Fair enough, and there are certainly better habits. But booze has been a counter to working-class stress for a long time, hence vodka being the national spirit of Russia and the Soviet Union.

By my understanding, harm reduction is a process. It's a matter of steps, and the first one (switching from acting out to drinking) might not look like a great leap forward.

But you're supposed to keep going.
~ If eating junk food and watching reality shows keeps you from needing to drink, you eat the snacks and watch the tube.
~When you can substitute the junk food with fruit, or something easier on your body, you do.
~When you can move away from reality shows, say Saturday morning cartoons, you do that too.

Essentially, you move away from harmful habits and towards healthier ones in small steps.

But that's not represented in the first step, which is to what I was referring in the first place.

spirit, yeah I need to drink more of those

Sadly, serious problems are not always easy to escape, especially when we have crises such as housing and affordability that make it difficult to escape. It was something that I had to talk about with my roommate during the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 since it was clear that some of our dynamics were not healthy.

On occasion stuff got smashed. It wasn't direct violence directly against each other, but it was violence.

In the end, we considered two factors. One, that things got that heated rarely, like maybe once a year. And two, that we were both proactively working on our respective shit. In therapy, changing our bad habits for better ones and so on. And so we decided to stay in place. It didn't escape that we were in a rent-controlled flat in San Francisco, and if either of us moved, we'd likely have to move out of SF.

(Eventually, the neighborhood gentrified and the landlord became hostile, really wanting to swap us out for the high rent Google techs could afford, but that's a different story.)

Anyway, serious problems often come with serious circumstances that need to be weighed. And yes, I think we should live in a society without social crises that force dysfunctional people to stay together when they need to separate. But that is not what we have here in the US in 2026.

Oh god that Ubereem liver kick was so fucking satisfying, I almost cried. Live by the Alistair, die by the Alistair

he did it all for the gummy

I don't get it