Unhappiness has too high a price for recovering or recovered alcoholics. The price, sooner or later, is relapse. It might involve graduation through intense forms of therapy or self-indulgent cul-de-sacs of religious experience; it might be via the diagnostic manual and the prescription pad; it might be via the shaman's serum or the near-beer; it might it might be via the flinty allure of the career ladder and the stacked, laden shelves of the counting house; or it might bubble directly up:
Nothing is right. […] People annoy me. I try to read. I try to pray. Gloom surrounds me. Why has God left me? I mope around the house. […] What is the matter? I cannot understand. I will not be that way. I’ll get drunk! It is a cold-blooded idea. It is premeditated. (Alcoholics Anonymous, page 217)
The word gloom is striking. He perceives it not as within him but outside of him. His problems are caused by others, even by God's abandonment. And this is the key to the solution.
Unhappiness is never because of the moment. It is never even because of the past: someone who is full of God's spirit but with a terrible past is risen above it so fully that not a toe dips in the swirling waters; the angels lift him up for his foot to dash against no stone. It is not the past that is the problem; it is the future, or, rather, the apprehension, the perception, of it.
Those who know too much might be tempted to conclude, based on their cursory examination of the future, their familiarity with lurid anticipations and plotted extrapolations, that all is woe, in the general and the particular, for the whole and for the individual. The future settles and seeps like a Dickensian fog:
The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that, although the court was of the narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms. To see the dingy cloud come drooping down, obscuring everything, one might have thought that nature lived hard by and was brewing on a large scale. (Charles Dickens)
It is impossible to live with such gloom except by dissociation and escape.
How can it be dispelled?
Firstly, humility: one does not know the future.
This all meant, of course, that we had substituted negative for positive thinking. After we came to AA, we had to recognise that this trait had been an ego-feeding proposition. (Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions)
The ego loves to curate a simplified future based on a small number of negative predictions, wipe its hands, and declare its job done, as it sits atop the middenheap it has amassed. The actual future, like the actual past, will be a welter of contradictions:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. (Charles Dickens)
Secondly, one's own future is not aligned with the general future. Most any long-term AA member of sound mind and solid experience of the Twelve Steps will attest that their particular experience of someone placed in the hands of God is that God, more often than not, opens doors and smoothes the way, in contrast to general trends of surrounding society and the catastrophes wrought by self:
So our troubles, we think, are basically of our own making. They arise out of ourselves, and the alcoholic is an extreme example of self-will run riot, though he usually doesn’t think so. (Alcoholics Anonymous)
And:
When we look back, we realize that the things which came to us when we put ourselves in God’s hands were better than anything we could have planned. (Alcoholics Anonymous)
Thirdly, a good life and a hard life are not incompatible. There will certainly be difficulties, but, again, the aforementioned sterling member of AA will report that these difficulties can be borne well and turned to good account if placed, along with everything else, in God's hands:
Would the kind of dependence they had learned in AA carry them through? Well, it did. They had even fewer alcoholic lapses or emotional binges than AAs safe at home did. They were just as capable of endurance and valour as any other soldiers. Whether in Alaska or on the Salerno beachhead, their dependence upon a Higher Power worked. And far from being a weakness, this dependence was their chief source of strength. (Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions)
Gloom and cynicism must be dealt with head-on, swiftly, and determinedly.