How Modern Society Is Making You Drink Alcohol

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Chapters

• 0:01 The Alcohol Trap in Modern Society
• 11:28 Alcohol's False Link to Success

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome to the Stop Drinking Podcast, where we help you make stopping drinking a simple, logical and easy decision. We help you with tips, tools and strategies to start living your best life when alcohol free. If you want to learn more about stop drinking coaching, then head over to wwwsoberclearcom. Modern society has traps set up everywhere. If you spend all day on your phone scrolling on social media instead of going to the gym and working on your goals, nobody gives a sh**. Why? Because the people who have designed these traps in modern society only care about profit. This is not a zero-sum game. All of these traps are all about the bottom line. It's all about the dollars, and one of the biggest and most dangerous traps of all in modern society is alcohol.

Speaker 1: 0:50

Alcohol dominates the world that we live in, but, unlike scrolling on your phone and playing video games and watching Netflix all day, alcohol is in a totally different category. Why? Because alcohol is a known carcinogen. Alcohol drinkers shave years, decades, off their life expectancy. Alcohol is a poison and it literally attacks and damages every single cell it comes into contact with in the human body. It's in a totally different category, but nobody seems to see it this way, and today I'm going to show you how modern society is tricking you and making you drink alcohol.

Speaker 1: 1:21

You do not want to miss this video. Just think about it for a second. Every celebration, every social event what's there? You go to a funeral, have some drinks. Drown your sorrows. You go to a wedding let's celebrate Fantastic, let's get drunk. You close a business deal. You're doing business networking. What's there? Drinks. And this is not by accident, this is by design. The $1.5 trillion alcohol industry didn't just get lucky. It's been engineered into the very fabric of our society.

Speaker 1: 1:47

And today I'm going to show you how deep this trap goes. Everybody thinks they have a choice when it comes to alcohol, but I'm going to show you how. You don't have a choice, and once you start seeing the five levels that we're going to break down, it's going to make you question your relationship with this drug for the rest of your life. And now let's get into level one, the normalization level. We live in a world where it is normal to consume this drug. Now here's something that might shock you. You might have never thought of alcohol as a drug. You might have never thought of it as the same as crack, cocaine or heroin or amphetamines or anything like this. But I'm going to tell you something right now that will shock you.

Speaker 1: 2:21

So imagine we lived in a parallel universe, an alternate reality, where everything in our life was the same but alcohol wasn't discovered. So every drug was illegal, but there was just no alcohol. If alcohol was found today in that alternate universe, what do you think would happen? Do you think the governments would be like, oh, this is great. Like let's make sure everybody drinks this, let's promote it at sporting games, let's, you know, encourage 18-olds to drink, 21-year-olds to drink? No, that would not happen. What would happen is that would be immediately classified as the highest grade drug. In England it's class A, I'm not sure it's like schedule something in the States. I can't remember how it works, but basically, if you got caught selling that drug, you would go to jail for 25 years, maybe for life.

Speaker 1: 3:01

But we don't live in this world. We live in a world where a celebrity is able to build an audience doing sport or acting or some kind of entertainment, then create an alcohol brand and become a billionaire. Now, we'll talk about this later on, but the world that we live in has normalized this and it's somehow managed to just be woven into every single event in our life. I remember the last funeral I went to and I got so drunk like just almost blacking out, I made a complete fool of myself. But because it was a funeral, everybody just you know it probably upset a few people, I'm not going to lie, but it was kind of accepted. Well, leon's upset, like he's drunk, of course he's going to be, you know, crying and making a fool out of himself. He's upset, he's in pain and it was almost okay. You know, we've seen so growing up. We see this. We see the adults at the party, you know, having some grown-up drinks. We turn on the TV and then one of our favorite characters they're there with the whiskey, with the beer, and this is where it starts. It starts as we're growing up and we're just taking in all this information and we keep seeing alcohol at all these different places.

