(Previously in Swedish on this webbsite 2016)
Intoxicate yourself with alcohol means voluntarily putting yourself in a state of madness. You become “dumber” and also incredibly ego-obsessed and egocentric, only abel to see your own narrow and distorted perspective of existence. You stop listening and caring for others and try to indculate your surroundings with your problems and your often perceived own excellence. This becomes very stressful and boring for the surroundings and often ends with that you waking up the next day with a guilty conscience and feelings of shame about what you said and done the night before. In addition to this, you also feel physically unwell “the next day”. All in all, this means ruining several days of your precious time with a “fun” evening. In addition to these aspects of “drunkenness”, we also have all other known negative consequences such as an increased risk of accidents, the risk of violence – both that you become violent yourself or that you can be beaten, and an increased risk of a number of diseases – including cancer.
Given all the obvious drawbacks, both in the short and long term, with drinking alcohol, is it a mystery that we continue to drink and poison ourselves with this substance. An important explanation for doing this, however, is that we can use the drug to regress our way back to the childhood and to the unresolved needs from that time.
Intoxication by alcohol leads to weakening the so-called ‘me’ structure, which normally controls and prevents us from acting unbridled based on our internal impulses. If we weaken this “controller”, we “come out” as we really are, egocentric, angry, sad, thirsty for love and care or something else.
That is, expressions of the needs we did not meet when we were young children. When you’re intoxicating, you can let some of these pent-up feelings out. Some people have very unsatisfied feelings and needs in their luggage. If the luggage is too heavy to carry, it must be lightened at regular intervals. Some do this by releasing the barriers that usually hold back “emissions” using alcohol rush.
I think this is an important explanation for why alcohol plays such an important role in most of the world’s cultures. In most parts of the world, alcohol and its poisoning symptoms have even been turned into something mythical and fine-cultural. We try to turn drunkenness into something nice and exclusive by becoming “experts” in the drinks, drinks that sometimes cost a fortune to buy and that are almost given magical properties in our cultures that are conveyed through literature, film and Television.
For the aspiring middle class, embracing this alcohol culture also becomes a status marker and a way of trying to approach and become as “fine” as the upper class. The latter, however, have had their cultural ‘sophistication’, the one on which the middle class aspires, from the very beginning and are therefore always on their own and for the middle class unattainable level. When our oral intakes begin to become something else, when we talk about this in an “elevated” and fine-cultural way with their own vocabulary, consumption is used to try to enhance the status of the person who “understands” the value of the product and can decipher the jargon. One question you always should ask yourself when it comes to alcoholic beverages is whether you would drink the wine, the beer or whatever alcoholic beverage you drink, if the drink did not contain alcohol.
In other words, I believe that there are all the reasons in the world to avoid consuming alcohol and this is one of my five rules of living that I strive to follow. I will translate the four others into English at a later date (they can be found in Swedish here on the blog).
