Earlier this year, a Redditor made an incredible post on r/Confession. Of course, anything on the internet should be taken with a grain of salt, but I’m inclined to believe this dude simply because of the scale of his claim.

Earlier this year, a Redditor made an incredible post on r/Confession. Of course, anything on the internet should be taken with a grain of salt, but I’m inclined to believe this dude simply because of the scale of his claim.

In short, he said that, for over a year, he’s been running a company while constantly drunk: “Literally every decision is made drunk. I review budgets, fire/hire employees, review contracts for customers and subs, send emails, attend meetings, etc. All while blackout or at least buzzed.”

Eventually, this post made its way over to X/Twitter, where people quickly pointed out that, while this may be considered alcoholism in the PC culture of today, there was a long period of time where that’s how many, many people lived their lives.

You might not like it, but this is how Western civilization ran for a thousand years. https://t.co/RBBke3cS1C

— Samo Burja (@SamoBurja) April 11, 2024

Which got us thinking: Who are the most successful, and drunkest, people in history?

To start, Otto von Bismarck. As this poster notes, the former German Chancellor “drank wine with breakfast and every other meal, beer in between meals, and drank himself to sleep every single night.” He also ate a lot of pickled fish — I’m sure he smelled great!

Otto von Bismarck drank wine with breakfast and every other meal, beer in between meals, and drank himself to sleep every single night. He was also a lifelong chainsmoker.

While dividing Africa at the Congress of Berlin, "he ate pickled herrings with two hands." Probably drunk. https://t.co/om5PfwOs8W pic.twitter.com/o9uCoMDoV5

— Marko Jukic (@mmjukic) April 11, 2024

In fairness to ol’ Bismarck, his behavior isn’t exactly atypical in German history. As noted by The Atlantic, it was not uncommon for Germans of yore to drink the modern-day equivalent of 50 cans of beer in a single day. How they had the motivation to do anything else after that is beyond me.

Next up, Alexander the Great. While during his lifetime he extended the empire to an incredible 2,000,000 square miles, he also did it while absolutely plastered. In fact, he once got so drunk that he killed one of his close friends during an argument. Of course, after this happened he was so distraught that he refused to eat and drink for three days — at which point he went right back to drinking.

Founders, if you aren’t drinking atleast every second day, you’re a pussy. Alexander the Great was constantly drunk. Caesar and Sulla - complete piss pots. What have you done compared to them? Flogged some SaaS you got a philipino dev to pump out? Wake up, and drink up.

— Buyback Capital (@Larryjamieson_) September 12, 2022

No list of alcoholics would be complete without a mention of Ernest Hemingway. While writing beautifully straightforward prose, the man was also throwing back daiquiri after daiquiri. By the end of his life, his alcoholism was so intense that George Plimpton later wrote, “His liver was bad. You could see the bulge of it stand out from his body like a long fat leech.”

In 1920s Paris, James Joyce would get drunk, start fights, and then hide behind Ernest Hemingway for protection, screaming, "Deal with him, Hemingway!" pic.twitter.com/6FNrLwM3Gp

— rosey (@thechosenberg) January 24, 2024

To give a modern, and admittedly less impressive example, Kelsey Grammer. While Grammer didn’t write spellbinding novels or conquer empires, he did take functional alcoholism to new heights.

As one of Fraiser’s writers put it, “He would ooze into the studio, his life all out of sorts. Jimmy would say ‘Action,’ and he would snap into Frasier and expound in this very erudite dialogue and be pitch-perfect. And Jimmy would yell ‘Cut!’ and he would ooze back into Kelsey — glazed-over eyes, half asleep, going through whatever he was going through. It was the most amazing transformation I’d ever seen.

Today, Grammer is over 20 years sober — congrats, dude!

All the behind the scenes stories I hear from Frasier are about Kelsey Grammer being like blacked out drunk until the very moment he was on camera but DHP is the one who looks it. https://t.co/2SB9GNXIVj

— Breddy Tidgewater (@intelSEBASTIAN) February 5, 2021

To close out this list, we gotta head all the way over to Russia. While pretty much every Russian leader throughout history has had a taste for booze, Boris Yeltsin elevated it to new levels.

Yeltsin’s drunken escapades are legendary. In 1994, he drunkenly “snatched the baton from the conductor of a police orchestra, and pretended to conduct them while blowing kisses to the crowd,” per The Guardian. He also, in an alcoholic stupor, wandered the streets of Washington, D.C. yelling that he wanted pizza. This isn’t even mentioning the time he fell off a bridge in Moscow while hammered and had to be fished out of the river (he later allegedly claimed this was an attempt on his life, but who knows).

This sort of existence makes sense for a man who almost drowned when he was a baby because the priest baptizing him was drunk.

If you’re ever drunk and think you should be doing something with your life, don’t fret — you can still achieve anything you set your mind to, and you don’t even need to sober up to do it.