“Oh my God! i'm so grateful to Jesus that I'm one year free of alcohol. The best year of my life.” Is it? Are you bored? But what have you picked up instead? Gambling? Getting into meaningless conversations with other people? Eating more? What is the tradeoff to achieve similar levels of dopamine? Bert Kreischer said it best: "if your life sucks because of alcohol, alcohol isn't the problem". But using drugs, food, or alcohol as the solution also has major consequences. So, what's my thesis about this issue: keep the main thing the main thing and use all your resources at your disposal to make your life easier to achieve your goal. And booze is absolutely a resource for me.
If you go to a painfully boring party and get absolutely blasted and blame it on the booze, it's not the booze. If you make the commitment to a lucrative but self-loathing occupation and use any method to cope, maybe the problem isn't the substance. If you go through a juice cleanse to lose 50 pounds in 50 days and choose to celebrate with a buffet and end up at the ICU, the problem is the mindset. So, stop being a little bitch and take ownership. Maybe don't hang out with people that you don't like. Tuck your ego in between your legs and take an easier job when the stress becomes overwhelming. Hit the pause button. Maybe don't engage in horrendous weight loss schemes and take it easy on your body. Remember this, you are always in control!
Who are you when you're sober? A personal anecdote from my corporate days: I had a close friend who was an excellent employee. One of the smartest people I have met and she progressed in the corporate ladder with light speed. She was fantastic off the court as well, as she would organize group events and parties. She almost sounds like the perfect friend, right? Well, her flaw was judgement and manipulation. Anybody who doesn't live up to a certain socioeconomic standard would be met with judgement from her eyes. If something is not in her advantage, she would engage in duplicitous behavior to achieve the goal regardless of the emotional harm done to others. Why am I going on this tangent? The scariest part about this person is that she is very proud of her "ability" to be manipulative. And when she is explaining her conquest there is a smile on her face similar to an alcoholic taking a sip of whiskey. The point I'm making is sometimes being sober can be more destructive than any drug addiction or alcoholism. Human beings don't need substances to receive dopamine, "the ability to judge" is enough. And an alcoholic only ruins their body while words can be daggers that lead to emotional genocide. I'll sign off with this note: Churchill drank and smoked a lot but Hitler didn't. Whose side are you on?
