Happiness Is

Drinkers believe that using alcohol makes you happy, but I believe the reality is it makes you unhappy. 

How do you know if you're happy or unhappy? It sounds like a ridiculous question. If you're happy, you must know it, right? And if you're unhappy, you must know that as well. But my own experience with alcohol, and what I see in those who drink, leads me to the conclusion that alcohol does exactly the opposite of what we think it does.

You can think you're one thing and actually be something else. You may think you're smart and actually be not so smart, for example. Studies show that many people think they're taller, shorter, thinner, fatter, nicer, meaner, or either more or less attractive than other people would describe them. It's our nature that we just don't know ourselves very well. 

And if you drink, your ability to know yourself is further impaired because alcohol exaggerates the normal tendency to misjudge yourself. So it should not be surprising if in fact drinkers think they're happy when they're not.

"Happiness Is" is the title of a documentary by director Andrew Shapter about "the pursuit of happiness" in America. He finds that happiness comes from "connections and service to others". It follows that a mother and child must be the epitome of happiness, at least so long as the child is safe and healthy. The rest of us are happy to the extent we also have loved ones to care for. After spending most of a lifetime chasing happiness in all the wrong ways, this simple truth astonishes me.

Try this experiment. Search Google for "images of mother and child" and look at those pictures to see what happiness looks like. Then look at photos of yourself, and ask, do I look happy? If you're a drinker, I believe the answer will probably be no.

Alcohol tends to make you self-centered and damages your relationships. When you drink, your focus becomes more selfish and your capacity to give and receive love is impaired. The result is a lonely ride on the carousel of self-indulgence.

If you're on that carousel, probably you're a drinker. All those colored ponies look a lot more wonderful through an alcohol haze. The only thing drinking does is soothe the pain you feel from having sold your happiness for a few laps to nowhere.

Know if you're happy or not. If not, find out why. If you drink, that's probably the reason.

To be or not to be...

Shakespeare's Hamlet lacks the will to take charge of his life and it ends badly for him. Shall we wander aimlessly through life in a fog of indecision? Or make clear-headed choices about our happiness. That is the question.

A lot of things we once thought might do us some good, turns out they're bad.

• A century ago, using opium may have seemed like a good thing but unfortunately it turns you into a zombie.

• The original formula for Coca-Cola contained cocaine, which is quite a pick-me-up but leads to anxiety, paranoia and hallucinations.

• For 40 years after its discovery, radioactive radium was added to face cream, lipstick, tonic water and even suppositories. Maybe it had some benefits but it also caused a variety of cancers.

• Cigarettes: pleasure, focus, emphysema, cardiac failure, cancer.

But in the pantheon of wonderful things that turn out to be not so wonderful, alcohol is king. About half of us use it. We think it makes us happy. It doesn't.

If I worked on Madison Avenue, here's the ad I would write for alcohol:

Life just too hard? Things not going your way? Can't get no respect? Not having enough fun? No need to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Pick up a bottle of tasty, nutritious ethanol. Just one sip and you'll be smart, good looking, rich, important, and sexy, and having the time of your life. The fast and easy way to a full and rewarding life!

Sounds ridiculous when you say it that way. What halfway-intelligent person believes that happiness can be bought bottled or canned at the corner store? Yet we drink because we believe exactly that.

Just because you think you're intelligent, attractive, powerful and happy doesn't mean you are. Alcohol puffs you full of delusions that, among other things, warp your judgment about alcohol itself. But if you drink, perhaps there's a part of you, a ghostly voice, telling you that something is rotten in Denmark, if you will only listen.

Don't end up like Hamlet. Act now. Stop drinking away your happiness.

An Uncomfortable Truth

Writing this blog makes me uncomfortable. Maybe reading it makes you uncomfortable.

What if you had a long-time friend that you trusted and relied on for many years. Suddenly you realize that this friend has betrayed you, abused your trust, cheated you and those you care about out of the good life you deserve. What an awful feeling! You've let yourself be duped, played for a fool! In the face of all the evidence, you want with all your heart to believe that your friend could not possibly betray you that way. You just can't accept it.

For me, alcohol is like that trusted but abusive friend—the Bernie Madoff of beverages. This blog is called "Our Unfaithful Friend" because, just like the investors whose life savings disappeared in Madoff's Ponzi scheme, I still find it hard to accept that something I trusted so much could be so treacherous.

How could I have been so stupid, especially since I thought I was so smart? Well, of course, alcohol use makes you less smart than you are, all the while making you think you're more smart than you are. 

What a prescription for disaster! A cocktail of impaired ability to choose wisely, shaken or stirred with a jigger of reckless confidence.

It's terribly difficult to admit to yourself that you've been wrong about something and accept the loss you've suffered from it. But you have to make that break so you can go on. 

You need to mourn the death of that dream world. I still yearn for it sometimes, but it's dead to me. In a world painted in pink champagne, everything is pretty but nothing is beautiful—craving without love, being without living, indulgence without happiness.

Yesterday was my 65th birthday spent happily with my lovely wife on a short, alcohol-free fugue to Montauk on Long Island. I look at the photos we took and I see no trace of the chronic sadness you would find in photos of me when I was drinking. 

My whole life could have been like that if I'd never used alcohol, but at least I'm free of it now. Better late than never.

A Satisfying Sadness

I've been trying to find better information about the effects of alcohol use and came across something called the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, a comprehensive study of the lives of some 10,000 individuals from 1994 to 2008, including consumption patterns and level of satisfaction with life. According to the survey, people who drink report greater satisfaction with their lives than non-drinkers.

It's probably true. Ask a homeless alcoholic if he's satisfied with his life, he might very well reply that he is. Alcohol, I think, makes us satisfied with less. In particular, it makes us satisfied even though we're unhappy.

But if you're satisfied, isn't that the same thing as being happy? No, they're different things. Satisfaction you can have by yourself, but happiness comes only from sharing your life with others.

In Aldous Huxley's famous novel "Brave New World", everyone takes "soma", a drug that keeps them satisfied in an emotionally bankrupt future society that discourages "inefficient" feelings. Inhabitants of that lonely world are satisfied but not happy.

Alcohol use is like soma, trading the happiness that is possible from love of friends and family for mere "satisfaction". When I was in school, "satisfactory" was not a good report card, at least not in my family. You shouldn't accept a grade of "satisfactory" for your life.

Can you measure happiness scientifically? I said in an earlier blog that I believe I see sadness in the eyes of drinkers, what I call "alcohol eyes". The psychologist Paul Ekman specializes in the study of facial expressions.  His work is the basis of the recent TV series "Lie to Me", and he consulted on the 2001 BBC series "The Human Face" hosted by John Cleese. He coined the term "micro expressions", meaning subtle clues about a person's emotional state that are revealed in facial expressions and which you can learn to read, to tell if someone is feeling suppressed anger for example, or is lying, or, I suppose, bluffing at poker. I believe that if a person is chronically sad, you can learn to see that if you pay attention. 

Sometimes it's very profound and easy to see, sometimes it's more subtle.  I suppose it depends on how much a person drinks and how long they've been drinking.  What's truly revealing though is to look at the eyes of non-drinkers. If you move mostly among drinkers, the non-drinkers will stand out.  They look like they're not from this world.  They have a "puppy dog" happiness about them that may seem bizarre. 

"Happiness is a warm puppy," according to Charles M. Schultz, the author of the Peanuts comic strip. It's spending pleasant moments with people (or animals) you love. Drinking diverts you from that, substituting sad self-indulgence for the simple joy of loving those you care for.