I felt I was an insignificant loser. A lot went wrong in my middle-age life. I couldn't control those crises exploding in my face. Anti-depressants didn't help. Only a depressant, alcohol, seemed to make me forget about the battles I was fighting because I no longer saw any purpose in my life.
After I centered my life around God's will and re-discovered sobriety, I found this in The Reason for God, by Timothy Keller: "Every person must find some way to 'justify their existence' and to stave off the universal fear that they're 'a bum....' In our contemporary individualistic culture, we tend to look at our achievements, our social status, our talents, or our love relationships.... Some get their sense of 'self' from gaining and wielding power, others from human approval, others from self-discipline and control. But everyone is building their identity on something....
"Identity apart from God is inherently unstable."
Read that last sentence again. It's the most succinct statement of the cure for alcoholism I've ever come across.
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