Day 4: The Culture That Enabled You
Nobody becomes an alcoholic alone.
I want you to think about that for a second, because there is a version of this conversation where we sit here and point at everything you did wrong, every bad decision, every bottle you should not have opened, every morning you woke up and reached for it again…
And sure, we can agree that technically those decisions were yours, I won’t even pretend otherwise, but you did not build this thing in a vacuum.
You were handed a culture in life, and that culture told you, from the time you were old enough to understand advertising, that alcohol was what happy people drank, that it was what successful people drank, and that it was what men drank after a hard day, what women deserved after a hard week, what families did at holidays, what friends did to celebrate, what people did when something went wrong, and what everyone needed to take “the edge” off.
The culture did not hand you a bottle; it did something far more sinister, and much more effective than that; It made frequent, often excessive, alcohol consumption feel normal.
Drinking until you puke was expected for the partiers, holding your liquor was a badge you earned, and choosing not to drink made you feel like the weird one, as everyone else was doing it and having a great time.
When you look at it now, do you see how surgically precise the marketing has been? There’s no other substance that is as destructive, and yet hailed as an essential component to society, quite like alcohol is. It’s an addictive, cancer-causing, problem-amplifying poison, and it’s drank in church, shown on TV, and drunks are in front of children, and this is all considered “normal”.
I lived inside that culture for twenty years before I started questioning it.
In the Navy, the culture was not just present; it was loud. Drinking was woven into the fabric of every moment outside of work, and it was ramped up upon returning from deployments, getting promotions, and saying goodbye to friends. We drank to celebrate, we drank to mourn, we drank because we had been sober at sea for months, and being back on land with money in our pockets with nothing to do was a green light.
There was no one to pull us aside and ask if we were okay, there was no conversation about what we had felt, seen, or what we were carrying; there was a bar, and there were brothers, and for one night at least, that felt like enough.
I am not blaming the Navy; it was the best thing to happen to me, but my early adult life was spent in that culture. It’s the same as why I am not blaming my family; they were caught up in the loop, too. And for you, your version may not have deployments in it; you may have drank because you lived in a small town and there was nothing else to do, so that became your “hobby”.
To be honest, I am not blaming the commercials, the culture of American society, or the way alcohol has been sold to us since we were old enough to watch television…
I am pointing at these things because you need to see it; you need to become aware that alcohol was pushed onto you in every country song, every movie, every sports commercial, every life milestone, and every everything you’ve been brought up in. How could it not have crept its way into your life?
I need you to be aware of this, because here is what happens when you try to get sober without understanding the culture you are swimming in…
You make it in a few days, maybe until that first Friday, and then you go to a barbecue, or a wedding, or a work function/”happy hour”(check the name), and the culture surrounds you again, and it hands you a drink and says, “What’s the big deal? Everyone is doing it, you deserve it; just one...” And you fold, not because you are weak, but because you never identified the threats in the water you have been swimming in your entire life.
The system is not designed to help you quit; the system is designed to keep you buying…
Big Alcohol has run the most effective marketing campaign in the history of consumer products. It’s impressive how they have tied their product to every emotion people experience:
Joy
Grief
Love
Boredom
Victory
Defeat
Stress
They have made it a character in every story you have ever watched on screen, and they’ve made the person who does not drink the strange one, the boring one, the one you cannot trust.
I wrote about this once, the idea that “you cannot trust a man who does not drink.” Think about how deep that goes. We have been conditioned to associate sobriety with suspicion and alcohol with authenticity. We have been sold the idea that the bottle is what connects us, as if it is where truth lives, and that the person who turns it down is hiding something.
That conditioning is not an accident; that is a marketing strategy, and they’ve spent billions of dollars to keep you living inside that lie.
None of these excuse the choices you made, but I hope this chapter helps you understand why this happened, and softens how hard you are on yourself about what you’ve done.
You were not broken; you were targeted, and now you are choosing to opt out. That is not a weakness; that is one of the clearest-eyed decisions a person can make, so see the culture, and leave it.
Your Day 4 Sober-Challenge
Write down your top three drinking environments; think of the places, situations, or people that made drinking feel automatic.
Then, next to each one, write what you will do instead when that situation comes up in the next 31 days.
You are not avoiding your life; you are showing up to it differently, so plan for that now, before the moment hits.
If you fail to prepare, then prepare to fail (again).
- Zac