There’s a particular kind of fog that settles over your life when substances become a regular companion. It’s not always obvious while you’re in it. The days still happen, decisions still get made, and life moves forward. But looking back, many people describe those years as viewing the world through frosted glass—everything slightly distorted, priorities subtly rearranged without conscious permission.
The relationship between substance use and decision-making isn’t about moral failing or lack of willpower. It’s about chemistry and cognition. Alcohol and marijuana both affect the prefrontal cortex, the brain region responsible for planning, judgment, and weighing consequences. When you’re using regularly, you’re essentially asking your brain to chart your life’s course while operating with modified software. The person making decisions about your career, relationships, finances, and future isn’t quite the same person you’d be with full cognitive clarity.
Consider what “big life decisions” actually means. We’re talking about choosing a career path or making a major pivot in your work. Deciding whether to commit to a relationship or end one. Determining where to live, whether to go back to school, how to handle your finances, or what kind of person you want to become. These aren’t choices you make once and forget about. They’re foundation-setting decisions that create the structure of your entire adult life. Getting them roughly right matters enormously. Getting them wrong can take years to correct.
The problem isn’t necessarily that you’ll make wildly reckless choices while under the influence, though that can happen. The more insidious issue is that regular use subtly shifts your value system and risk assessment. Things that should feel important might not register as urgent. Red flags in relationships get rationalized away more easily. The gap between your current situation and where you want to be starts feeling more acceptable, less pressing. Ambition doesn’t disappear, but it gets softer around the edges, easier to postpone.There’s also the question of what you’re optimizing for. When substances are part of your daily routine, you’re often making decisions based on what feels manageable or comfortable in your current state rather than what serves your long-term interests. You might turn down opportunities because they’d disrupt your routines. You might stay in situations that aren’t serving you because changing them feels overwhelming. You might not even recognize certain opportunities as opportunities because your frame of reference has shifted.
This is where age becomes crucial. The decisions you make in your twenties and early thirties are disproportionately important. This is when most people establish career trajectories, develop professional skills, build relationship patterns, and create the financial foundation for everything that follows. It’s also when your brain is finishing its development and you’re forming the habits and identity that will likely stick with you for decades.
Getting sober young doesn’t mean you have to figure everything out immediately. It means giving yourself the clearest possible lens through which to figure things out. It means your mistakes will be genuinely your mistakes, made with full cognitive capacity, rather than decisions you’ll later question because you weren’t entirely present for them. It means the person building your life is actually you, not a chemically altered version of you.
The mathematics here are straightforward. If you get sober at twenty-five instead of thirty-five, that’s ten additional years of making decisions with clarity. Ten years of building on a foundation you chose consciously. Ten years where opportunities don’t slip past because you weren’t quite alert enough to see them. Ten years where the compounding effects of good decisions build on each other rather than being diluted by clouded judgment.
None of this is to say that people who get sober later can’t build wonderful lives. They absolutely can and do. But they often describe wishing they’d done it sooner, wishing they hadn’t spent so many formative years operating at partial capacity. They talk about the relief of finally making decisions that genuinely reflect who they are and what they want, rather than what feels acceptable through the haze.
The invitation isn’t to judgment but to honesty. If you’re in a phase of life where substances are frequent companions, consider what decisions you’re facing and whether you trust your current state of mind to navigate them well. Consider whether the person making choices about your future is the person you want making those choices. And consider whether you might want to give yourself the gift of full clarity sooner rather than later, while there’s still maximum time for those clearer decisions to compound in your favor.
Your future self is already taking shape in the decisions you’re making right now. The question is whether you want to meet that future self knowing you built this life with your full attention and clearest thinking, or whether you want to wonder what you might have chosen differently if you’d been fully present.
