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There was a pretty good Kurzgesagt video posted earlier today on alcohol in general: https://youtu.be/aOwmt39L2IQ
The shift in perception of alcohol is certainly a good sign. Even outside of the health benefits, a night out at the bar is expensive now (at least on the East Coast) and honestly speaking other drugs are simply more cost-effective. I still have the occasional cocktail when going out with friends but now that I'm focused more on my overall fitness I find less of a reason to drink now. Still love the vibe of bars and pubs though.
Anecdotally knowing that club drugs like ketamine and 2c-b are gaining popularity, I wonder whether young people may be turning onto substances like those now or if in general Gen-Z prefers to abstain entirely.
Anecdotally it seems like alcohol is being replaced with weed or other things. But it doesn't bode well for the future of mental health if social drinking is being replaced with solo drug use or just solo everything.
Substance use is dropping precipitously, because partying and socialization writ large are dropping. The people who party are still drinking, they're really not the ones driving these decreases.
Alcohol's primary purpose in our society is as a social lubricant. It both lowers inhibitions, and in the expectation of its doing so creates spaces with freer acceptable behavior. Cannabis doesn't currently fill that niche, because there aren't really spaces dedicated to its consumption.
> night out at the bar is expensive now
"They" will make it cheaper. If you look at the cost of alcohol in developing countries, it can be way WAY cheaper. The profit and tax margins are currently colossal, both of which can be changed by big booze.
NA beers and cocktails are becoming more common at bars and restaurants, which helps dramatically if you are shifting lifestyles.
You can still go out with friends and enjoy festivities while "blending in". People are often more caged if they're drinking and you're not and that subtle camouflage can help alleviate that social awkwardness.
> The shift in perception of alcohol is certainly a good sign.
Is it? That same video, in the last 2-3 mins, mentioned all the positives of alcohol and ton of possibly related fallout from social drinking going down. People being lonely and depressed instead of socializing.
If I had to choose between living an extra few years but being lonely and depressed vs living a few less years but enjoying them a bunch more I'd choose the enjoyment.
I get that *maybe* that can happen without the alcohol but it's not happening and my experience is that alcohol is a net positive at the moment, until some substitute appears.
Also, different cultures have different associations with alcohol. My opinions on alcohol changed over my life:
As a child my parents offered me a sip of wine/beer/etc and it tasted horrible so I had no interest.
As a teen I happened to get interested in a religion that said "no alcohol" and so I saw it as a bad thing.
As a 20-25 I gave up the religion but it was "designated driver" time and I was happy to be that and so alcohol had this negative "drunk drivers" association.
Around 26-30 I got in a relationship with some who liked to drink socially. I tried it, nothing tasted good and it gave me a headache so after a few months I went back to not drinking as i got nothing positive out of it.
As 30 something I moved to Japan where (1) I no longer had to drive so no worries about drunk driving (2) my friends/co-workers/classmates introduced me to izakaya culture - being with friends for 2-6 hours, drinking and snacking and talking. And sometimes going to 2nd, 3rd, or 4th outings. Now, love that experience and I wouldn't give it up for almost anything. I love being with my friends, and, as the video pointed out, the alcohol works. The experience is different than without alcohol, and in a positive way. Remove it and it's influences and I think the experience would die out. I certainly don't like the negative health effects but I'm not going to give up hanging out with friends and the drinking, for me, is a positive part of that experience.
Here's a talk about how alcohol helped civilization
> a night out at the bar is expensive now
I mean, I understand the economics of it. Rent, wages, pricing, supply and demand, etc.
But, like, how messed up are things that hooch is too expensive. Like, it literally grows on trees (if you leave it there a bit). Booze is the thing where sales go up when things get worse (lipstick too, right?).
I'm not saying this is a bad thing that we're not drinking as much, but I am saying that not drinking as much is a sign of really bad things.
Meanwhile daily or near-daily marijuana use has increased by 269% from 2008 to 2022.[1]
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/611714/marijuana-use-dur...
I wonder how much of that is honesty in reporting? No doubt the wave of legalization has increase usage massively, but I sure as shit wouldn't have told a random poll in the 2010s about my illegal marijuana use. I didn't even tell my doctor for fear of it ending up in a chart somewhere.
Well we are leaving a massive microbrewery/winery bubble where everyone had a cousin opening a brewery in the 2010s. At the same time marijuana usage is slowly becoming legal. So I might expect the relative change to be quite large.
shh, you are going to upset people that think drinking is evil and cutting it has no draw backs
Hence the virginity rates. Weed replacing alcohol is a tragedy. Lonelier people in healthier bodies with rotting brains.
