I come from a place where a lot of men start drinking when life ends up turning into a different direction than they expected as young. They use it as a replacement for a therapist, because therapy is relatively new there and people are generally looked down upon if they require it.

I am recently bereaved of my father, who was an alcoholic of about 20 years. His death wasn't immediately due to the drinking but undoubtedly it was one of the causes. For most of this time he had it under control, and it manifested itself as long evenings of watching TV drinking quietly and going to bed late in the night. I wasn't fully in the picture for most of this, and had cursory glimpses during rare visits.

Over this period I watched him get more and more embittered. He had cancer treatment and multiple strokes - the former I suspect were related to alcohol. His second wife and step-children tricked him out of the house they had bought together and sold his car. I suspect they wanted to distance themselves from the drunk he was, but I can't bring myself to discuss it with them now. Slowly all his friends turned away and in a desperate move he returned to his home town to get in touch with childhood friends. Here he couldn't get a job and his friends (old men with separate lives) didn't have time for drinking with him. He decided to retire early.

I started to support him full time about six or seven years ago when his pension wasn't enough (if it ever was truly) to support his addiction and pay the rent.

At first on his own he looked interested in getting a hobby and trying to learn new things. Due to his previous passion for computers - one of my fondest childhood memories was playing on Amiga like computers at his work in the early nineties - he started learning PHP and built a small course material in our native language. We has proud for a while that people were using his website to learn themselves. I was hopeful for a while and helped
him with the computer, internet and answered his questions.

However things got worse. His balance wasn't very good because of the strokes and combined with being drunk most of the time it led to multiple accidents. The cancer had taken his sense of smell and he almost set fire to the apartment he was living in when cooking and falling asleep.

My mom and I visited once in a while, as I couldn't bring myself to see the ruin of my father in the rare times I returned to my country all on my own. She helped tremendously first by convincing him to go into a home and then, when he gave up on being sober and deciding he wanted to be back on his own by finding a person to help him with taking care of the house.

Finally, he died this summer, all alone. I didn't go to his funeral, it was my mom again that had to go across country and take care of everything instead of me.

The reason why I'm writing this is not to give you a cautionary tale. I partly blame myself for being an enabler for my father's addiction over the period when I had the power to force him into rehab. I suspect most people would do that for their family. I couldn't. They say hitting rock bottom can be a trigger for an internal desire to fight the alcoholism, but I always had a pillow there and my father never hit it hard enough to matter. For that I am sorry.

You read like a young man, so you can probably make it work for a long time. However, it will never get better by drinking, the only way it will go is worse and lonelier. If you have dependents, at least make sure they won't regret outliving you.