Speaker 1: 4:08

Did you know the average person sees 3,000 alcohol advertisements per year? And that doesn't start when you're 18 in England or 21 in America. The legal age to drink? No, that starts from day one of being born. Drinking is almost expected In social events. It's not a question of are you drinking, it's a question of what do you want to drink? Going for a date. Let's get drinks Meeting a new business partner. Let's go for a drink Giving somebody a housewarming gift. Here's a bottle of wine, and this list just goes on and on and on.

Speaker 1: 4:39

Let's get into the second level the marketing machine. See the way that alcohol is portrayed in the marketing couldn't be further from the truth. What do we see when we see an alcohol advertisement? We see a kind of a lifestyle. We see amazing social lives, friends laughing and joking. We see sophistication. We see a certain level of success to aspire to a certain personality. In these drinks we see people living their best moments. This is nothing more than engineered deception Of the 3,000 alcohol advertisements that we see each year.

Speaker 1: 5:10

How many times do we see somebody with two black eyes because some drunk person's come up to them, thought they were the wrong person and just punched them in the face? How many times do we see somebody with two black eyes because some drunk person's come up to them, thought they were the wrong person and just punched them in the face? How many times do we see somebody getting a divorce because alcohol's ripped apart their relationship? Never. How many times do we see somebody getting a phone call from a doctor saying I'm sorry you've got cancer, I'm sorry you've got cirrhosis of the liver? Never, but the same product that's apparently supposed to give us all of this amazing success, sophistication. It's supposed to make us socialize better. It's the same drug doing all of these things, yet they're hyper-focused on this almost fake outcome that doesn't really happen.

Speaker 1: 5:46

Like I said earlier, celebrities they're endorsing it, they're promoting it. They achieve great heights in their life and then they start to sell this product and people start to associate the success of the celebrity with the alcohol and they think oh, wow, wow, maybe that's why they're successful. Alcohol has done nothing for those people. In any other world where alcohol was discovered tomorrow, those people would be in jail for the rest of their lives. Then we've got the alcohol companies themselves telling us to drink responsibly.

Speaker 1: 6:10

What the heck does that mean? Well, it's not supposed to make sense. Drink responsibly. What does responsibly mean? What if I'm not drink driving? Is that responsible? If I'm only having one, is that responsible? If I get blackout drunk when I'm on my own and I don't upset anybody, is that responsible? Who knows? You're not supposed to know. The only word that's supposed to make sense in that little stupid slogan is drink. Listen, there's nothing responsible about drinking. How about? Instead of drink responsibly, it just says be responsible. And anybody that's 100% responsible isn't going to consume a poison that does nothing for them. That's not being responsible, that's being stupid. And then it gets sicker because we're not just talking about the advertisements, the celebrities, you know the drink responsibly campaign. It goes even deeper because alcohol companies fund the science.

Speaker 1: 6:54

You might have heard it before Red wine is good for your heart and it makes you live longer Again, a total myth. This has now been disproven. But how can consuming an ethanol that damages every cell it comes into contact with make you live longer? It's nonsense. Which leads me to level three, the social pressure level. Now, this is where the normalization of alcohol and the marketing machine meet. See, the problem is nobody likes to drink alone. Everybody knows in their heart of hearts that drinking alcohol is boring, it's silly. They just know in their heart. So when you meet somebody that's drinking and you don't drink, it almost shines a mirror on them.

Speaker 1: 7:31

But we live in a world where it's okay for somebody to ask you if you want to have this drug. But it's the way people ask. Oh, go on, leon, just have one tonight, it's not going to hurt. Just one drink. Oh, why not? Come on, please just have one. How many times have you heard this? What would you say if somebody was doing that with a crack pipe right With a marijuana joint? With any other drug that you don't take? You would never speak to that person again. And the weird thing is is it's like you've almost got to explain yourself to not take this drug. If you said no to a cigarette, people are just going to be like all right, I guess you don't smoke, but with alcohol people almost want an explanation. Sorry, I'm not drinking. I've got some race coming up. I'm running a marathon, I'm training for this, I'm training for that. Oh you sure it's not like you've got some kind of problem, is it?

