When I got sober, there were around 550 meetings a week in London. Now there are over 900, I'm told. The average age of people in those meetings, 24 years ago, was probably somewhere in the early forties. Only a proportion of the people who were sober then will have died of natural causes since then. Life expectancy is up around the high seventies. Yet there are very few people in meetings who are 24 years sober, plus.
Of the remainder, a lot retired or moved to the country, and London's population is being replenished by youngsters, so one would not expect as many long-timers in AA as in rural areas. Still, I can go weeks without meeting someone sober longer than me.
Where are the others?
Countless people I know are dead or drunk. Whenever I go to a treatment centre or detox, there are people in there who were sober many years (including people who were sober back in 1993) but who relapsed, and a large proportion of the newcomers are actually people returning after a slip after a long period of sobriety, often over ten years or so.
There are certainly many people who are unaccounted for, but of those I have run into over the years who have left AA, whilst some are absolutely fine, many are not, and the range of ways in which people are not is alarming.
Very clearly, these anecodotal statistics are not promising.
However, there is something that is promising: my sponsor was at an AA conference a while ago, sitting at a banquet dinner with nine other long-timers. Someone asked if anyone at the table (and these were people averaging 30 to 40 years of sobriety in AA) knew of anyone who completed the steps, including all of their amends, and who then remained active in steps, service, and sponsorship but who drank again. They all thought for a while, but could not come up with anyone.
This is consistent with my experience.
I'm playing a long game, here. I got sober when I was 21, and my alcoholism is of the sort that kills ya as soon as look at ya. When I drink, catastrophic things happen, and I can't get off the merry-go-round because the fog comes down and I get stunned and desensitised by the whirling and the lights and the nausea. I cannot afford to have a drink again, yet that means, if I live a normal life span, I need to look at the people who are fifty or sixty years sober as an example.
I've known some people who are fifty or sixty years sober, and a smaller group of people with that length of sobriety who are content and well-balanced. What do they all have in common? Continued application of the steps, service, sponsorship, home group.
I'm admittedly hardline about how I 'do' AA, and this is accused of being 'harsh'. What's interesting, though, is that, whilst the accusations of extremity, harshness, and inflexibility remain the same, the people carrying these opinions come and go. By contrast, the friends of mine around the world in AA who are equally keen on the formula: steps, service, sponsorship, home group, years later, decades later, are all still sober, content, and useful.
Obviously lots of people stay sober without AA. Maybe some of them have a different type of alcoholism than mine or that of those many people who leave AA, relapse, and live miserably or see their lives curtailed.
I'm not a gambling man, and, since I've found a formula that works, I'm sticking to it.
Steps, service, sponsorship, home group. AA remains at the core of my life, every day, and my life is filled with AA people. Do I have time for other things? Yes. I have a career (two careers actually), I look after my family, I look after my home, I get to go on trips, I have hobbies and interests I have time to pursue, and I cannot see any deleterious effects of placing AA at the centre of my life, other than, in some people's eyes, being insufferably intransigent about my AA life.
To sum up: play the long game. Swiss government bonds may be duller investment choices than the latest tech start-up stocks. But I'll tell you one thing a professional wealth manager once told me: the Swiss have never once defaulted, in hundreds of years; and my Higher Power has not once let me down.