Drinking Again Because One Is Ashamed of Drinking
On the next planet, the Little Prince finds a drunkard sitting among empty and full bottles. Asked why he drinks, the man says that he wants to forget. Asked what he wants to forget, he says that he wants to forget being ashamed. Finally, asked what he is ashamed of, he confesses that he is ashamed of drinking and falls silent.
He is ashamed of drinking, so he drinks again to forget the shame. Having drunk, he becomes ashamed once more and drinks again to forget it. It is a complete wheel. The scene is short, yet it leaves the Little Prince deeply sad. To me, it is not an exaggeration in a children’s book. I lived with an alcoholic father for nearly twenty years. Empty soju bottles were always piled up at home, and we had to clear away dozens each month. For years I watched a red face, a ruined daily life, and an entire household sink into alcohol.
I therefore draw three words from this chapter: sorrow, self-harm, and addiction. I reduce them to one sentence:
Every day, alcohol consumes me.
From Drinking Alcohol to Being Consumed by Alcohol
People sometimes drink in joy or sorrow and may occasionally enjoy alcohol with food. An addicted drinker, however, first looks for alcohol when meat or raw fish appears on the table and eventually seeks alcohol with no food at all. Drinking ceases to be a special event and becomes ordinary life. The person cannot endure being sober and reaches for another drink as soon as alcohol begins to leave the body.
Nicotine addiction is similar. If a person cannot tolerate a certain period without nicotine, he must keep smoking. I too struggled with tobacco addiction for a long time. After quitting for a year, I began smoking again and now intend to stop once more. At first it seems that I choose to smoke or drink, but at some point the body can no longer tolerate the absence of the substance.
The alcoholic does not make a rational decision each day to drink. He reaches for alcohol whenever the situation presents itself, seeks it in withdrawal, and drinks even when nothing has happened. Morning, afternoon, and evening make little difference. Once the repetition continues beyond a certain point, the sentence “I drink alcohol” no longer describes what is happening. Alcohol consumes the person’s time, body, thought, and relationships.
A Family Must Not Simply Endure Violence
Years ago, I lived near a family whose divorced father moved into his children’s home, demanded alcohol every day, broke things, and shouted abuse. He seemed to have fallen into drinking after his business failed. He ordered his children to buy alcohol, cried, “After everything I did to raise you,” and committed violence. I advised them not to mistake an alcoholic for a person currently capable of normal judgment and dialogue.
Conversation does not work in the middle of addiction. Even when the name “father” creates fear and reporting him feels unbearable, the family must not keep enduring violence. They must seek help, report the situation, and create a physical environment in which he cannot continue drinking. There is a reason alcohol treatment uses medication and removes access to alcohol. As with separating a drug addict from the drug, the substance must first be made unavailable.
My family learned this far too late. Only after my father’s body and mind had been almost completely destroyed did we report him and have him hospitalized against his will. Before that, we endured for decades because he was family. Endurance did not make him recover; it only delivered the greatest damage to those closest to him. An addicted person’s violence turns his sorrow into the misery of everyone nearby. However frightening the confrontation may be, breaking the situation can be better for both the addicted person and the family.
Alcohol Taken to Forget Makes Emotion More Vivid
A business can fail, a friend can betray us, or a lover can leave. The event has already taken place, but the person repeats, “Why did this happen to me? How could that person betray me?” He drinks to forget the anger, sorrow, and resentment. Because he continues even while knowing the damage to his body, drinking also takes on the character of self-harm.
But does alcohol erase the past? Reason becomes clouded and emotion intensifies. A person drinks to forget yet keeps chewing over the same scene, feeling anger and resentment more strongly. Greater pain leads to more drinking, and sobriety becomes intolerable, so he drinks again. The attempted cure for sorrow strengthens the sorrow and deepens the addiction.
Moral condemnation alone cannot break this cycle. Addiction is also a bodily problem that cannot be settled by a sentence about willpower. Coffee increases alertness, nicotine changes bodily states, and alcohol clouds judgment and alters emotion. A substance entering the body directly affects the mind. Body and mind are not separate substances; they affect one another through dependent relationships.
We should therefore reject mystical claims that an addicted person merely needs to make up his mind. To stop alcohol, one must first enter a physical situation in which alcohol is not consumed. The same applies to tobacco and excessive caffeine. Demanding spiritual strength without changing bodily conditions misunderstands how human beings work. Buddhism should not be a religion in which the mind supposedly transcends everything. It should be the study of how body and mind actually function together.
