I drink because life’s too short!
Or perhaps life is too short because you drink?
Many people defend their use of alcohol with statements that on first hearing sound entirely laudable.
Statements such as ‘I drink, so what? I am not hurting anyone else’, ‘I drink because life’s too short’ and I have even heard ‘so us drinkers live a shorter life, but we live a better life’.
Would you believe a pharmacist friend of mine said that last one!
All these assumptions are based on a lie or as we call it these days ‘an alternative truth’. The assumption that alcohol is a benefit with some side effects.
The reality is, alcohol is a problem with life-limiting side effects.
I drink, so what? I am not hurting anyone else:
It’s my life, keep out of my business!
This is a common defence offered by problem drinkers everywhere. While concerned family members express concern about their drinking and try encourage them to get help.
The problem is this is not true. You see, your own death is not really going to hurt you personally. It is only the death of other people that you will be forced to suffer.
You are free to carry on drinking, but don’t be under any illusion that you are only hurting yourself.
Trust me on this, when you start getting ill and still refuse to stop drinking your friends and family will have plenty of sleepless nights as they witness your self-destruction.
When you get the fatal diagnosis that you have something terminal, it will be your family that will torture themselves that they didn’t try hard enough to get you help. It will be your children and your partner who have to consider life without you.
When you die, it will be your loved ones who cry at your grave and feel your loss. Drinkers need to wake up to the fact that their drinking is not just ‘their business’.
I drink because life’s too short!
No, you drink because you are addicted to a drug. Anyone who makes a statement such as this is blissfully unaware of how alcohol works.
Alcohol is the most devious and insidious drug on planet earth. Just because it is licensed and endorsed by the government does not make it safe.
I don’t know about the political system where you live but personally, I wouldn’t just my countries politicians to find there asshole with both hands.
Alcohol creates pain and misery purely to motivate the addict to drink. When they drink alcohol the drug rewards the individual by removing the discomfort it placed there in the first place.
Back when I was a drinker, I wanted to quit but I was in a panic about whether life would be worth living without alcohol…
I was worried I would have no way to relax etc. It took me a while to realize that the drug was creating all the things I was using alcohol to escape from.
Remove the source and you no longer need the solution!
Us drinkers live a shorter life, but we live a better life!
This is on a similar misguided theme as the ‘I drink because life’s too short’. I don’t need to explain the broken logic any further.
What I do what to mention is the person who first used this expression with me.
I have a friend who is perhaps the wisest, the most present individual I know. He runs a chain of Pharmacies in Cyprus, as you can imagine – a very intelligent and informed individual.
As smart as he is, he still opens half a bottle of whiskey every other day.
When I first questioned his drinking, he shrugged in that cool Greek way, lit a cigarette and said ‘So we live a shorter life, but we live a better life my friend’.
I think what he is referring to there is a statistic that heavy drinkers live on average ten years less than a non-drinker or moderate drinker.
However, to assume that you just live an amazing life and just die in your sleep one night, ten years early is to miss the likely way life will end for a drinker.
Alcohol is a proven carcinogenic, for example – women who drink have a 50% increased chance of developing breast cancer.
Men have a vastly increased risk of prostate cancer and so on. Since the 1990’s it has no longer been a case that alcohol might cause cancer.
We now know for certain that alcohol DOES cause cancer.
So perhaps instead of dropping down dead one day in a blaze of glory, you develop cancer. You have years for painful chemotherapy and eventually, waste away to nothing.
Or maybe your liver fails and you spend six months in agony hoping against all the odds to get a liver transplant. Eventually, there is so much poison in your body you collapse a die.
Serio
usly wake up and grow up!
Alcohol kills someone every 90 seconds, it is the second most addictive substance behind heroin. It is the ultimate wolf in sheep’s clothes.
Alcohol has one objective, to kill you. It will do everything to distract your attention while it is busy achieving this goal.
The first step on your happy sober journey is to stop denying the reality.
Face the truth, embrace the truth and then set about changing the way you think, talk and feel about alcohol.
This is the process I used to break a near two-decade long relationship with a killer!
