Why is life in the richest nation the world has ever seen so fucking miserable that people have to drink themselves to death to cope with it?

The only way... the only way... to solve a problem is by eliminating the root cause.

The root cause is usually a thing that creates these circumstances and bans things for coping/breaking up with it. I doubt that we can eliminate it, because it helped with species survival for too long to be forgotten in a moment. At least not in our current form.