After a 3 or 4 drinks, the extroversion switch flips in my head and suddenly I want to stop and chat with just about anyone about any topic imaginable. This adds value to my life, and so I drink regularly and have a few at a time (not 10+ drinks a day though. That's probably more on the escaping reality level)
Sobriety is great and preferable 99% of the time to me, but your framing of "escaping or distorting reality" is founded on a trust that your senses and current mental processes are objective reality and that reality is desirable.
Going away from the psychedelics, if I want to have an afternoon where I'm more giggly and enjoying of food, chemical enhancement for that experience seems like way to go, same way someone would listen to music to get in a work mood.
Maybe. I'm unconvinced that this is the only way to achieve any kind of insight. In particular I'd be surprised if it outperforms a cup of coffee or a rhapsodical conversation for any type of insight.
> your framing of "escaping or distorting reality" is founded on a trust that your senses and current mental processes are objective reality and that reality is desirable.
How can a high be "more real" than what you perceive through your senses? That seems almost incorrect by definition, so I guess I plead guilty to the charge of believing that sober experiences are more real.
With respect to "I'm assuming that reality is desirable"--yeah, if you think reality isn't desirable, then you're escaping, so I think you're [agreeing violently][0] with me here. I am guilty of the charge that I think escapism is bad and confronting reality is good.
[0]: http://joe.blog.freemansoft.com/2020/02/recognizing-violent-...
"Perceive" is the key word here. To draw an analogy, if your mind is a computer, your senses are raw data inputs, which your unconscious mind parses, filters, and transforms before the data is eventually passed to your conscious mind. Some hallucinogens give you a peek into this process - you get to see what's going on under the hood, so to speak.
Like a young child, you might find yourself enamored by the beauty of the simple greenness of a leaf.
These substances can teach you that there are many valid ways to "perceive" an event. It's not so much that what you perceive while intoxicated is "more real", but that it's an equally valid (and sometimes drastically different!) interpretation.
They're simple lessons that can mostly be learned without any drugs at all (meditation helps), but a proper trip can hammer a lesson home in such an immediate, visceral, enduring way that I'm not sure there's a sober equivalent.
Ego death is a hell of a thing to experience. We can talk about it and how some people can reach it through years of meditation, but LSD is a sure ticket to it and the value of it is in the qualia of the experience, not the knowledge of what it is.
Imagine your psyche is a factory you've built over your life and you're standing high above it supervising. Regular introspection is walking through the lines and tuning the machine. Ego death is a tidal wave knocking down everything you've built, adjusting to your new reality, and the rest of the day is watching as it all comes back together. There's a level of forced commitment and intensity of the experience that you can't simulate. I'm not claiming you'll reach enlightenment, but something more akin to the learning from tearing down and rebuilding an engine, except it's ~~you~~.
There are real gains to going through it if you're of sound mind.
Also, sometimes things are just really shitty and there's nothing that can realistically fix them and escapism actually is a reasonable choice.
I don’t buy this. Even when you can’t fix things (and I’ve been there) you can still process through your emotions and accept and make sense of your new normal. You don’t have to do it all at once, but that’s the only path to recovery—drugs and alcohol won’t get you there.
You understand the motives just fine. Reality for many people is some combination of boring, stressful, depressing, etc.
So yes, escaping reality is very much preferable to these people. And alcohol and other drugs are very effective at this.
To state the obvious, improving your situation so you don't want to escape reality would be preferable. But that takes a hell of a lot more time, motivation, resources, and effort than just cracking open that next beer.
To that extent, I've gone through some very hard times (for me anyway--not interested in comparing traumas), and for whatever reason much of my cultural upbringing suggested I should reach for some whiskey; however, ultimately I was just too aware that that wouldn't fix my hurt and that "the only way through it was through it" cliche was ultimately true. What really got me through was accepting reality and acknowledging that even though reality was painful, avoiding pain isn't the objective in life (or that's my moral philosophy, anyway)--enduring a trial well is life-affirming. Embrace reality, truth, etc even if it sucks.
EDIT: "everything in my cultural upbringing" -> "much of my cultural upbringing". On reflection, I think the philosophy which allowed me to be successful was largely traditional, Judeo-Christian philosophy which permeates much of American culture. Credit where due.
I would argue this isn't universally true. As I shared in another comment, I recently took a month-long break from drinking. For me it hasn't been difficult, but it's made life seem to explode with excitement and energy, just from taking alcohol out of my life. I think many people would benefit more than they expect just by cutting out alcohol for a month or even just a week.
And sometimes when you try anyway, the universe decides to punish you for it. Some people experience this multiple times. I don't blame them for wanting to escape reality.
I would not at all be surprised to see a strong correlation of people who are religious and people who never drink. Even "one drink a week" or whatever is a significantly different category than "zero drinks, ever."
Maybe depends on whether "would never drink again" and "basically never drink" are included in your definition of "never".
There are a lot of non-religious reasons people don't drink, and a lot of daylight between "one drink a week" and "zero drinks an ever". I fall into the "maybe 3-4 drinks per year" category. It could be more, it could be less -- alcohol just doesn't really occupy a different space for me than, say, pickles. I like pickles well enough, if one comes with my sandwich at a diner I'll eat it. But I only think to get a pickle from the jar in my fridge like once or twice a year, and eating pickles and drinking alcohol have about the same impact on my life and happiness.
Some of it, though, genuinely comes from causing the mind to operate in a rather different mode and make connections and "leaps of understanding" that it just can't do under normal circumstances. It essentially forces a sort of "educational learning-difference" on you, and if you manage to muscle through and learn how to solve a problem in that state (and get the empirically correct answer), you've essentially allowed your mind to come up with a totally different approach to a problem it would never normally take.
Having previously been one of those programmers chasing the "Ballmer Peak", it definitely was more than just an XKCD joke; the joke worked because it was documenting a real phenomenon that's been known for ages. Several recreational drugs, like alcohol, marijuana, can also be used as "performance-enhancing" drugs in the same way things like Adderall can; it's down to careful dosing and discipline - you have to carefully stay in the "eye of the storm" and not get too inebriated, and you also need to exercise a careful awareness of how the drug's effects can "lead you astray" (i.e. something like Adderall can give you a rush of manic hyperfocus, but it's easy to waste this on irrelevant details, instead of focusing on something productive. There have been plenty of comedic stories of people taking Adderall and … instead of doing their homework, doing something daffy like carefully organizing all the books on their shelves … by color.) So you have to be aware of the drug's "biasing" effects and carefully wrangle your behavior during it.
All that said, I definitely recommend against long-term use of alcohol in particular, just due to the chronic toxicity of it. For a while it's great, but over time, it really starts to wear you down, and do more harm than good. Eventually you're so damn tired all the time, that any productivity gains from mental breakthroughs are wiped out. If it was used on rare occasions for breakthroughs/inspiration, it might be viable, but using it as an anti-adhd/procrastination drug (for which, anecdotally, it was very effective) just isn't sustainable, long-term.
For whatever reason, I like sobriety. It's strange to me that people should think we need a religious motive to prefer sobriety, as though escaping or distorting reality is inherently preferable. Maybe I equally misunderstand the motives of the heavy drinker?