I remember being in college and I wanted to create some sort of argument about substance abuse - particularly alcohol as it related to mental illness. The core of the argument escapes me now. I was absolutely shocked that the numbers that the government provided were in terms of dollars lost as a function of time taken off of work to seek treatment times salary. "But people do things other than work!" I thought. "What about the psychological damage? The relationships town apart? The personal journey?" I didn't think this precisely, but I didn't have a conception of politics as a fundamentally material matter and I wanted some kind of acknowledgement of alienation causing people to use. What I got was pity for business owners. This wasn't a breaking point for me, but it nudged me toward being sympathetic to leftist arguments.