I strongly recommend everyone read Allen Carr's Stop Drinking Now (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Stop-Drinking-Now-Allen-Carrs/dp/18...) - a fantastic book in which the author logically argues why every perceived positive of drinking is actually a negative.
Also contrary to popular belief, alcohol does not heal or help the mind unless perhaps you have methanol poisoning or are in the middle of a panic attack
Is it not possible that some people find alcohol in reasonable doses to be a net positive mentally and mood-wise?
It's the same for sweet desserts: why TF should you deprive yourself of all of them? Just keep it in moderation.
No, you shouldn't be made to feel unhappy; or rather, you should push back harder against anyone who tries to effectuate that. Being sorta Stoic here: no one can "make" you feel anything.
It's none of their business, after all.
Before then, I drank socially-- a couple times per year I'd get buzzed with friends. Not all my social outings were buzzed.
But those hazy memories of being buzzed withe friends are little treasures that bring me smiles even long removed from them. My life is richer, and my mental health better, by virtue of hanging out with people this way and I miss it (this is a casualty of COVID).
Many memories of sober moments with friends bring joy, too. But they're qualitatively different things. I want both.
Something can be a "net positive mentally and mood-wise" without also being something that is "not/[postponing]/[avoiding] solving an underlying problem for unhappiness".
For example, exercise, where you damaging muscle fibers to heal, maintain, and/or improve the body.
Also for example, intoxication, by virtually every vector known to exist, often damaging the body in order to maintain the body.
Being alive is about tradeoffs, not about minmaxing. You can max out any statistic, but only at the cost of the others — sanity included. Alternately, being alive is about the exquisite joy of minmaxing, being able to hyper focus on one specific body goal at the cost of everything else in your life, including sanity (if you’re not careful).
“I’m sane without intoxicants”: so no nature, no music, no games, no social joy, then.
For example, this is either a description of an acid trip or of someone listening to orchestral music on the radio:
“It was so amazing. I’ve never felt so alive. It was, like, there was a train running through the mountains, and my room was one of the train cars, and I could see it right there, and I just stared at the wall for like half an hour and enjoyed the ride.”
I find it simpler to discuss mind and body in separate terms since people have trouble seeing transcendent experiences as intoxicants, but I hope this use of your terms helps clarify my viewpoint.
is it...?
Even if you want to step into the realm of the philosophy of mind[1] - there still are rather clear portions of the mind that are physically linked and a pretty wide consensus on the feedback of bodily strength to a healthy mind. Modern dualism accepts that a lot of mental functions are either enabled or assisted by our physical brain goop and classical dualism still assumed the definition of some crossover point where the metaphysical abstract expression of thought was translated into physical signals that triggered actions in the body - the existence of pain reactions necessitates a fair amount of our mental processing having the direct involvement of physical systems.
going further, alcohol is interesting in that, in appropriate amounts, it can improve the state of consciousness through a better quality of social interactions, and at the same time, can damage the state of consciousness through poisoning