The Zen of Drinking Alone
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The Zen of Drinking Alone
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Re: The Zen of Drinking Alone
#2This is a whole lot of very artful words to justify what often leads to very unhealthy coping skills. While perhaps useful to have to fallback on in times of crisis, doing this too often deprives one of the social juice and community that makes solving problems easier and less burdensome.
Re: The Zen of Drinking Alone
#3I wish I could source it, but I recall reading an anthropological study of drinking that mentioned that solo drinking is universally shunned across all cultures.
There's also something perverse about associating this with Zen given that abstaining from intoxicants is the fifth precept (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_precepts#Fifth_precept).
I would never say there is no insight that could be gleaned from this -- people are different, after all -- but I agree with the other comment that this justifies an unhealthy adaptive strategy. We have deeper and healthier modes of self-knowledge than this.
Re: The Zen of Drinking Alone
#4Drinking alone ≠ "Got wicked drunk"
Having a drink alone is pretty harmless. Getting wicked drunk alone is depressing.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/07/america...
Re: The Zen of Drinking Alone
#5Aka alcoholism
Re: The Zen of Drinking Alone
#6This is a whole lot of very artful words to justify what often leads to very unhealthy coping skills. While perhaps useful to have to fallback on in times of crisis, doing this too often deprives one of the social juice and community that makes solving problems easier and less burdensome.
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Re: The Zen of Drinking Alone
#7I wish I could source it, but I recall reading an anthropological study of drinking that mentioned that solo drinking is universally shunned across all cultures. There's also something perverse about associating this with Zen given that abstaining from intoxicants is the fifth precept ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_precepts#Fifth_precept ). I would never say there is no insight that could be gleaned from this -…
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Re: The Zen of Drinking Alone
#8I agree with everything in this article. Drinking alone is the best, particularly if you like to write while listening to music. The flights of fancy I used to go on!
I wish I could still do it, but I found myself waiting for the liquor store to open up at 7:00 am to get rid of the shakes. Then when I tried to stop I couldn't. Long story short, after several rehabs, more stints in mental health lockup than I care to remember, and burning through more sponsers in AA that I can count, I finally was able to stop.
"Cunning, baffling and powerful" is how Bill Wilson, founder of AA called alcohol for those of us who are "real alcoholics" or if you prefer
“Everyone knows that dragons don't exist. But while this simplistic formulation may satisfy the layman, it does not suffice for the scientific mind. The School of Higher Neantical Nillity is in fact wholly unconcerned with what does exist. Indeed, the banality of existence has been so amply demonstrated, there is no need for us to discuss it any further here. The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically, discovered three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, and the purely hypothetical. They were all, one might say, nonexistent, but each non-existed in an entirely different way.”
— Stanisław Lem
p.s. There is a tradition of the Drunken Zen Master but it's archaic. We all know better now.
Re: The Zen of Drinking Alone
#9I wish I could source it, but I recall reading an anthropological study of drinking that mentioned that solo drinking is universally shunned across all cultures. There's also something perverse about associating this with Zen given that abstaining from intoxicants is the fifth precept ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_precepts#Fifth_precept ). I would never say there is no insight that could be gleaned from this -…
- From "Social and Cultural Aspects of Drinking" [0]:
"The most important of these cross-cultural constants in the social norms governing alcohol use is the near-universal taboo on solitary drinking. The fact that drinking is, in almost all cultures, essentially a social act, is recognised throughout the anthropological literature, and ethnographic data from a wide range of cultures indicate that solitary drinking is at the very least ‘negatively evaluated’, and often specifically proscribed."
- Drinking and masculinity in everyday Swedish culture [1]:
""Drinking alone should not be done. To drink alone is to be anti-social (by not wanting to share); it is commonly thought to be an indication of alcoholism. And alcoholism is shameful: to be labelled an alcoholic is a condemnation beyond words…""
- Also touching solo-drinking: "America Has a Drinking Problem" [2]:
"He and his onetime graduate student Kasey Creswell, a Carnegie Mellon professor who studies solitary drinking, have come to believe that one key to understanding drinking’s uneven effects may be the presence of other people. Having combed through decades’ worth of literature, Creswell reports that in the rare experiments that have compared social and solitary alcohol use, drinking with others tends to spark joy and even euphoria, while drinking alone elicits neither—if anything, solo drinkers get more depressed as they drink."
- Pandemic related, "When Drinking Alone Becomes A Problem" (2021) [3]
- From Kasey Creswell, "Drinking Together and Drinking Alone: A Social-Contextual Framework for Examining Risk for Alcohol Use Disorder " [4]
"The context in which drinking occurs is a critical but relatively understudied factor in alcohol use disorder (AUD) etiology. In this article, I offer a social-contextual framework for examining AUD risk by reviewing studies on the unique antecedents and deleterious consequences of social compared with solitary alcohol use in adolescents and young adults."
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[0] http://www.sirc.org/publik/drinking5.html [1] https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/97802030... [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/07/america... [3] https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/psychology/news/2021/creswell-a... [4] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/096372142096940...
Re: The Zen of Drinking Alone
#10"It gets down to what drinking is all about: getting loaded, and by doing that, getting down to the inner you. The inner joy, the inner madness, the subconscious you, the real you"
No, except for alcoholics, drinking is not just about getting loaded.
And for inner journeys, there are way better drugs avaiable, or - how boring, paths without any drugs at all.