I agree with you. I had a drinking problem. I tried AA and other methods to stop drinking and they never even came close to helping. One day I discovered that for me, alcohol and opiates did not mix and made me violently ill without fail.
Using that to my advantage, I became addicted to opiates, knowing I couldn’t drink while on them. It broke my mental addiction to alcohol a few months after the physical addiction was gone. Breaking the mental addiction was the critical part. Once I knew I no longer wanted to drink, I knew it no longer had control over me.
Breaking the opiate addiction afterwards was easy because I never really wanted to do it in the first place. I never had the mental addiction. I just drank until the opiate physical addiction was gone, then stopped drinking because I already didn’t want to, it was only a tool being used.
I don’t recommend anyone try this method though. It very likely will kill anyone who attempts it. I wanted to share because for me, it confirms what you said, forcing an addict to get ‘clean’ will only make it harder for them to do so. In my opinion.
I haven’t worked since pre-covid.
I worked approximately 40 jobs over a 30 year period. Now that I have been able to view them through the lens of time, I can see which ones I truly loved and which ones were gaslighting me into thinking i loved them and which ones were critically bad for my mental and/or physical health.
Younger me thought working in a library was the dream job and settled for working in a few bookstores, all chain stores, not local. I for one am glad that many brick and mortar book store chains are shuttering. Being forced to upsell predatory magazine subscriptions to the elderly, ripping covers off overstock returns, daily mobs of Karens sharing their opinions on romance novel lasciviousness and countless other things, made me not even want to read for a few years after the place closed.
One of the best, most fun and least paying jobs was a Taco Bell. Note I say ‘a’ Taco Bell, meaning a specific flocation. I have worked at 3 total but that one particular location was just a blast. I had fun with coworkers, got free food, made my own hours mostly, could walk to work, it was just the best. Not the most glamorous and I mentioned low pay but that’s to be expected from TB.
At my last job I trained new employees for a call center. It was a very toxic workplace, high stress, low pay to the point it broke minimum wage laws multiple times, a ‘we are like family here’ company but also management extorted sex from employees, mandatory christmas and thanksgiving parties actually on the holiday, coupons for customers that we couldn’t use which were better than our lauughably small employee discount, that kind of nightmare kind of place. By this point, I stopped caring about what any company wanted from me and did what I wanted and naturally that led to my repeated promotions into the trainer role. I said the same thing to every trainee, about 250 people overall:
“Never let a company decide if you can have fun. If you hate your job, leave and don’t look back. If you make plans with friends but your job refuses to give you the day off, which would you rather remember doing? If your life flashes before your eyes when you die, what will you see?” I’ve run into some of those trainees since. Two of them said it was the best job advice they ever got. Another told me it saved them from going through with a planned suicide.
I hope these stories help your perspective. I should add that I have never made a lot of money, don’t have a degree and by societies standards, most would consider me an absolute failure, which makes me find it hilariously ironic that I’m pretty happy with my life so far. Not working for 5+ years will do that.