I’m drinking a lot less. I’m getting older, and it’s harder on my body.
Having access to weed and psychadelics helps, but also the alcohol-free-beers are much better than they used to be.
I still drink, but I fully support younger generations not drinking as a health choice. I suspect a lot of this is, unfortunately, not due to health concerns, but afordability.
Americans just fucking suck in general so of course they’d be lame.
Alcohol is lame and for chuds, compared to most other drugs it’s a shit buzz and literally destroys your health and kills braincells long-term (unlike weed and psychedelics, despite pop culture myths)
Drinking is cringe. Recreational drugs in general are cringe. We should strive to create a society of teetotalers.
Puritanical bullshit
Wanting to do away with it doesn’t mean ban it all immediately to try and force people to be a new communist person. It would whither away. If some of it stays around, it stays around, but differently than it did before. I think the approach to drugs is similar to the approach to religion. Teetotalitarianism is a lot like state atheism in my mind.
It’s not like I’m currently a teetotaler.
CW
I say this after caving and smoking weed again after being clean for a week because dysphoria, nicotine withdrawal (also a week out), and drinking spurred me to self harming the other night.
Habitual recreational drug use is really off-putting. When it’s done occasionally on a whim it’s not so bad.
There is truly excellent beer where I live, and I don’t remember the last time I bought it outside of a restaurant. Shit’s expensive, I’m old enough to feel it the next day if I have enough to make the alcohol matter, and it takes up fridge space.
Meanwhile, weed is almost free. Even the people who grow it professionally give it away.
The teetotalers will soon overtake the alcoholics. Big Booze is at least as afraid as Big Tobacco.
We’re coming for you sooner than you think, Anheuser-Busch, Phillip Morris, et. al.
Speaking only for myself, I’m now old enough that having one (1) drink is gambling with being a tired hazy slug the next day, and two is a guarantee.
I tend to be sensitive in that way though, my brain is very clearly not good at homeostasis and never has been.
can’t afford that shit anyway even if i wanted to go out and be with the plague rats.
no point in drinking alone when there’s weed alone
Feel like this is being framed as a good thing but I want to give another perspective. Depression rates are at an all time high. Loneliness is creeping back up to 2020-era levels. People are goddamn miserable. I think about the only person I know whose life has improved since the 2010s is my sister. Even having small talk with like waitresses, cashiers in stores, you get a sense that everyone is just miserable and trying to hang on.
I stopped smoking weed and drinking in 2016 when my anxiety just became too much to bear. Those things are often portrayed as substances that take the edge off, but my experience was the complete opposite. My anxiety would just get worse. I wonder if other people are having similar experiences here and it explains the drop. Because idk when I remember the time that I used to smoke like a chimney and binge drink every weekend, it was a time when I was so much happier. Stopping doing those things was not something I did because I really wanted to, and it’s been linked to a period where I’m just increasingly miserable. Anxious and depressed. So I wonder if others have stopped drinking because of similar reasons of being miserable. Because interestingly my sister has started drinking since the 2010s. Giving support to my anecdotal hypothesis.
People also can’t afford it at all. When a drink outside is like minimum 10 bucks and you’re expected to have more than one it’s impossible to just leave the house and get a drink
Yeah this is huge. I used to drink at house parties and in basements. It was either free or I’d throw a couple bucks into a pot. I remember the first time going to a bar and ordering a drink and my eyes damn near popped out of my head when they told me how much it cost. And that was over a decade ago. I shudder to think what it’s like now.
same. i scaled back my drinking 5 years ago because i was taking life changing risks when i got drunk and i needed to clear my head about an unhealthy relationship that i was in. while i felt healthier and more stable during this sober period it was a somewhat miserable and boring time in my life. it made me look back fondly on my drinking days. I don’t see myself going back to drinking on such a regular and intense basis but i have reintegrated drinking back into my life on the weekends and it’s improved my overall mood.
i guess it’s about balance just like anything. less people drinking means less problem drinkers but I think going out to a bar and getting a little drunk (responsibly) every once in a while is a good thing for many people.
i also quit smoking weed because of the anxiety and I miss it less than alcohol. weed used to be my main crutch but something about my biology or attitude changed and the negative side effects came to outweigh the benefits. though I have also reintroduced very modest cannabis use back into my weekend routine.
