Are We All Addicts?

I think this more and more.

As a two-decades-plus drunk of both moderate and pretty extreme swings around that, I think and write a lot about addiction. Here is a particularly long one.

To start this out, I want to point us at two resources.

First is this New York Times interview with Dr. Anna Lembke, who is an expert voice on addiction.

In there, you have:

And here is a Substack article on “the case against drinking.”

In there:

There’s a lot to unpack between those, but essentially combined they are saying: “We all have an urge to disconnect from ourselves and numb ourselves, and also, society tells us the arc is perfectly logical — but then if we take it too far, we get empathy removed.”

I think I would agree with all that.

On the first part, I think there are two interesting sub-parts to that. I had a very long and twisted history with day-side drinking…