While booze has, for thousands of years now, been the most socially acceptable form of self-medication, its many health detriments have pushed some to seek alternatives: shrooms, weed, pharmaceuticals, kratom, or some other wellness industry offering.

But why not just skip the drugs? What’s so bad about sobriety? In an article in Vox, Rebecca Jennings notes: “The world is really tough. The world has only gotten more anxiety-inducing and more challenging over the past decade or so. People are looking to numb out, they want to medicate their anxiety.”

But Jennings concludes with some startling observations about the movement, ones that point well beyond alcohol replacements:

There’s a dream that basically everyone in the world shares. It’s the dream of an alcohol that isn’t quite alcohol but almost is — a substance that will make you feel free and happy and sexy and chatty but also won’t get you addicted, won’t shave years off your life, won’t make you groggy and achy and anxious the next day. It’s the dream of a substance from which taking an entire month off as part of an annual challenge would be laughably absurd because why would anyone ever need a break from it?

Possible Preaching Angle:

If this sounds like the search for utopia, you’d be right. For her part, Jennings is deeply skeptical this utopia is ever possible: “Such a substance could never be more than fantasy because of course human beings would find a way to render it destructive.” But for Christians there is the always available, always effective promises of God (Psa. 23:1-3; Phil. 4:6-7).