DRUGS OF EVERYDAY LIFE - BREAKING HABITS AND FINDING YOUR WAY BACK TO YOURSELF
Why we believe we have everything under control - while slowly losing ourselves
Volume 1 of the series "Between the Years"
A man sits high above the ground on a construction crane, talking on the telephone.
From below, everything appears clear: responsibility, success, control. And sometimes that is exactly where the quiet distancing from yourself begins.
Not with collapse, withdrawal or a destroyed life, but with an everyday life that continues to function remarkably well. Work. Relationships. Friends. Success. Travel. Completely ordinary evenings.
Nothing looks particularly wrong.
Which can make it surprisingly difficult to notice when something is.
DRUGS OF EVERYDAY LIFE asks what happens when everything functions on the outside while, inwardly, we slowly lose touch with ourselves.
Marijuana. Alcohol. Tobacco. Sugar. But also heroin and cocaine. Not as sensational stories of collapse, but as different ways people may ease tension, cover emptiness or simply keep functioning.
Because sometimes the most powerful habits are not the ones that destroy a life dramatically.
They are the ones that fit into it perfectly.
DRUGS OF EVERYDAY LIFE is for people who function. People who work, maintain relationships and meet their responsibilities, yet sense that something inside them has gradually moved further away.
It explores consumption without moral judgement, looking instead at habit and adaptation – and at the quiet ways people learn to regulate tension, emptiness or emotional distance.
There is no programme, no raised finger and no promise of a quick solution. This is not about dividing people into those who have a problem and those who don’t.
Life is rarely that conveniently organised.
Instead, the book asks a more interesting question: What purpose does a habit serve while it is becoming part of everyday life?
Because changing something becomes considerably easier once we understand what it has been doing for us.
DRUGS OF EVERYDAY LIFE is Volume 1 of the four-part series BETWEEN THE YEARS – about the things that numb us long before we recognise them as numbing, and what may remain when we begin to let them go.
Bernhard Christoph Lichtinger writes from lived experience – from setbacks, detours, new beginnings and encounters that never needed to be invented. His texts begin where real life leaves its mark.
If you have not yet read a volume from the “BETWEEN THE YEARS” series, you can begin with one of the following books. The books can be read independently of one another.
Volume 1: DRUGS OF EVERYDAY LIFE
Volume 2: WHEN NUMBING BECOMES NORMAL