Speaker 1: 8:12

I'll never forget when I was about 21 years of age, I used to go to this bar at nighttime and there was a. There was it was an Australian bar and there was an Australian girl that worked there and she was. She was quite attractive and I remember I stopped drinking, but I said you know what? I'm still going to go out, I'm still going to go and socialize, but this bar was like a very heavy drinking bar and the city was. It's a place called Blackpool. Now I don't know if you ever heard of it before. I grew up close to Blackpool not in Blackpool but during my crazy period I went to live in Blackpool. Now it's not the nicest place. It's quite rough, especially where I was living and working. But I remember going to this bar and honestly I thought this girl would be impressed. Wow, he's out. He's so strong, he's in this bar and he's not drinking and he's having a good time and dancing.

Speaker 1: 8:54

That wasn't her reaction. I went to the bar. I said, oh, can I get a glass of water? And her face I've never seen somebody just look me up and down and be so disgusted before. Now, in hindsight, looking back, that's nothing to do with me. That's probably a reflection of her own drinking problem, because when you don't drink, it shines a mirror upon other people. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm not trying to judge that person. But hey, if you'd have seen the look she gave me, she was almost offended the fact that I asked her for water. But that's the world that we live in. If you're not drinking, you're seen as a little bit weird and different.

Speaker 1: 9:33

So let's get into the fourth level, the self-medication level. Listen, I'm not going to lie, modern life is hardcore. Maybe 20 years ago things would have been different, but these days, with smartphones, with emails being plugged in 24-7, it is stressful. We've got people demanding things from us all of the time. We live in a very global world now where different time zones can be pinging at once and our lives can have a lot of pressure and stress, especially the older that we get and the more responsibilities that we take on. So how do you think most people deal with this stress? Meditation, a balanced diet, making sure they're exercising, walking, getting time in nature? No, of course not. We medicate. That's the world we live in.

Speaker 1: 10:02

We go to a doctor and the doctor says just take these pills, you'll be fine. And then for a lot of us, for a lot of people, we self-medicate with alcohol. We don't go to the doctor, we just have a drink, and that just gives us that moment of relief, despite the consequences. It just gives us that split second of ah. We get home after that hard day at the office With all of this pressure and stress. We get home, we open up the bottle, we have a drink, we're traveling, we're going on a plane, we're stressed, we drink. We can't sleep at night. What do we do? Nightcap, and this is totally normal.

Speaker 1: 10:28

If you're extremely stressed and you go to a bar and somebody sees you're stressed and you're having a drink, they just look at you like I don't blame you, we don't see that person as taking a drug, being addicted to a drug, self-medicating. We just think, yeah, that's going to chill him out, why not? And this was my pattern for so long. I'd feel lonely, I'd drink. No-transcript accepted, it's okay. But I want to promise you one thing If you're using alcohol for self-medication, it doesn't get better over time because you need more and more and more of the drug to get that same relief and, if anything, you end up feeling less relief because of the addiction the alcohol creates. Which takes me to the fifth and final level the success paradox. I have a lot of clients with big businesses. They're out doing $10 million, $20 million deals and when they go and raise money and make a massive sale, what do you think they're doing?

Speaker 1: 11:28

It's expected that we crack open a bottle of champagne. We celebrate with a glass of champagne this signal of success. And this can become an extremely dangerous connection when we start associating alcohol and success. This is just a recipe for disaster. Why? Because you can then go out for dinner, you can order a really expensive bottle of wine with some business associates, some colleagues, and sure it's 500 bucks.

Speaker 1: 11:51

But we no longer see this as alcoholism. We see it as a sign of success, of doing well, of celebration. We don't even see champagne as drinking alcohol. It's just another sign of success. And this is one of the worst things of all, because alcohol doesn't do anything to make you successful nothing. But when we start associating winning with having a drink, this becomes one of the most dangerous bonds ever, because the more successful we become, the more we associate alcohol with that success. They aren't related at all. People achieve things not because of alcohol. They achieve things in spite of alcohol. Thanks for checking out the Stop Drinking Podcast by Sober Clear. If you want to learn more about how we work with people to help them stop drinking effortlessly, then make sure to visit wwwsoberclearcom.