Fifty-one percent of U.S. adults now believe drinking one or two alcoholic beverages a day is bad for one’s health
51% of US adults now dimly aware of research supporting the claim that habitually drinking poison is bad for you, actually.
A mere 51% of American adults now believe that [alcoholism] is bad for one’s health.
That’s too generous. They stay sober for 6 days a week then get heavily inebriated before getting behind the wheel of an SUV. It’s just that fewer and fewer of them can afford those drinks and/or SUV.
XI JINPING IS PERSONALLY STOPPING ME FROM DRINKING A 30 RACK BEHIND THE WHEEL OF A DODGE RAM
Last week, we had a little going-away campfire for a couple of our coworkers. I brought sun tea and simple syrup so people could sweeten it like they wanted to.
Boss thought it was vodka for a second and we joked about it. But it was funny to think, we’re all like 20-35 and no one seems to drink besides me. And I drink like 1-2 per month. Doesn’t help that we all had to drive home afterwards and we’re all reasonably responsible.
Its doubly funny because me and the boss talked about how we officially can’t do anything alcohol related because of our employer’s rules. Can’t do a history of cider or small beer event because of town rules and/or requiring a liquor license. Plus its “not family friendly”. Which, yeah, I get, but there is such a gulf between unhealthy drinking and “Here is one drink thats 2% alcohol and a history lesson about how and why people made alcohol”.
Its a shame because I love learning and talking about historical alcohol/drug use. Especially the less depressing use (topics like preservation, taste, and medicine, rather then misuse).
Overall, its really good that people are drinking less. But it does suck a bit for those of us who like weird shit.
I had a mangonada margarita yesterday and that’s cause we do our weekly splurge meal up front on the weekend. Otherwise, I try not to touch the stuff except at social functions. Everything is so fucking expensive.
Cool, now are you going to pay us so we can afford to go out drinking?
turns out drinking alcohol depletes vitamins needed to function without pain / headache. Recovering from drinking should include supplimenting before and after the session.
Maybe it works for some people, but for me it just feels really bad. It also makes me sad and angry.
Oh it for sure got worse for me with the sad and angry part. I can have like 4 hours of fun and after that it is suffering the consequences. If I take in enough supplements and go right to bed after those 4 hours it can be worth it on rare occasions.
I thought for sure they were going to blame Islam for this.
“ALCOHOLICS FURIOUS AS HIJAB WEARING YOUTH REFUSES TO GO OUT DRINKING.”
Once upon a time:
By 1810 the number of distilleries in the young nation had increased fivefold, to more than fourteen thousand, in less than two decades. By 1830 American adults were guzzling, per capita, a staggering 7 gallons of pure alcohol a year. . . In modern terms those 7 gallons are the equivalent of 1.7 bottles of standard 80-proof liquor per person, per week—nearly 90 bottles a year for every adult in the nation, even with abstainers (and there were millions of them) factored in.
From Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, by Daniel Okrent
We now know that Prohibition is bad policy, but people don’t think about how bad the alcohol problem was that the Temperance Movement managed to get it into the Constitution.
Something else I learned from that book is that the income tax was a Prohibitionist plot. It was a necessary prerequisite because one-third of federal revenue came from alcohol taxes.
it does help that the water doesn’t make you shit yourself to death now (
)
I had two drinks last night at happy hour with some coworkers and it was kinda nice to be slightly more relaxed and smiley, but they both tasted like alcohol aka bad (cosmo and long island ice tea, which are supposed to not even taste alcoholy??) and it upset my stomach. And it cost money! And it’s bad for me!
Might just retvrn to teetotaling. Save my substance bandwidth for something nicer
I thought long Island ice teas were known for their high alcohol content?
The selling point is supposed to be that it’s really strong but tastes weak, or even barely acloholic.
So long as you are using decent quality spirits, this should be the case. The kind of liquor you get in a well drink can be pretty rough depending on the venue. When I was drinking in bars I chose a dive bar for its well liquor selection being slightly above the bottom shelf because that monarch vodka taste is woof
Gin and tonic is the go-to for cheap well drink that doesn’t taste alcoholic. It tastes like a pine tree and even the shittiest dive bar will make a decent one.
monarch vodka
ooof that looks like the shit i was drinking in the Bad Times
My stomach hurts just thinking about drinking it lol, that along with Three Star and Popov, which my phone amusingly wants to correct to “poopoo”
it was uhhh, not a good time for my GI system. talk about poopoo goddamn
