Breaking Bad is good and engaging but the value to time payoff isn’t quite dense enough for me. Some episodes are amazing. Others are suuuuuper boring. I only made it halfway through season two, I think this is generally because I’m not as attracted to stories with a flawed protagonist. Walter should have just taken the job at the company he founded and gotten super rich that way. I also don’t like the way that he lied to his wife so much. Anyway, stories about people who make a lot of bad decisions aren’t that engaging to me.
–
On a broader note, people seem to develop problematic relationships with substances when they use them as a coping tool. Alcohol, cigarettes, coffee, sugar (my fav!), marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, etc etc. Those things have nothing inherently wrong with them but using them to cope and escape is when things start to go awry.
Another way to put this is that you should be sober about 90% of the time. I’ll say this again even more carefully, if you find yourself doing some intoxicant everyday, it’s not helping, it’s just making your problems worse.
