Life Evaders

It's not that drinking is bad for your health or a waste of money, but that it ensures a low quality of life. Substance centered living is most easily refuted as an unsustainable evasion, an appropriately modern denial of life.

Sure, you can close your eyes for a while, and it's fun to care about nothing, smoke with irreverent hipsters and losers, and have free sex with other undirected suicides, but after your stretch of drunken whoring, the damage remains. You too can look like a sloppy mid-40s soccer mom when you're 25, natural beauty needlessly worn away, a now lusterless face marking great self-inflicted suffering, and nothing to show for the wreckage you've wrought.

The physical trauma is dwarfed by the psychological toll. All of your free time has been spent with other addicts -- misery selfishly enabling greater misery to flourish. One's relation to the world has been framed by a never ending succession of bad events and situations brought upon oneself by not embracing reality. Druggies say they want to explore consciousness, but they only care about temporary fantasy, not the infinite attainable and lasting possibilities of the actual world. What memories they have are clouded and revolve around bars and drug dens, and worse: the people who are attracted to those and consider them a good use of a short life.

City people like bars because intoxication and easy sex are the joys of city living, especially when there is nothing to do at night and no one interesting to spend time with. One can drink for hours, trying to bury realization of where everything went wrong, sowing fertile seeds of sorrow.

The bad bar music is always too loud for conversation, and after a few good natured attempts of screaming and being screamed at, all that's left to do is drink up and go home with strangers. You've come a long way baby.