Too Much To Drink?

Casual Alcohol in Modern Culture

Carrie Bradshaw in season two of Sex and the City

By the time I was a junior in high school, people were naively placed in have and have-not mental camps in my mind - the ones who partied and the ones who hadn’t yet. I was a part of the latter camp. Having witnessed alcoholism up close and personal at home and knowing that the disease was likely housed in my genetic code, I had an aversion to drinking. I knew that alcohol could warp your thoughts and actions and change the way you treat others. I had experienced the ill conduct of people who drank heavily and I didn’t want to treat people that way. I harshly judged my peers who considered alcohol a magic elixir, feeling a burning sensation in my chest whenever the subject was broached. They seemed as ignorant as they could be to the ways drinking could utterly rock a family. But I figured they were just kids. As was I.

I had my first drunken experiences when I was college-aged and felt as though I better understood my peers on another level. Alcohol did make certain things appear funnier, my head a bit lighter. It’s a silly experience, drinking, but one that I still believed should be engaged with in moderation, based on the way I knew it could unspool one’s life. I thought “drink” was better off as a noun than a verb - something you consume rather than something you do, further externalizing it from a person. If it’s this thing that’s separate from someone, maybe they have a better chance of controlling it. I earnestly tried to pull back on the reins of my judgment.

While those sentiments still hold true in my head, I had another thing coming when I moved to New York City. Alcohol is a firm, dazzling pillar of social life in the city. Weekend-long drinking sprees, copious late nights, afternoon bar crawls, boozy brunches - the heavy drinking tendencies of college linger more than I dumbly expected. This perhaps shouldn’t have been so shocking - it’s the beige-toned water most Americans swim in. Drinking is a part of young adult culture in just about every major city across the United States. Still, I felt socially isolated in my experiences, making the transition more of a revelation. As an adult, it’s even harder to ignore the depth to which alcohol punctures just about every life facet, particularly in NYC. 

Conversations with friends and coworkers about weekend plans almost always center on alcohol - where, when, and with whom people are planning on drinking. People love telling stories about alcohol, even the mere mention of being intoxicated is grounds for hilarity - just as it was in high school. Modern workplaces are often the primary culprits of heavy drinking culture, with after-work happy hours that often include open bars and hard seltzers in office fridges. Many wouldn’t bat much of an eye if you brought a seltzer to your desk after five. None of this is new - I’m imagining the parties of the roaring 20s and Don Draper-types carousing brown liquor in their mid-century offices. But, as I step further into the professional realm of young adulthood, it’s striking nonetheless.

In her piece "America Has a Drinking Problem," Senior Editor for The Atlantic Kate Julian argues that alcohol has social and psychological benefits when consumed in the “right” context, which is typically a social context in her eyes. She tells NPR, however, that a problem also lies within how embedded alcohol consumption is in ordinary domains of life. One can drink in places other than bars and restaurants, including supermarkets, select Starbucks, zoos, and gyms. Julian claims that people who drink alcohol will continue to do so even as the amount of time available to socialize with others dwindles with age, making alcohol’s deeper entrenchment in daily life welcomed. That paired with modern life stressors - both on personal and global scales - leads to a community landscape in which alcohol is and will continue to be heavily embedded.

Heavy drinking tendencies almost had a juvenile cleanness to them in college. But now, as adults, a darker underbelly is revealed. One that urges the mind to stay heavily occupied and in a state of distraction, perhaps to white-knuckle grip the final years of one’s youth and avoid maturation. Or, most obviously, because of a growing chemical addiction, which serves as a source of laughter and “fun” in school and morphs into a cause for concern in the “real world.” A cause that often slips under the radar of friends and family until a more visibly troubling problem emerges.

It’s well-known that drinking heavily all the time can put one’s physical health and safety at risk. But even among those below that threshold, drinking a lot causes sluggishness - during and hours after its consumption. As such, motivation to create challenging, but personally rewarding work and engage in meaningful conversations can diminish, since the drink is reward enough itself. In addition, the time and energy put into consuming alcohol and recovering post-consumption eats into the time one might devote to more long-lasting, fulfilling weekend pursuits. More cynically, putting all your stake in alcohol as a primary personality facet makes one flat in their complexity, joining the masses of beer dads, wine moms, and SantaCon millennials, of which drinking is often the main social activity. At its worst, heavy drinking as a hobby can sincerely harm people, and at its “best,” it can tire people and ultimately make their primary points of conversation uninteresting.

Our world contains no shortage of mental distractions - whether it’s alcohol, phone addiction, or even overscheduling one’s social calendar to stay busy. All of these measures succeed in keeping us from sitting quietly with our minds, and perhaps interrogating the richer questions of purpose and passion that are uncomfortable to consider. “I think there are multiple ways you can try to dissociate and not be present with your mind,” Priyanka Kompella, co-founder of the booze-free event company Zero Proofed tells me. “I think it’s important to be cognizant of that and choose to be an active participant in your brain.”

Zero Proofed is one of a handful of brands spearheading a burgeoning “social drinking without alcohol” movement. “We still say we’re drinking, we’re just drinking non-alcoholic cocktails,” co-founder Chirasmita Kompella says. The purpose behind the company’s social events is to create environments where people are encouraged to be their most authentic selves, “engaging in genuine conversations based on your own intuition, instead of what’s in your glass driving the conversation.” “It’s about choosing to celebrate that everyone is coming together and having these serendipitous conversations out of the presence of the moment,” Chirasmita shares.

Gen Zers are reportedly drinking less than past generations in both the US and UK. BBC reports several reasons for this, including the generation being generally risk-averse, more aware of the adverse health effects of drinking, and notably, concerned with personal development. The last point reminds me of the online identities Gen Zers have seemed to connect with in the last couple of years - one of which, is the optimized “That Girl” who would likely put nothing more than a tequila soda with lime in her system, if she drinks at all. Given the sine wave upon which trends cycle, drinking in excess will likely be as en vogue among young people again as in the early aughts. As such, how does one find balance in a world that promotes unbalance on either side of the spectrum? Whether it’s Y2K party culture, millennial office party culture, or hyper-optimized, short-form Gen Z culture, everyone seems to have a dog in the fight - a stance, one way or another, on partying, inebriation, and what engaging in either says about who you are.

Despite our culture’s longstanding obsession with dichotomies, Priyanka says that she sees our generation seeking relief from a life of “absolutes.” The optimization trends reflect a desire to become more in touch with one’s gut intuition by engaging in more mindful practices, whether it’s spending more time offline “touching grass,” or more time sober. “For me, removing alcohol from my lifestyle just strengthened my intuition to this level where my mind-to-gut communication pathway is so strong,” Priyanka shares. At times, she and Chirasmita forget that “alcohol” is even a part of the conversation surrounding their work, as removing it has emboldened them - and others - to make more conscious decisions in other life domains as well.

“Once you know you can, everything becomes so much easier because you actively choose whether you should or shouldn’t [drink],” Priyanka says on experiencing a night out without alcohol.

There is glamour in the party girl and glamour in the sober, green-juice-guzzling gym girl, but there is naturally less visible allure in the person who seeks harmony between polarities. Drinking with friends is a fun part of life. And it’s also not a bedrock for a personally satisfying existence. Similar to how we might approach phone addiction, learning to feel comfortable interrogating our “casual” relationships with the fun, but mind-numbing facets of life may help clarify feelings of personal dissatisfaction. Drinking can be a part of one’s life, but not a stand-in for a more intimate passion or pursuit. As such, there’s harmony to be found in the places between extremes.

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