My friends own a bar in Brooklyn. I’m frequently there. It’s frequently crowded. But, recently, I’ve noticed that a packed bar doesn’t mean what it once did—on some nights, maybe half or more of the patrons aren’t drinking alcohol.
I’ve been drinking for 15 or so years. It’s always been a part of my social life as an adult. But recently more and more people around me have decided to give up alcohol or cut way, way back on their booze intake. These friends aren’t alcoholics, it’s more that drinking stopped fitting into their lifestyle, or the drawbacks started to outweigh the benefits.
It seems much of the United States is in a similar place these days. In August, Gallup released a survey showing that only 54% of American adults were consuming alcohol, the lowest percentage ever recorded in the survey’s 86-year run. While the number of Americans who drink has always ebbed and flowed, there was a precipitous, nearly 10% drop-off between the mid-2010s and today.
From a health perspective, the Gallup poll might signal something positive—alcohol, after all, is bad for your body no matter how you look at it. And that tracks with what people told Gallup: The biggest reason Americans have stopped drinking, according to the poll, is that more people are aware of alcohol’s ill effects on people’s physical health. Gallup found for the first time in its survey that over 50% of Americans say that even drinking in moderation (one to two drinks a day) is bad for their health. That number has shot up by 25% in just seven years.
That’s why my friend Michael, 32, stopped drinking. “A goal of mine this year was to be more intentional about my diet and my use of substances,” he says. “I found drinking socially made me not really like how I felt, both when I was drinking and the day after. Now I find I get better sleep, I have improved focus, less anxiety.”
But, from a social and mental health perspective, the picture is a bit more complicated. Malcolm Purinton, a professor of history with a focus on beer consumption and production, said that the Gallup results track with what he’s witnessed in the last 5 to 10 years: Americans, particularly young ones, are more aware of the health problems, especially those pertaining to mental health, associated with alcohol. He credits social media for disseminating the risks of alcohol to audiences far and wide. But he says an equally large factor might be that people are simply relaxing in different ways.
“A lot of people who are coming of age around COVID, they’re socializing completely differently,” he says. “It used to be that alcohol was everywhere. In the home, at social institutions, cultural institutions, at colleges. When I was in high school in Vermont, we’d have parties in the woods and drink alcohol there. How does that shift if you’re going to school online and living with your parents?”
Purinton also says the rise of technology has played a role in the decrease in another way: People might be less likely to get drunk if they’re aware anything they do could be recorded and posted online. “The surveillance life we all have now—children growing up with cameras in their pockets, people are realizing they’re always being tracked by their peers and potential employers and everyone,” he says. “So in some ways there's an aspect of control.”
The Gallup survey and Purinton’s research echo what I hear from my sober and sober-curious friends: that drinking simply doesn’t fit into a more fractured social landscape, one in which people are socializing more through the internet and less through physical spaces.
Read more about why our waning drinking culture might be hurting our social lives here.
