest. If you don’t like the way you are being treated, say something. If you think you can solve the problem that isn’t yours, give an answer. Don’t be afraid of what people will think. The worst case scenario is that you are incorrect, but have shown the initiative that is enviable in friends, employees, and coworkers. The best case? You show that same initiative, nerves of steel, and an intellect rarely seen in public.