Wait a minute, wait a minute! You mean, drinking is irrational? Seemed pretty damned rational to me while I was doing it!
Hey, if drinking were really irrational or illogical, none of us would ever do it. Your internal conversation about the merits versus the immorality of alcohol is just you engaging your AV, if you didn't already notice. Here's one, "I 'need' a drink, because I am SOOOOO stressed out!" Or, "I 'deserve' a drink because I have been working SOOOOO hard!" I can think of lots more rational reasons to drink
In reality, it is illogical to QUIT drinking, from the perspective of how we FEEL about it, which is really where the decision to drink comes from. Urges to drink don't come from our rational brain, so why try to fight it at that level? Quitting drinking feels BAD. It is illogical to make oneself feel bad. We make all our non-drinking promises to ourselves while we aren't feeling bad, with the exception of maybe during the midst of a bad hangover. Of course, I "fixed" all those with good old hair-of-the-dog.
As "logical" beings, it's difficult and often prohibitive to take the "illogical" path of quitting drugs and alcohol, insofar as our basal human drives are concerned. For those of us who have succeeded at doing that long term, almost NONE of us did so by virtue of wanting to live a more "virtuous" life. We did it because the alcohol wasn't "working" for us any more.
What it takes is not logic or virtue, but bovine determination, to forge through days of misery you are sure to encounter as you quit drinking. You've got to be damn sick and tired of drinking to put up with that. The decision to be a non-drinker cannot be contingent upon "as long as I feel good."
No matter how complicated the various methods of quitting drinking try to make it, they ALL revolve around ONE simple decision. To be a non-drinker. At least that's what I think. I also think that the problem is that many people don't think that AT ALL. "Not drinking" to a lot of people just means the physical act of abstinence. The very term implies intention of future drinking.
Defining oneself as a "non-drinker" is taking that to the next level, removing the future intent. For some crazy reason, a lot of people in the early stages of quitting drinking seem to think it makes them feel better to hold that future door open. To me, that's a limbo state of slow torture, waiting until I can be "normal" again, i.e. a "moderate drinker". It took me 15 years of trying to make that attitude work before I finally figured out how illogical that was.