A Culture Unable to Meet and Speak Without Alcohol
Alcohol appears at nearly every kind of gathering in Korea: university trips, company dinners, hobby groups, first meetings and after-parties, joyful and sorrowful occasions, serious conversations and light ones. This is not unique to Korea, and alcohol can reduce awkwardness and lower social barriers. But when every meeting requires drinking, people become unable to meet without alcohol.
Many cannot speak honestly while sober and confess their feelings only while drinking. As alcohol enters the body, rational control weakens, emotion grows, and defensive walls fall. If that state feels easier, a person begins to reach for alcohol before every meaningful conversation. A culture that forms relationships only through drinking nurtures individual dependence.
I am not saying that everyone who occasionally enjoys alcohol must stop. I sometimes drink too. But if a group puts bottles on the table every time and attendance always means becoming intoxicated, one should reduce participation. Once alcohol becomes a condition of relationship, the ability to meet and speak without it disappears.
Growth Stops on the Days Spent Drinking
If half the week is spent intoxicated, what can be learned during that half? It is difficult to read, study, or reflect while drunk. During the day, people work to earn a living. In the time that remains, they need reading, new information, and study beyond their profession to enlarge themselves. Drinking every evening consumes that time entirely.
A person who begins drinking five nights a week in his thirties may remain intellectually fixed in his thirties. He may reach fifty, sixty, or seventy, yet little study or reflection beyond work accumulates. The reasons vary: stress at work, sales meetings, sports, television, dating, or social gatherings. The result is the same. A day of drinking becomes a day when personal development stops.
This is not a mechanical moral law claiming that one drink erases all growth. It means that habitual drinking repeatedly takes away the hours that could have gone to reading, learning, and self-observation. Addiction does not only destroy the body. It blocks the channel through which new thought could enter and holds a person inside an earlier version of himself.
The Past Event and the Second Arrow I Shoot
When something unwanted happens, remembering it can repeatedly produce resentment, grief, and anger. The event has passed, but the scene continues in memory. In Buddhist terms, if the event itself is the first arrow, repeatedly recalling it and tormenting oneself with “This should never have happened; why did it happen to me?” is the second arrow.
We may seek revenge or social punishment for a superior’s assault or another person’s crime. I am not saying that the act was acceptable or that it should simply be forgotten. Taking action to correct a wrong is different from replaying a scene and continually stabbing oneself. Sometimes the past event is not happening again in the present; rather, the self recalling it is tormenting the present self. Alcohol does not stop the replay. It intensifies emotion and drives the second arrow deeper.
Yet traumatic memory cannot be eliminated by ordering someone not to think about it. Memory is a transformation of the brain and body. Intense fear, sorrow, and physical or mental shock leave traces, and the mind may replay the scene involuntarily in an attempt to avoid the same danger. Like dreaming of being forced back into the military years after discharge, trauma returns regardless of conscious will.
Two Ways of Changing Thought and Looking Beyond the Self
Our relationship to memory can still change. One path is a powerful change in understanding through a direct realization of life and impermanence. Even when the same memory returns, accepting that such an event can occur may prevent it from causing the same suffering. A person recognizes that he may die tomorrow and sees how he has been using a past event to torment himself today.
The other path is a gradual change of perspective. When trapped entirely inside myself, my pain seems to be the greatest in the world and the event seems to have happened to me alone. Looking outward reveals countless people betrayed, ruined in business, assaulted, injured, and bereaved. Dinosaurs did nothing wrong, yet an asteroid struck Earth and wiped out much of life. War and massacre kill people who did nothing to deserve it.
In modern Korean history, the Syngman Rhee regime accused and massacred hundreds of thousands of its own citizens as communists without properly investigating them. Rhee fled after destroying a bridge and then ruled through terror. Building a memorial for such a man is insane. I do not mention this to say that such injustice was acceptable. I mention it to escape the narrow vision in which what happened to me is the world’s only and greatest suffering.
Nor should another person’s suffering be used to belittle mine. The point is that I am not the only person to suffer and that unwanted events genuinely occur in life. That observation can gradually change the thought, “Why only me?” Trying to erase the past with alcohol makes it more vivid. We must separate the body from the addictive substance, understand how memory works, and observe both our inner life and the world beyond it. Only then does a path open away from the cycle in which alcohol consumes us and we keep shooting the second arrow into ourselves.
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