6
votes
Millennials are sick of drinking, but they’re not giving up booze just yet
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- Title
- Millennials Are Sick of Drinking
- Authors
- Amanda Mull
- Published
- Apr 2 2019
- Word count
- 1828 words
This is such a weird framing to treat this as some faddish trend motivated by cultural forces. As with most millennial baiting headlines, they always try to shoe-horn some weird meta-commentary on social and cultural trends into normal ass life-milestones.
Millennials are in their late 20s/early 30s. Binge drinking is hard on your body. After a certain age you just can't drink like you used to without feeling it the next day (and sometimes the next few days). Your metabolism also starts slowing down, so you need to cut back if you don't want to pack on pounds.
People also naturally just accrue more responsibilities as they get older. Work becomes more challenging, the stakes in your projects get higher, people start having kids and pets and homes to maintain. All of this cuts into happy-hour time.
I don't know that they are totally off-base though, though it would be purely anecdotal. I have spent time around a lot of people in the finance and legal worlds, and there are A LOT of 40+ year olds who are married and have children and yet are getting hammered drunk after work at a bar with coworkers before they all go home to their families. I can't expand that to all fields, nor would I imagine its universal, but I will say I did see a distinct difference in how people my age who worked there treated drinking vs the older guys who seemed like they were living in the show Mad Men.
I think "finance and legal worlds" is the key here.
Also, from my anecdotal experience the guys always getting hammered after work have stay-at-home wives or domestic staff taking care of things at home. Those of us with household chores to do usually have to leave at a reasonable hour. It is possible that more equitable divisions of housework between husbands and wives might be contributing, as would inability to afford household help.
This sounds like the most plausible result. Millennials are simply getting older and hangovers are lasting longer.
I lol'd at this. But I think you're right -- we're getting older, we just don't want to party as hard (and we just can't).
I quit drinking last New Year's because I didn't like where my relationship with alcohol was heading. I come from a family where alcoholism is present (though undiagnosed), and I could feel what felt like a thirst when I began drinking -- I never wanted "just one" beer or wine or whatever. I'd have one, then want another, and the more I had, the more I'd want. And I'm a lightweight, so I'd end up getting drunker than I wanted to and say things I didn't want to say and feel bad about it in the morning, and worry that people were upset by me making a fool of myself. I think that I was using alcohol to get over some social anxiety I had in the moment, but it just exacerbated my social anxiety over the long term, so, after an abortive try, I committed last year.
I honestly don't miss it at all. I was worried for a little bit about being judged (I'm in Louisiana, which has a very alcoholic culture), but no one really has, at least to my face. And I've lost my taste for it -- I accidentally had a gulp of my fiancee's beer the other night and thought, Wow, I don't want this at all. So for me, it's more than a trend. And I'm glad that places are opening up that focus on non-alcoholic beverages. I mean, I love a good cranberry-lime soda, but I can only have so many!
Honestly, I never get this, and it has made me constantly wonder if there is something wrong with me because of how people talk about drinking. Alcohol simply tastes bad to me. Most of the best tasting drinks can generally be improved by removing the alcohol. So when you talk about not liking beer now, I find it extremely refreshing.
You are absolutely not alone in this.
I didn't drink for a significant portion of my life, and a lot of it was due simply to the fact that alcohol as a beverage is deeply unpleasant for me. It's not just a taste issue either. There's a mouthfeel thing going on that I don't like and can't really describe. I have never met a beer I don't immediately want to spit out, and mixed drinks are only good if the alcohol is drowned out under something else.
My husband and I go back and forth on this. He likes beer and I'll try one of his every so often, just to see if it's still disgusting (which it always is). Meanwhile, I genuinely love coffee and drink it black, which he finds equally disgusting. Neither of us can understand what the other sees in their beverage of choice, which I think speaks to the idea that taste is far from universal.
Oh, I think the opposite is true! I quite precisely because I felt that my "thirst" for alcohol was wrong, or rather, unhealthy. I think that a non-alcoholic life is definitely better, at least for me :)