EndGameNYC

Sounds to me more about negotiating with your drinking on your vacation than struggling with the inevitable problems of existence.

My own thoughts on these things. We don't get to feelings of belonging until we've worked through loneliness. Every person who is a part of the happy-looking couples that people often mention here had to work through the ordeal of loneliness in order to learn how to love and to work through the aggression and the emotional violence that comes with rejecting love from other people. This is a real and serious problem related to feeling or actually being disconnected that is rarely discussed.

Emptiness. We're born that way. The solution is not to run around filling things up, as booze is just another way to fill ourselves of something we empty of ourselves. Activity is very different from making progress or living with purpose, and many of us willfully confuse the two at our own peril, but as yet another defense against being. "I don't know...I workout all the time, work like a dog, take care of the kids, volunteer, so things for my friends, but I'm still miserable!"

In my experience, there are levels of consciousness which we cannot and will not access without struggling with and through a great deal of pain. We don't just one day stop reacting to people, places and things in a self-defeating and unhealthy ways because we need a change in our emotional wardrobes or that we've learned that doing so will render a fuller, more peaceful way of being. We can only hope to train ourselves to make such major changes in attitudes and beliefs in what is usually a grueling process. And if we can't do that, then we're gonna need help to get the job done. And here is precisely where the emotional response to love offered, in this case, "getting help," comes into play. Too many of us are stuck on the ego-driven farce that accepting love or help means we're weak or damaged, or that we'll then be indebted to a nameless, faceless debt collector sent by the Universe. After all, if someone cares for me, then they must want something from me. Right?

We further place ourselves in grave danger or, at the very least, in a morbid state of deprivation, when we expect things such as happiness, peace of mind, and a sense of fulfillment as part of the deal we make in life. We do not exist in a Universe in which such things are readily available. It's just the wrong place to be if you expect to be happy by virtue of your existence alone. None of these things are possible without suffering or, rather, without our working through whatever suffering there is that challenges us in life.

Suffering is relentless, all-encompassing and without either mercy or grace. Suffering is, in a very real way, what it means to be, to exist. The more we resist, the more we put ourselves in the same painful situations, over and over again ("Why do I always pick the world's biggest loser at any given time as my partner?"), while what we refer to as "meaning" takes a lifelong holiday, until such a time comes when we either stop fighting that which is intrinsic to being human, or when the clock runs out. We don't all or always stop fighting to tear down and then to remake the world in our own image, but the clock always runs out.

Despair is the easy way out, and no decision at all. Complaining regularly is only another way that we rob ourselves of the very little time in which we have to decide what we'll make of ourselves and our lives. And drinking, well, if you've been around here for more than a couple of days, then you know what it means to die a slow death that, by our own hand, is predetermined from the start. It's a rigged game, and the only way to stop the bleeding is to stop playing.