A good chunk of my “fun and memorable nights” involved going out for a drink with friends/meeting new people at the bar. It’s very good if the younger generation is consuming less alcohol, but unless they’re replacing the social-aspect of it with something similar, I pity them. Unfortunately, looking at the data, it shows that people are just lonelier and hang out in social circles even less.
Obviously there are problems with over-consumption, and addiction. However, what is life, if not a large collection of your memories?
Does "going out for a drink with friends/meeting new people at the bar" require consuming alcohol?
Plenty of bars have non-alcoholic beer and mocktails. I've always switched to them after 1-2 drinks.
There's so much to do other than drinking. Tennis, badminton, hiking, or even just walking the coastline.
I find the problem much more to do with the availability of entertainment. Before social media and YouTube, you just got bored staying at home all day and would naturally go out and socialize. Nowadays, everyone is just plugged into a never ending stream of TikTok brain rot.
I really like the trend. It is getting more acceptable to not drink.
I'm a party drinker, but whenever I see someone who does not drink he gets bombarded with "why not?" "You just did not have the right kind of beer yet" "just one?" and that is incredible sad.
Sadly social gatherings such as "meetups with friends" and "attendance at parties" is also dropping :( Kurzgesagt just had a video about alcohol and the social aspect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOwmt39L2IQ
Edit: Oh, and the trend for non-alcohol wine and beer is also a big plus.
When I was in my early 20s, I used to instinctively pressure non-drinkers into drinking as well. I did it because the non-drinkers ruin the fun for me. They don't laugh as much or engage in banter. They're timid and lack the drinker's adventurous spirit.
The pressuring usually worked though.
When I realized that I was hurting those people by pressuring them into drinking, rather than stop pressuring them, I stopped inviting them to social gatherings that involve drinking altogether.
Nightlife customer patronage is way down post-pandemic, to the point where some very famous bars in Chicago (Twisted Spoke, Violet Hour) have shut down. To the extent nightlife drinking was a major component of US alcohol consumption, that may explain much of the drop.
I've observed the same in NYC. I experienced the nightlife in NYC shortly before the pandemic, and then again a couple of years after, and the difference was stark. The streets used to be buzzing at 3am on any given weekend. Nowadays, you'll see some people on the streets, but the city that never sleeps is, if not quite asleep, doomscrolling in bed.
In Berlin, some clubs are closing, but the most noticeable thing is that the nightlife that used to start and end very late is now starting and ending an hour or two earlier. Covid was like a reset for some things that were "out of the ordinary" before. Pay for hospitality personnel, too... I hear it's less bad now.
I recently had a cardiologist wag her finger at me and tell me that recent data pretty much demonstrates that there really isn't any healthy amount of alcohol to consume.
20 years ago, when "1 drink a day is healthiest" was all over the news, I said cheers and picked up the habit. It's kind of hard to break, considering that I really, really enjoy the flavor of alcoholic beverages. Alcohol, as a solvent, allows for flavor profiles that just water don't allow.
Reply to her that this is only true for populations, not individuals.
Plenty of people who drink age well and plenty of people who don’t drink don’t age well.
Statistics say something about aggregates, not individual data points
A few years ago, I really dug into the research to try to find things to convince my father to stop drinking but all the evidence I could find said the opposite.
That not drinking is what is dangerous for longevity. Completely not what I wanted to find or was expecting.
I think what is actually happening is we are becoming less of an evidence based society and more of a society based on sentiments. That is what has changed the past 20 years. It doesn't matter if the actual evidence says the opposite.
We "know" drinking is bad a priori, the evidence be damned.
This is not a direct response to this article, but related to the topic of not drinking. I'm usually a follower of the latest data and such but I am highly skeptical of all the recent news about how drinking isn't safe in any quantity.
The latest data can be wrong. No different than how there was a period of time where UV light was considered this evil to avoid, and now we know it's actually pretty critical to get sunlight in moderation (and completely avoiding UV causes its own issues). This seems to be a problem with US health science where they will find something bad like partially hydrogenated fats (a terrible man made substance), and then go on to claim "fats are bad" (this is back in the 90s ish). The health system just ignored the long history of diets that were relatively high in fats (actual good natural fats), and tried to use "data". Ultimately data is only as good as our ability to measure, which is limited with something like the human body. That overcorrection has since come back to a more reasonable middle point but still has some issues.
It's undisputed that drinking a lot of alcohol is bad for you, but I don't see clear data for the grey area. If I fed a rat a whole bunch of vinegar day after day in large quantities it would get health problems, yet drinking a bit of apple cider vinegar, salt and vinegar chips, etc. are all fine, likely beneficial (pickled vegetables are good for you).
I'm not saying that there's any proof that alcohol is beneficial yet, but the lack of clear data for that grey area of risk is interesting. In Japan for example it's believed that drinking sake in moderate quantities has health benefits.
