I spend a lot of time (professionally and as a human being) thinking about what is and isn’t distinctive in culture; especially how our culture is different from the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome. Before the past hundred years or less, our familiar tropes of sobriety and addiction were imagined very differently. People have always been obsessive and crazy in many different ways, but social norms vary a huge amount. The AA model borrows a lot from Protestant Christianity, which is a few hundred years old, and that in turn borrowed from earlier traditions; e.g. the Stoic model of the passions/ negative and obsessive thinking. Where I’m going with this for now is: I think history is useful for a zillion reasons, and one of them is to expand our awareness of the vast range of human experience. Addiction is a sort of master-trope in our culture, so many behaviors are labelled as addictions, and that can work; I just think it’s worth knowing that it’s not the only possible way to see it. I want to make a couple of reading suggestions for people who want to think about how people before modernity imagined life improvement or addiction. One is, read the Stoics: Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. A lot of what they say will be familiar from the serenity prayer (cognitive psychology in its inception borrowed a lot from the Stoics). Second, if you haven’t read Dante’s Inferno recently, check out Canto 6 – the sin of Gluttony overlaps with what we’d call alcoholism, and those alcoholics are imagined submerged in mud, in never-ending rain; it’s a powerful image. I find it helpful in thinking about who I don’t want to be.
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Very interesting thanks for the post 
Marcus Aurelius is a firehose of goodness. I try to read The Meditations and get overwhelmed with the sense of the size of the work, the project of a good human life. I am an atheist but that book puts the spirit in me. I don’t think he would have approved of my dancing though.
Yes, maybe not; but then again, maybe you don’t approve of his warmongering imperialism. I definitely don’t, and I notice how much he uses philosophy to justify his own power and misanthropy. But I find it often very inspiring all the same. You can take the good even from problematic sources. I’m an atheist too.