My addiction to personal development started small, just like my issues with substance abuse. I didn’t think getting stoned on the weekends in high school would turn into a 13-year lifestyle of binge drinking and excess. In the same vein, I didn’t think that reading self-help books would lead to a three-year downward spiral of searching for “the best possible version of myself.”
Let’s take a minute to talk about relapse and its role in recovery. It happens. A lot. Recovery is fucking hard. It’s nonlinear. Recovery (in relation to substance abuse) doesn’t necessarily mean sobriety or complete abstinence. At the end of the day, we are just humans who have been through some shit. We are looking for love, validation, encouragement, opportunity, and myriad other things.
There are tons of health risks associated with having a drinking problem: cirrhosis of the liver, high blood pressure, cancer, infertility, hurting yourself and others, yada yada yada. Knowing those things never stopped me from destroying my insides one drink at a time, so that’s the last thing I want to talk about right now. What I do want to discuss is how much money I have spent on booze. I made some brutal calculations based on a very low end of my whiskey-soaked spectrum.
On average, I went out for drinks 3 nights a week for 10 years. I would spend about $50 a night.
$50 x 3 nights = $150 per week
$150 x 4 weeks = $600 per month
$600 x 12 months = $7200 per year
$7200 x 10 years = $72,000