I was thinking about when I was younger.
When I grew up, the internet was a slow and intentional thing that happened at a keyboard, with a computer the size of a moving box, with absolute strangers. When you wanted to know about something in the world you hoped like hell it was in an encyclopedia (or as I came to love, Encarta). Otherwise, the world was mysterious. People were mysterious.
Things changed and the internet became ubiquitous. It became fast and omnipresent. It became ad-based, targeted, and predatory from a corporate side. It became unintentional and maybe even compulsive from human side.
And curiosity? Now, we zap the mystery out of a discussion or a thought as quickly as possible, collapsing our imaginations into fine-tuned keyword searches. Some people are ready to make this part of biology and become permanent know-it-alls.
Just imagine that ideal world where you never have to ask, "Why do squirrels build their nest so high in a tree?"
Instead of sitting with a curiosity, instead of pondering it, we have wired ourselves to have an answer. No gray area, no unknown. Unknown is uncomfortable.
And this action of collapsing imagination to fact becomes habitual, because there is a small amount of satisfaction that comes from getting the answer, so brain wires itself for more of “that.” But the world isn't built on collapsing the state of things, it's built on transposing and actively pondering the how and the why of things.
(A quick aside: I’d argue this culture of collapsing gray areas, of owning facts, has created the toxic and divided political climate we live in today. Politics [and much of life] really exists in the gray area.)
When we read about some of the physicists and mathematicians of yore, we find some novel stories about people who worked a regular job but invented calculus. Back then, there was less collapsing state, there was no internet to answer for you. And so people even found alternative methods for solving the same thing. (Granted, there were very different rules for who was even allowed to learn, but things have progressed a bit since then.)
My point is this: these compulsions to know instead of ponder have created tighter reward loops in our brain.
And drinking exposes this fundamental human element of rewiring our brain that we can't solve immediately. We can't solve it with a pill or a keyword search or by learning a fact. We overcome it by pondering it, by sitting with it, by not scratching the itch, by not collapsing into a craving. We solve it with time, with imagining a life without it, and by expanding possibilities.
So, get more comfortable with the gray area. Embrace the unknown. Expand the zone between conception of a thought and crystallizing reality.
Or, to paraphrase the Foo Fighters concise yet crude take: maybe try to get stuck between the handshake and the fuck.
I’m not a doctor and none of this is medical advice. If you are struggling with substance abuse, reach out to the SAMHSA helpline.