The Alcoholic Fantasy.

The fantasy of every alcoholic is to give up.  To be buried. To be dead.  To be despised.  To be ugly.  To be loathed.  AND to be worshiped.  To be better.  To be higher than before, to be grander than ever, and find a way home.

What I'm saying is that we, as boozers, however you want to define that--and perhaps it is just being human--have to get straightened out regarding effort, and discipline, and patience.  Those are things that come later in life, later in maturation, and they are items that need learning.   We long to find a place where we do not need to deal with pressure.  In efforts to hijack pressure inducing circumstances, we hijack our own tomorrows.  A little less pain in an effort toward sobriety will go a  long way tomorrow toward comfort and stability.

Progress is generally incremental.  It doesn't happen in large swaths.  We don't like that either.

We're generally not the smartest folks, though we've convinced ourselves that we have something impenetrably unique, impenetrably better.  What I'm saying is that we make a lot of excuses not to make an effort, and the cumulative total pain of all of those excuses if often times much greater than the pain of effort.

I'd even go so far as to say making an effort is genuinely rewarding, as long as we don't expect miracles.

Here it is: making an effort forces us to be involved in development.  Development is key.  We shun it in favor of the fantasy of leisure.  That's a cappuccino enema induced figment.   We have to be better, to hold ourselves to higher standards.

We can, indeed, run mini-self-experiments, by changing one variable/habit about our behavior every few days, and then reverting to the habit/variable, to see if there's a difference in our subjective quantities of happiness and satisfaction.  Alcohol is but one of those variables (albeit important). Breaking away from all or nothing thinking is vital, and, even better, possible.