Alcohol is just in a structural decline. From my experiences in Switzerland:
1. 10-15 years ago it was expected you would have 1-2 glasses of wine at lunch as a front office guy / banker while talking shop. Now you will get a trip to HR unless meeting a client or in a place that still allows it. I imagine similar things in other areas. I still see construction workers drinking a can at 6:30pm however.
2. For good reason, "we were both drunk and X happened" doesn't work as an explanation anymore. Turns out that was a big a part of it.
The only real place people are still "expected" to drink is the army (cos there is nothing else to do) or meeting some boomer client. Younger people just do other drugs/stimulants.
Same observation from Finland. Additionally, being even slightly drunk in front of children has become very no-no. I recently had a small gathering of other families with children at my home and I made the mistake of offering them some beers. Everyone declined and the looks I got were the same as if I had offered them crack cocaine.
I don't think it's all good, though, since a lot of social events that were previously facilitated by alcohol just disappear. Like who the fuck actually enjoys acquantainces' children's birthdays without a beer or two? Turns out people suck at socialising without alcohol, and if alcohol disappears, people just stay at home and play video games or something.
This is going to sound like I'm over generalizing and maybe even a bit... racist? and I already apologize for it, it's not my intention. I hope I can pass the actual message I'm trying to pass. So, let's go.
Doesn't Finland, like the other Nordic countries, have a long history of alcohol abuse and pushing against it (like, with draconian prices)? Isn't maybe just that policy "winning"? Also, couldn't this be yet another case where the Nordic are seen as "one step beyond" the rest like it was the case when fully digitalizing schools, only then to backpedal realizing it's not all so good and there are drawbacks that were not considered?
I say this to connect with the second part of your post, to which I fully agree: alcohol is not generally good for health and it can be abused but also small quantities here and there won't probably hurt you in a serious way and will give some social benefits like the ones you mentioned. (and the same applied to other light drugs as well!)
I'd say that here in Finland, the decline in alcohol use has more to do with global trends, especially with the younger generations. The problem though is that there has not been any replacement for the social lubrication required here for people to attempt to be social. Purely based on my own experiences, people are less social, go out less, and therefore use less alcohol.
Feels as if the death of religion is followed by the death of bars, restaurants and other places to go out to in the evening, especially after Covid, leaving even fewer places to meet people.
It's true that people up here tend to get very drunk collectively as the evening drags on, which has always bothered me as somebody who doesn't drink alcohol... First everybody's very dry and awkward, then it's fun for an hour or so, and then things start getting over the top and pretty mental. Compared with central Europe, people don't slow down a few glasses in.
But all that is changing as it seems many people just stopped going out at all. So people might drink less alcohol, but I'm not sure that indicates an improvement of mental health or social coherence. The internet is making people lonelier.
From my anecdotal experience in Sweden, I suspect it might have a lot to do with the lasting economic situation since Covid. People do not seem to be able to afford going out or having people over like they used to.
Prices have increased a lot, making the margins even harder to survive on for the majority.
Is it literally hard to survive? Even with a job and statistically nobody having children and a sparsely populated small country? Perhaps it is better to just not have a job and live on government welfare.
If that is unsustainable for the country then eventually something might change. Until then you have to play the hand you're dealt.
“In short, the great disinvitation is real, and we can’t wish or explain it away by arguing that Americans are just finding new ways to be with friends.”
> Doesn't Finland, like the other Nordic countries, have a long history of alcohol abuse and pushing against it (like, with draconian prices)? Isn't maybe just that policy "winning"?
Yes and no; all the Nordic / Lutheran countries have some mildly prohibitionist policies like the Norwegian wine monopoly, and yes it gets very dark and depressing up there which led to alcohol abuse becoming a social problem in the early 20th century, but that situation was stable for years and the decline in alcohol consumption is a global phenomenon.
While the origins may be religious, I'd say the high taxes on alcohol and most alcoholic beverages only being available in state-run shops (Systembolaget/Vinmonopolet/Alko/Vínbúðin) is by now a 100% Nordic phenomenon.
