"My thinking is that later in life........,"
I stopped drinking at 22 and recovered from alcoholism around my 23 rd birthday and I've been sober ever since. Suffering from malnutrition, hallucinations, and all the other joys of end stage alcoholism it eventually became clear that there would be no "later in life".
I can't say I consciously stopped for good, but I did want a permanent solution to my problems. It turned out that not drinking was part of that. Though I had little faith that anything would work for me, I was confronted with a simple choice, continue on to the end or live a spiritual life. A no brainer you might think, but to me either path seemed equally frightening. What would become of me?
I shut my eyes and tried for the spiritual deal. Three months later my life had changed completely. I no longer needed to drink, and have not needed to drink since. Odd as it sounds, my focus was on the spritual deal which I did not understand, rather than on not drinking. The drink problem dissappeared almost as a bi product.