Is This Anything? 11

Sometimes I'll remember something bad that happened and get mad or sad about it, and have a strange sensation that I'm not sure whether 1) I remembered the thing and then got mad/sad about it, or 2) my body was getting mad/sad first, and then my brain cast around for a Reason, and it picked up one of my main existing madness/sadness reasons to superimpose on the feeling.

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I suspect my ideal amount of alcohol-drinking would be one moderately-soused evening every quarter, and no other alcohol in between. But I find it incredibly hard to maintain this: I can go teetotal perfectly fine, but as soon as I have a happy evening of drinking again it re-opens some kind of mental gate, and the next time I'm at dinner and someone else orders a cocktail I find myself unwittingly ordering one as well.

I don't really know what to do with/about this. I assume it's partly a decision-rule thing, my brain needs a simple decision rule and "I don't drink" is simple, while "I drink sometimes" is an invitation to endless difficult in-the-moment choices.

Some religions create tradition-and-community structured drinking decision rules, so you can get drunk occasionally without getting drunk often, but without that community structure I don't know a good solution.

I think the same problem exists for lots of other products – other drugs, of course, but also things like meat-eating, where I think a very reasonable position is "it's good to eat a small amount of meat but bad to eat a large amount of meat," except that psychologically it's much easier to be a Person Who Never Eats Meat than to constantly evaluate whether to eat it on each occasion. I don't know what to do about this.