The most interesting situation is actually in Iceland: full prohibition introduced 1915, wine legalized 1922, all other beverages legalized 1935 except for (of all things) beer with more than 2.25% ABV, which had to wait until 1 March 1989 (since then celebrated as "Beer Day") - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_Iceland
Ah, ok, that's interesting! I have been to the US three times, and was aware that there are still some counties with complete prohibition, but wasn't aware of this particular quirk. But, even from that list, it's hard to tell which states sell alcoholic beverages only in state-operated stores (similar to the Nordic states), and which license private stores to sell them (which is common throughout the world, but of course more restrictive in some places than in others).
Most states still have very strange laws around alcohol due to the aftermath of prohibition.
I grew up in NY where beer cannot be sold in liquor stores, but can be sold in grocery stores. But grocery stores can only sell beer that is less than 6% ABV so any beer that is higher ABV can only be sold directly by breweries or by beer distributors.
Right next store in NJ, beer is only sold in liquor stores and for the longest time breweries could not legally sell you beer for on-site consumption so a bunch of breweries got around this by offering a $5 tour and as a part of the tour you were given a glass of beer.
I live close to a city that only allows city-owned liquor stores, Eden Prairie MN. But it's trivial to drive to the next city over and shop wherever you want.
Alcoholism was a huge problem if you go back several 100 of years where home distillation was rampant, and there is indeed regulation and taxes to control it in Denmark. You can ask an LLM for more details. It's just not done the way say Sweden does it.
Finland's alcoholism-curbing policies date from the early twentieth century and the kind of abuse they were meant to curb was especially the drinking of spirits. Then, nothing changed for decades until, quite recently, beer sales have actually become more liberalized and you can buy higher-strength stuff in supermarkets.
Finland definitely has a history of binge drinking and straight up alcoholism. However, I don't think the state can take credit for consumption going down, since the decline in drinking among younger generations seems pretty much global at this point.
Exactly, the younger generations just stay at home, on the internet. So social drinking has mostly disappeared. Those that really want to get totally drunk probably still do though.
My impression is that decline can mostly be attributed to gen Z. They grew up with social media that made a better point to emphasis how dangerous alcohol is. Previous dominant media, at most, had very sterile disclaimers that alcohol is bad for you.
Romania has seen a similar decline in consumption (though still in top 3 across EU in consumption), such as that nowadays we have articles from media outlets (as a voice for the industry) that complain of the downward trend. While in reality we should be celebrating this change in culture!
Of course we should be, but the line went down, therefore we need 600 think-pieces attempting to shame us for caring for our health.
Wife and I used to be avid drinkers but with the expansion of legal cannabis, it's just not as good of an option. I'll still make myself a negroni or an old fashioned on occasion, just because they're delicious, but I haven't drank-to-get-drunk in YEARS. If I'm actually trying to unwind (and who isn't given the sheer STATE of our world!) I'm spoiled for choices of substances that both don't interact with my depression nearly as badly as alcohol and, as a bonus, don't make me gain weight like an inflation fetish character.
The alcohol industry won spectacularly for decades a game of public policy and image where alcohol, a substance connected to industrial quantities of human death and suffering, was somehow the "accepted and normal" way to get fucked up when you wanted to be, even though again, numerous alternatives existed that were better for you. They're going to go through a similar process to tobacco I think, which is to say: it'll still be around, but it will shrink to an industry sized appropriately for the actual demand of it's product.
In the US Gen Z doesn't drink because of social isolation. Drinking was always a social thing and drinking alone has a stigma associated with it. Also, THC use has become much more socially acceptable and that has replaced a lot of alcohol use.
Gen Z still parties and socializes, but their parties are constantly recorded and posted on social media. There's much higher stakes to getting wasted and making a fool out of yourself in the panopticon.
It is a generational thing, but IMO you've got the wrong root cause. Discussion of the dangers of drinking stems from people choosing not to drink, and people are choosing not to drink because they are attending the kinds of social gatherings that are lubricated by alcohol less.
