" alcohol’s principal effect is to narrow our emotional and mental fields of vision.8 It creates, in their words, “a state of shortsightedness in which superficially understood, immediate aspects of experience have a disproportionate influence on behavior and emotion.” Alcohol makes the thing in the foreground even more salient and the thing in the background less significant. It makes short-term considerations loom large, and more cognitively demanding, longer-term considerations fade away. "

― Malcolm Gladwell , Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know