A Beer Can in the Woods

Our back yard faces a park where the neighbor kids, age 10 to 13, hang out. A couple of weeks ago, while doing some yard work, I saw an empty beer can there in the woods.

It made me sad, and it has haunted me ever since, thinking of the chain of unhappiness that starts with a can of beer in the woods and tightens its grip, perhaps for a lifetime, can by can, glass by glass, bottle by bottle.

I can't help thinking of a 13 year old with two lives ahead of him (I'm sure it's a boy), one where he uses alcohol and one without. How different those two possible lifetimes would be.

Without alcohol, a normal life, probably. Love, marriage, career, children, retirement—the normal highs and lows. With alcohol, perhaps great success, but along with it, broken families, loneliness, and many regrets, with the possibility of a long, slow descent into alcoholism. 

No one who has young children should drink. Children can be the greatest source of happiness, but if they're messed up, the greatest unhappiness as well. It's bad enough that you miss out on the life you should be having with your children, but what's worse, your drinking is teaching them to drink. One day, when you ask yourself how everything went so wrong, you won't have to wonder because I'm about to tell you.

It was the drinking.

Easy Street

If only I could win the lottery, I'd be happy. I'd be living on "Easy Street".

Easy Street is not like Main Street. You don't have to work, you can pay people to do everything for you, you can do almost anything you please, and everyone has to treat you just the way you want or you can just tell them to take a hike.

Sounds like bliss. This must be happiness.

Yet I've known people who live on Easy Street and none of them seem half as happy as the people on Main Street.

What's going on here? 

The magazine Atlantic has an article titled "There's More to Life Than Being Happy". It shows how confused we are about "happiness", which the article equates with self-indulgence, finally concluding that "givers" are better off than "takers". But what does that mean, "better off"?  It means happier, of course. Happiness must be the only goal of life, but it depends on what you mean by it. Most of us tend to think of happiness as getting what we want, but as it turns out, that doesn't make us happy nearly as much as simply thinking of others more and thinking about ourselves less. You can pretty much tell if someone is happy by looking at their eyes, and based on that, it looks to me like selfish, self-indulgent people tend to be unhappy while unselfish, caring people tend to be a lot happier.

Unhappy people drink and happy people don't, in my experience. Unhappy people may drink to be happy but it only makes things worse, and drinking is probably what made them unhappy in the first place.

Drinking is easy: pour, drink, bliss, repeat. 

But don't be fooled. The happiest people live a sober and fruitful life, nurturing and protecting those they care for.

Do You Want to Be Happy?

What a ridiculous question. If the reply is, "No, I want to be unhappy", it's almost certainly sarcastic. Of course we want to be happy. Whatever else we want, even if it involves great sacrifice, we want it because we think it will make us happy or will help us avoid unhappiness.

If I ask, "How happy are you?", most would say, "so-so." The few who would say "very happy" are the newly fallen in love, the recently-become-rich, the parents of newborns, some people in the "caring professions" such as medicine and teaching, and nondrinkers who enjoy good relationships with family and friends.

"Happy" is the way most of us ought to feel most of the time when nothing unusually bad or good is going on. A lot of us don't experience this though, and perhaps don't even know what it is. We are chronically unhappy from loneliness, bad relationships, excessive debt, poor health and selfishness, all of which can be brought on or made worse by alcohol.

There is a well-worn aphorism which goes: if you find yourself in a hole, the first thing you need to do is stop digging. If I'm right in believing that alcohol is behind most of the world's unhappiness, then for most of us, "stop digging" probably means "stop drinking".

Know Thyself

The title of this post is a saying that's some 2500 years old—an inscription from the ancient Greek Temple of Apollo at Delphi.

A thousand years later, Socrates proclaimed that "the unexamined life is not worth living", and so chose death rather than submitting to censorship of his efforts to get Athenians to see the truth about themselves.

It's a problem known to history for a very long time. We tend not to know ourselves very well. Hold a mirror up to someone's shortcomings and you're likely to get an unpleasant if not violent reaction.

It's difficult enough for most of us to see the differences between what we want to be, what we think we are and what we really are. If you drink, it's that much harder. Achieving a state of comfortable self-assurance may be the most important benefit we seek from alcohol. Such delusions tend to lead to unhappiness though. Life usually serves up a gauntlet of unpleasant consequences for anyone not grounded in reality.

As the poet Robert Burns wrote in his poem titled "To a Louse, On Seeing One on a Lady's Bonnet at Church",

And would some Power the Giver give us
To see ourselves as others see us!
It would from many a blunder free us.