People with a belief in an afterlife have a strong reason to get sober. Christians, for one, condemn gluttony as a sin that would keep them out of heaven. There’s not a religion I know of that condones overindulgence. But what of the atheist or existentialist? Does it matter if you die sober or not? After all, we end up the same way, don’t we?
It does matter how you live your life. I didn’t always think so. I used to think that with 6 billion people in the world, individual action didn’t affect humanity as a whole. But in a sense, you don’t live with that many people in the world. Your world is made up of only a few hundred people, with a few thousand in your periphery. Your actual involved world is not very big, and you’re a significant part of it.
Everyone gets a life. That’s part of the deal. For some it may last only minutes, and for others it may last a hundred years. There are no guarantees on how long it is or how good it is. Maybe other people are right, and you get to come back again and again until you get it right, but we have no proof of that. What is true, no matter your religion or philosophy, is that we do get one at least. One life for everyone.
During fifteen years of drug and alcohol use, I talked about being a writer. I wrote one book in that whole time. Since then, this is my third book. I’ve also released a comedy CD. I was afraid I was giving up my writer’s life to get sober, but just the opposite happened. I was able to achieve my goals, surprisingly easily, while sober.