I guess going back to the sunlight analogy, it's hard to believe that a substance that has been around as long as alcohol has could be so toxic that occasional consumption has any meaningful negative effect.
I hope you are right, but honestly I think alcohol is negative for your health in any quantity. I think there are indirect benefits, like socialization, bonding, etc. But it really is a poison that your body has to metabolize. It majorly disrupts your sleep which causes all sorts of health issues. Your body needs sunlight, but it doesn't need alcohol. I drank two beers a night for years, and I wish I hadn't. I still plan on drinking on occasion, but never plan to go back to habitually drinking.
> No different than how there was a period of time where UV light was considered this evil to avoid, and now we know it's actually pretty critical to get sunlight in moderation (and completely avoiding UV causes its own issues).
The real issue isn’t that we “didn’t know” sunlight has benefits, we’ve known that for ages. Just as we know too much sun has downsides. The problem is that people can’t (or won’t) tailor advice to their own context. What counts as “moderation” in one place looks very different in another.
That’s why I’m healthy and look a decade younger than my age, while my younger sister already looks older than me and has had five skin cancers cut out. Where I live, 5–10 minutes of sun a day is plenty. Where you live, you might need hours.
So “avoid the sun” means radically different things depending on where you are.
I think the obvious reason for this is that alcohol is an order of magnitude more fun when you're socializing with people in person, and people just do so much less of that now than even just before covid.
Instead, you're seeing people turn to "quiet night at home" types of recreational drugs.
For me, I'd rather have more in-person social time and a few beers, whatever the health effects may be. The benefits of social time always felt well-worth it.
The NA beers out there have become quite good. Athletic brewing timed the market really well.
It's such a huge drop in one year, you have to wonder how much of it is Ozempic.
It's because GenZ is addicted to nicotine and millennials are all using legal weed. We've just replaced one substance with some others, rather than started abstaining.
Found myself cutting back, too. I drink beer and usually have 1-2 at a time - any more and the flavors just get muddled. It's water, tea, coffee for me most of the time (added benefit of polyphenols, antioxidants for those brewed drinks). If I drank more, I would be too worried about handicapping my intellect.
I like booze and I think social drinking is good for society.
There was a study a few years ago showing that there might not be a safe number of drinks per day.
That sort of thing makes a difference as the knowledge percolates through society.
I'd be curious to see a breakdown of this data by location/market and with sales data instead of a poll. I have a friend who works in the alcohol distribution industry and he's refuted these kinds of claims multiple times, but he also lives in a midwest state where there's not much to do but eat and drink so perhaps it's all relative.
Such a sad development, Young people need to drink more and socialize. No wonder the virginity rates are skyrocketing. You don't get into situations by getting stoned at home.
Sure it is bad for your body but when used in moderation the benefits are much much more than that risk. What a scam the weed culture is. Maybe we should ban it again together with the social media to save the birth rates and the society in general.
Casinos are also seeing a similar drop
Maybe on the coasts, but I can tell you that here in the mid-West, booze is still going strong.
I think what will happen in the future is that the people that drink, will be drinking way more; while the people that rarely drink, will more rarely drink.
We have the oldest population ever.
This should be the case.
I haven't had anything alcoholic in nearly two decades. Even when I was drinking it never got me any closer to getting laid. I quit because only stupid shit happened when I was drunk or around drunk friends. If anything nicotine acts as a superior social lubricant. These days I just drop acid, drink espresso, and consume the occasional nicotine pouch. Have never missed alcohol one bit.
After 2020, covid or long covid or something else, vaccine or not, a lot of people have been experiencing several prolonged health abnormalities, and health system are refusing or failing to recognise it. So a lot of people are trying to make sense of it and taking measures
Vitamins, exercise and reducing alcohol are some obvious ones
Besides there are studies about post covid and damage to the liver, pancreas, gut... A lot of these will have similar symptoms with alcohol excess or maybe compound with alcohol consumption
i like my mind clear 100% of the time
THC is the new Ethanol
It's laughable how young leftists manage to put every single thing that happens, in a negative way. Truly a generation of naggers.
I can see only one negative explanation to it - "people drink less because drinking is a social thing and people socialise less" and there may be some truth to it... But all the rest is just positive.
Costs: alcohol at home on average, is only 70% up between 1990 and 2024. Nominal GDP per capita is up 3.6x, so alcohol is 2.1x more accessible in real terms since then. Because real GDP per capita is only 1.7x up, the fact is that alcohol is down 19.5% as compared to everything else. It's almost never 'offshored' or otherwise import impacted - only luxury wines tend to be imported and these are a small fraction. So it's just cheaper because there is less demand - people drink less, it suppressed demand, and producers struggle to keep prices with the inflation.