People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the social and emotional reasons behind drug use, contrasting healthy societies with those where drug use is associated with loneliness and shame.
Wendell Berry's quote emphasizes the profound human need for connection and fulfillment, suggesting that the desire to use drugs—either legal or illegal—often stems from a deep sense of pain, emptiness, or disconnection in one's life. In societies where people are emotionally healthy and connected, drug use is a celebration of social life; however, in less connected societies, it turns into a source of shame and isolation, indicating a broader social malaise where individuals feel estranged from their communities and loved ones.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about mental health awareness in community forums.
We weren't allowing our hopes to become expectations. Expectations are tempting, pleasant, maybe necessary. They are scary too, once you have had some experience. They are not necessarily and not always a bucket of smoke, but they can be and are even likely to be.
The uplands of my home country in north central Kentucky are sloping and easily eroded, dependent for safekeeping upon year-round cover of perennial plants.
A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.
WE ARE DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY - I mean our country itself, our land. This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so.
Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.
We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel. It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.
I believe that the unity of mind and body is an objective reality. They are not just parts somehow related to each other, but an inseparable whole while functioning. A brain without a body could not think.
One always has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.
If honesty were suddenly introduced into American life, the whole system would collapse.
There is no dusk to be, There is no dawn that was, Only there's now, and now, And the wind in the grass.
There are five dark matters and five lamps. Love of this world is darkness, and the fear of Allaah is its lamp. Sin is darkness, and its lamp is repentance. The grave is darkness, and its lamp is 'none has the right to be worshipped but Allaah, and Muhammad is the messenger of Allaah.' The hereafter is darkness, and its lamp is the good deed. The Siraat is darkness, and its lamp is certainty of faith.
Philosophy is the highest music.
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