You Can't Drink Your Problems Away
No matter what we tell ourselves, alcohol doesn't solve anything.
Drinking Away Our Problems
Before getting sober, my first response to most problems was “I need a drink.”
In retrospect, it’s a ridiculous thought. I never needed a drink, least of all when things were going wrong. And yet, for a decade, I had myself conditioned to believe that I did.
If I got in a fight with a friend, my immediate, first instinct would be to have a beer. If I had a bad day at work, I’d tell myself that I needed to get drunk and forget it. Money problems? Drink. Dating problems? Drink. Stubbed toe? Drink.
Now, I’m not saying that my drinking habit was just a response to all of these problems in my life. Frankly, I drank every day, no matter what, and whether things had gone terribly or great. However, the problems sure did provide convenient excuses for all of that drinking.
When this really became an issue was when I tried to stop drinking. I spent quite a few years trying to overcome my addiction and gaining no traction whatsoever. I might make it a day, or even a week, when I was really doing well, but as soon as something went wrong in my life, I’d use it as an excuse to relapse.
For example, if I had a bad day at work, I’d then come home and think that I deserved to drink and forget about it. My reasoning would often go along these lines:
“Today was so hard, and I’ve only been sober for a few days anyway. It doesn’t really make sense for me to keep trying to stay sober on such a tough day, when I could just try again next week. I might as well drink today, and then give sobriety another go next week when I’m feeling better.”
This is such classic alcoholic reasoning. It sounds so logical in the moment, but once we’re outside of it, we can see how ridiculous it is. What would really happen when I gave in and had a drink? Would I quit the very next week, and would it magically be easier? Of course not.
I might try again the next week, or even the next day, but then I’d run into another problem, and that would become an excuse for another relapse.
Life is full of problems, especially when you’re an alcoholic. You don’t have to wait long or look hard to find some type of justification for drinking.
However, the reality is that drinking doesn’t solve any of these problems. It just makes them worse and adds another problem (or several) to the stack.
The way to solve problems is to think about them, address them, and sometimes work through them with other people. Getting drunk doesn’t fix anything. It just lets you forget about it until the next morning, when it’s often grown into something even worse.
Drinking Away the World’s Problems
What’s even crazier than trying to use alcohol to solve our problems is when we try to use it to solve the world’s problems.
I couldn’t count the times that, back when I was a drinker, I saw something awful in the news and told myself, “I need a drink.” If I were still drinking these days, I’d probably have that thought even more often.
It’s a completely irrational response. What would a drink do to solve the problem? Absolutely nothing. It might have let me forget about it for a few hours, but only at my own expense.
These days, I see drinking as a defeatist, nihilistic response to problems. It’s a way of giving up on ourselves and the world. It’s a decision to do nothing.
I’ve been sober for about nine years. In those nine years, I’ve seen a lot of changes in our country and the world that disappoint and concern me. It’s not secret to long-time readers of this newsletter that I’m fairly left politically, and that immigration is an important issue to me. This past year has been deeply upsetting.
However, even if you don’t agree with my politics, I suspect that you have your own world issues that you’re worrying about right now. It seems like one of the few things that nearly everyone agrees with these days is that we’re in rough times.
Despite that, going back to drinking isn’t the solution. If I were to relapse, it wouldn’t solve a single problem in the world. It would just make my life worse. I would wake up in a couple of weeks, realize that I had made a huge mistake, and likely struggle for a few years to get back to the secure sobriety that I feel today.
I’m not so arrogant as to think that I can fix all of the world’s problems now that I’m sober. But I’m also not so defeatist as to think that I can’t make any difference at all. So, when something goes wrong, whether it’s in my life or in the world at large, I’m retraining myself to stop thinking “I need a drink,” and to start thinking, “What can I do to make things better?”