As such, I'm hesitant to point to the decline in alcohol sales as a public health win. If people were drinking less simply because they were choosing to drink less, that's probably a public health win. If people are drinking less because their social lives have evaporated, that's probably really bad.
Your factors are real, but I think both elements are at play. I admit I could be biased as I see gen Z as more disciplined, locked in, from gyms to lifestyle.
Socialisation, or lack thereof, is a great problem for many people and newer generations raised "online", when you get for free at home endless social media distraction.
But even the 20 year olds I've met in bars were likely to stop drinking way sooner than us milenials, which still get plastered, at least on special occasions.
the article also explicitly called out that boomers aging out of the market is a driving factor.
its easy to forget just how freakishly large that cohort is and how they are all steeped in alcohol as the primary way to an altered state.
As they get too old to drink for various health reasons it makes sense that california wine especially would take the hit because boomers also have all the money so they are the ones buying fancy wine.
the younger gens not backfilling the demand contributes but it was never going to be at boomer levels anyway.
Get ready for a lot more stories like this as boomers stop doing all kinds of things... traveling, buying cars etc.
Their statement was appropriately hedged. They didn't claim small amounts were harmless, just that it wouldn't hurt in a "serious" way. Your rush to "um actually" someone meant you missed what was being said and "um actually"'d a statement that existed only in your mind. Anyway...
Everyone's threshold for "serious" harm is different.
For adult men, if you drink fewer than 15 drinks per week but greater than zero, the expected decrease of average lifespan is measured in months not years. Obviously more than zero. Is that "serious" enough to not partake? Up to each person.
I have an anecdotal situation dealing with dementia ridden parents from chronic drinking. And similar with grandparents. My risk tolerance is zero for alcohol. besides the lifespan being reduced: quality of life tanks off of a fucking cliff, dragging everyone you love and who loves you down there too.
Sorry to hear that, but your experiences aren't universal. Absolutism is a sensible option especially if there's been problems in the family. It's not the only sensible option for everyone.
In Eastern Europe it's still quite usual to have a few drinks at parties but we don't have it at lunch because one would most likely drive to work, so then it's a big no-no. Bulgaria and Greece have 0.5‰ tolerance for alcohol while driving and also allow public drinking (except where explicitly prohibited), but I would still not do it because it's easy to exceed the limit or get involved in an accident and then it's your fault regardless. Thus one might end up having a glass or two in the evening, after work hours. I'd possibly have a beer or two in the evening during dog walks or some wine in the evening with my wife. When we walk by the pub, my dog almost always pulls me towards the terrace.
In France they still drink a glass or two during lunch break. I've seen office workers in La Défense, where one would normally commute using Paris Métro Line 1.
In the US the reverse happened. Although people drink less, you do get offered alcohol everywhere. I don't remember it being present at places like zoos, kids indoor playgrounds, state fairs, etc. I was even at a birthday at a public park at 10am Sunday morning and saw some White Claws being passed around.
People drink less but there is less stigma around alcohol and obvious other once illegal drugs.
I think it very much depends on what groups. Because taboos on alcohol in formerly kosher environments are new (~2016+?), there's uneven adherence.
You saw the same thing with smoking in the 90s in the US. Kids nowadays wouldn't believe the amount of bitching there was that you couldn't smoke inside restaurants, etc.
And I get it -- cultural assumptions changing is messy and can feel confusing to people.
PS: Also alcohol sold in public spaces has relatively high margins, so that explains that.
I think smoking is going through a mini-resurgence right now.
I think back to my childhood and smoking was everywhere. My high school (graduated in 1989) had a smoking area for students. Cigarette smoke wafted out of the teacher's lounge. Kids would light up as soon as they got off the bus on a field trip. I don't have many specific memories of it, but people must have reeked.
Alcohol was also huge. We had a fifth year of high school (grade 13) and so there were plenty of 19 year old students and the drinking age was 19. Students would buy beer on their lunch period for the weekend and store it in their locker and nobody thought anything of it.
