Addiction, The Deferring Of Time, And Work
While there is a now-somewhat-politicized narrative around addiction “being a choice,” I personally have never thought that is the case. Addicts themselves make choices, absolutely. But I think a lot of addiction is genetic, and even if it’s not genetic, your brain shifts as you become an addict, and you get into this spiral that you can’t easily break, even if you’ve told yourself 10,000 times that you should break it. I’ve lived this dozens of times. I had entire swatches of 2019, 2021, and late 2022 where, if I looked at my microwave clock and it was noon and the weather was nice, I’d basically just drive to a bar with an outdoor area and start having a couple of beers and answering emails or whatever. That should also show you how pointless most white-collar work can be. I often saw guys at those bars in suits, doing the same thing.
I’m trying to vaguely diversify my ability to create content and weave together stories, so I also made a video about this recently:
Check both of those out.
Now, one thing kinda tied to this in the general addiction sphere has come up for me recently. It’s this idea of addiction as a thing that sucks away time, takes away time, and generally defers your life. I’ve written about this once or twice before.
Best I can recount and do mathematics around, I started drinking probably at 15. I wasn’t very heavy drinking-wise in HS. I was more into weed, honestly. Oddly, I thought beer was disgusting, and it eventually became all I drank. I think I had a screwdriver at post-prom and hated it. I wasn’t really vibing the drinking thing. I got more into it in college. Passed out a few times, carried out of 1–2 parties, vomited 1–2x. But those are “college things,” of course. Or so we say.
So let’s start I started boozing more heavily at 20. I’m 42. That’s 22 years. Now, I had drops in there — when I was in Teach for America, I didn’t drink a lot, because I had to regularly teach small, inner-city kids at 7:30am. Being hungover wasn’t the best look. I quit for six-nine months a few times. It’s not exactly 22 years, but it’s pretty close.
I don’t know how one is supposed to feel about regrets. I definitely have lost a few moments, and bigger-picture items, because of drinking to excess. I’ve lost some friendships, although sometimes I think those same friendships would have evolved out due to the general passage of time and place. Maybe that’s a rationalization.
I’ve lost memories (blackouts) and I’ve lost quality conversations (slurring incoherently). One time I f’ed up my car, so I lost the money to fix that.
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Recently I put this frame of loss, regret, deferment (spelling?) of life through the fertility prism. My boys don’t really swim, you see.
I’m generally not that healthy, I’d guess, but I think dousing my innards in IPAs for the better part of 22 years probably slowed down my reproductive capability. Now I’m married for the second time, and my wife is younger, and I’d still like the chance to be a bio dad. I realize that doesn’t happen for everyone, and I realize foster and adopt and other options exist. I get it all. As for this exact second, I’m still trying the bio thing and still trying to get my wife the experience she wants (carrying, being pregnant, etc.) So far, nothing. At the same time, almost everyone you know gets pregnant the first, second, third, fourth, etc. time and while I’m sure all of those stories took 500 times to happen but no one would publicly discuss that (“Looked at my wife and got her pregnant!”), it always feels like oh, here’s this thing we’re all supposed to do (if we want) and I can’t do it, and it comes close to breaking you sometimes.
That’s the best use case I think I could give a younger person against the idea of addiction. Obviously it’s hard to tell a 17 year-old, saturated in an alcohol-rage culture, to put it down and not socially fit in with the group he or she desires. But the problem with addiction is that it fundamentally resets the course of your existence and your relationship to wants and needs. You fundamentally become a different person, on a different path, because you are beholden to something bigger and more powerful than you.
You’ve probably seen this clip:
I don’t think there is anyone in human history who, as a small child, says “I want to grow up and wander around Philadelphia like a zombie.” And yet, it happens. So why does it happen? Lots of reasons:
All those people were kids who wanted to be relief pitchers or astronauts or nurses or architects, and now they literally stagger around Philadelphia looking to score and getting filmed by YouTubers showing you the demise of society. That wasn’t their desired path. It happened for a lot of reasons, and while the evidence of millions emerging from addiction does indicate that some addicts lack self-efficacy, it also shows that addiction pulls you off the path.
It defers the dreams, desires, and demarcation points (life events) so that you can go chase 10 beers on a random Thursday — which was often my particular problem.
The deferring of the dream and the timeline is what troubles me now. Handling drinking hasn’t been easy (it’s very hard), but it’s been easier than I maybe would have thought. But handling what my drinking wrought — the regrets, the lost friendships, the bad sperm, the opportunities missed, etc. — has been a lot harder to sit with.