If someone offered you a drink of something that had all the properties of alcohol you probably wouldn’t take it.
- It effectively poisons your body whilst it is in it.
- It reduces your reaction speed and makes you less co-ordinated.
- It makes you more reactionary and impulsive.
- It acts as a depressant, even you don’t think it feels like it does.
- It is correlated with cancer.
- It damages your liver.
- If drunk over a long period of time, it will kill you, one way or the other.
But, it is beautifully packaged and presented.
- The advertising presents alcohol as a sina qua non for making friends, intimacy and getting your end away.
- The bottles and cans are often beautifully designed.
- The wine bottles for example have dark labels and glass, with gold or ruby red lettering.
- It is often presented as a presentation of a natural product, as if you are drinking the land.
- In this way it is presented as a way of imbibing the locality from which the grain or fruit was grown.
- It is presented as an opportunity to be at one, to know, to have intercourse with the area from which the grain or fruit was known.
- These days its presented as something that everyone, who watches football at home, does, whilst watching football. If you watch football, and loads of people do, you can’t help but feel you should probably be doing it with a beer in your hand. You then get yourself into a situation whereby you find yourself with a group of people with a bottle in their hand watching the football, during which time you see an advert of a group of people with a bottle in their hand watching a game of football. The loop is closed.
It can be difficult not to drink alcohol, because:
- Alcohol is consumed by large numbers of people in a large number of settings. It feels a bit weird not doing it.
- Drinking alcohol is part of a ‘vulnerability’ or ‘normal rules don’t count any more’ ritual, in which everyone who wants to be included, is expected to take part.
- Drinking alcohol is treated as the ‘ostensible’ reason, or part of it, if you are at a dinner, for why people have gathered, and so not to do it, similarly, is seen as a statement of one’s determination to put distance between themselves and others. It can be seen as hostile.
- The marketing is so good, that people think that they’ll be more attractive to others, if they are seen to drink be a drinker and up for a drink.
It can be fun to drink alcohol:
- Getting drunk whilst watching a movie or meditating can lead you to experience very strong emotions, which can be quite stimulating and at some level feel cathartic, and which you usually inhibit.
- Being in a group of people who are all acting and talking impulsively, can feel liberating.
- It can make you and everyone around you feel more interesting, more fun.
- It can also lead to sex, or at least a kiss.
It doesn’t always end well though:
- Its a depressant, so people often end up in tears.
- Because it leads to impulsive behaviour it can lead to arguments, violence and murders, that probably wouldn’t have happened, if someone hadn’t drunk.