The American Pursuit of Relief
- May 27
- 4 min read
For nearly 14 years, I've helped individuals navigate the complex landscape of addiction in order to achieve recovery. Nicknamed "The Casual Counselor", my approach is unconventional but undeniably effective.
To understand why American culture maintains such a profound, often volatile love affair with drugs, alcohol, and any other venue of vice, one must look past the surfaces of simple hedonism, euphoric intrigue, thrill seeking, and the desire to escape, if only for a few hours.
We tend not to look more closely still in this day and age. The whole reason Alcoholics Anonymous required anonymity from its members was because of stigma. That stigma, along with many other factors relating to how we view drug and alcohol abuse through a moralistic lens, has evolved. AA still remains anonymous. Why?
Back in the 1930s, if you were found out and known to be a problem drinker, the dreaded alcoholic, you could literally lose everything. Your job. Your reputation. Ruined. Besmirched, many drinkers were actually driven away from their own communities. Run out of town by their fellow citizens, they became wandering outcasts.
People who use drugs are still outcasts in 2026. They’re a little more out in the open for the world to see, but the lens through which they’re seen is rarely compassionate or draped in empathy. It remains a reflection of shame, blame, and people turning away.
The reality of drug and alcohol use is far more complex. It’s something rooted very deeply in this nation's foundational psyche. The collective. America is a culture built on a striking contradiction: a fierce, unyielding work ethic paired with an equally intense demand for immediate relief and gratification. And without an ingestible tool, those two paths rarely converge in our busy American culture.
We are a society that constantly pressures itself to achieve at the highest levels and then requires a release valve to survive the pressure. Picture an actual pressure cooker. When it really starts getting hot and percolating, what happens if the pressure valve isn’t released? Boom! It makes an awful mess. Explosion. Implosion. Hard to clean up.
From the rugged individualism in our nation’s early days to the modern-day frontier of our “hustle and grind” culture of corporate ascendancy, the American identity has always been tied to output.
But what about input? What lessons, beliefs, and ambitions have been beamed into our collective consciousness since we were very small? Getting rich and building an empire of power and wealth. Expensive clothes and automobiles, and five-figure precious metals adorning our wrists, fingers, and necks. The golden goose can prove to be a golden noose, however. When an individual reaches the top of the mountain, there ain’t anywhere to go but down.
Status is frequently measured by busyness, and success by material accumulation and our desire to flex the optics online. Many of my younger friends? They aspire to be online influencers, often investing in sketchy services to push their content creation into the legend of viral manifest.
However, this relentless drive for power and status creates an equal and opposite reaction: a deep, collective exhaustion. It also has created an epidemic of extreme isolation, loneliness, and disconnection from the world beyond the hive. Beyond whatever device you’re reading this article on at this very moment.
When the cultural script demands constant performance, vices like alcohol, drugs, gambling, sex, retail shopping, or the digital escape of doomscrolling cease to be mere indulgences. They become sources of what I call “cheap dopamine.” Dose, dose, dose. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
Further, they have the potential to become our essential and only mechanics of coping with feelings. With life. The real-world adversities. The stuff getting ever more serious to contend with in these difficult times of growing worldly unrest and crises.
Vices, whatever your flavour, offer us a temporary boundary, a manufactured pause button for minds that do not know how to naturally rest. Why? Because we don’t teach our citizens about the importance of rest. To unplug. From constant productivity. An American at rest is labelled as being “lazy.”
We’re trained to keep the gears of the machine of economic growth turning, and without pause. With each passing year, our natural life expectancy decreases, and in recent years, the number one cause of preventable death for Americans 50 years old and younger is accidental overdose, usually from fentanyl or combinations of unregulated substances.
Correlation doesn’t always equal causation, but I think I’d take a flier on these two examples being synchronously linked with one another. Who do we hold accountable for the rising tide of addiction, depression, anxiety, suicide, debt, housing insecurity, violence, and on and on and so on?
We must hold the systems of power in our country accountable. Until or unless we confront and reckon with the push for “American Exceptionalism” being the gold standard of achievement in this country, and reevaluate the actual data on how seriously the consequences of class and systemic oppression have harmed us, the 99.9%, don’t expect things to get better before they get worse.
The owners of this country are counting on you!
Read more from Joshua Bennett-Johnson
Joshua Bennett-Johnson, Licensed Counselor & Owner of JBJ Counseling
After working for 7 years in an amazing clinic, I launched into private practice in 2018. I love my job. I can say that without reservation. Watching people rebuild their lives is something that is worth more than any dollar amount.
