| Yes, I think it is quite normal. Alcohol is a cheap, ubiquitous drug that helps us relax today, for a roughly proportionate cost which we can pay tomorrow (plus whatever longer-term costs like liver damage or memory formation which we can ignore or put off for even longer). It's not confusing or unintuitive. Alcohol helps us relax. That's all it does! Which leads to all the other behaviors that are secondary to suddenly finding oneself relaxed. At first, a healthy relationship with alcohol is a perfectly reasonable transaction. I think it is normal that we would have fond memories of being relaxed, even in the midst of the mild hangover that would necessarily follow. We easily get addicted to cheap methods for getting relaxed. Why wouldn't we? Especially if everyone around us is constantly using it to get relaxed. It's disgusting to witness! Unless you also use it to relax, in which case it suddenly becomes tolerable or even amusing. You don't need much to relax (initially). Like with most drugs, eventually it is less potent and you require more. Also, like with any habit, your default baseline (in this case, your default relaxedness) starts to shift, so that eventually you are actively un-relaxed unless alcohol is present in your system. Obviously, as this continues, you need more and more alcohol, which is toxic pretty much in direct proportion to its volume. Edit: added the sentence about hangovers, for clarity |
While I like this metaphor I don't think it's really true. As long as you drink in moderation the relaxation benefits easily outweigh the negatives. Of course, the converse is also true, you can drink so much that the negatives dwarf the positives.