Genuinely feels like we're optimising for a less human way to interact with each other in pursuit of some nicer statistics (hooray people live two tenths of a year longer). Why even have children if everything surrounding them has to be miserable these days.
I do have a feeling that the social structures, and perhaps even biology, have evolved over centuries with alcohol present to grease the wheels. It can allow a higher baseline of introversion / neuroticism (which facilitates higher performance in some areas but worse socialising), with the ability to drink to boost the social aspect when needed. Chesterton's beer, in other words.
But at what cost ? If your society needs alcohol to help the introverted and slightly neurotic fit in then you are just incentivising those people to have substance abuse issues.
There's a compelling argument that civilization itself is a bunch of scaffolding around beer making. Human social lives have been shaped by alcohol since before agriculture. Conflating having a few drinks with substance abuse is like saying eating lunch is an eating disorder.
Society being healthier is a good thing, but not at the cost of human socialization.
> Like who the fuck actually enjoys acquantainces' children's birthdays without a beer or two?
That's really just a personal trait. I love going to my kid's friend's birthdays because we get to talk to the other parents who have become good friends as well, plus we don't have to look after the kids as much. "Adult time" and we know they're having fun. I don't have to drink in those.
I guess not everyone is that outgoing and not every parent group is as friendly as mine but it's hard to see getting drunk as a necessary counter to that.
> Turns out people suck at socialising without alcohol, and if alcohol disappears, people just stay at home and play video games or something.
Again, a personal trait. It's extremely common here in Brazil to drink but it's also very common to just not drink and have as much fun. Someone saying they need to have alcohol to enjoy themselves at a gathering is not going to be looked at very kindly, as if everyone else was just so boring they had to intoxicate themselves to bear through it.
> Someone saying they need to have alcohol to enjoy themselves at a gathering is not going to be looked at very kindly, as if everyone else was just so boring they had to intoxicate themselves to bear through it.
Well duh, which is why nobody would ever say that out loud. Doesn't stop anyone from thinking it, though.
Whenever I go to one of my kid's friends' birthday parties, it's basically split into two groups: 1. Boomers / GenX "the grandparents" sitting together drinking beer and socializing, and 2. GenZ / Millennials "the parents" sitting alone scrolling their phones.
> Like who the fuck actually enjoys acquantainces' children's birthdays without a beer or two?
That is a fair point, but personally I enjoy the time during which my child is playing with their peers and not trying to have me as a substitute for these kinds of interactions.
At this exact moment there is another post [1] on HN from Derek Thompson talking about the >70% drop over the past few decades in having other people over to socialize for dinner. Correlation is not causation, and...
> Like who the fuck actually enjoys acquantainces' children's birthdays without a beer or two?
You have a reason to go there, which is socialising with the parents presumably. If you can't have fun with people without drinking and then blame it on the lack of alcohol... that's no good.
The reason you go to kids' birthday parties because your child was invited and they're too young to go alone.
You can socialize and you kind of have to, but they've probably invited every classmate from preschool or whatever, so there's 20 people you probably haven't met before, have nothing in common except having kids the same age, and will probably never see again (except maybe at the next birthday party). And often the parties are held in a McDonalds or something, so catering is chicken nuggets and shitty cake with a Paw Patrol motif.
I get the sentiment, but it seems to me like a crutch that should be worked on getting rid of. It can't be that painful to be with other people, if it is, we need to work on ourselves and the culture. The jump from "I'm bored/uncomfortable" -> "might as well get drunk" seems wrong and a slippery slide to boot.
Human beings have been complaining about other people at social events being bores since antiquity. There is no work on oneself and the culture that will, at a societal level, make all such interactions pleasant.
Having a beer or two at a kids birthday party is a world away from getting trashed at a college party. Personally, I need a drink to loosen up and not be so uptight around casual acquaintances. I offer the same courtesy when I host birthday parties.
I heard a comedian make the point that HR only began to exist once women became more prevalent in the workforce. And at that point you do need much more oversight. And having women in the workforce is positive since they're ~50% of the population and offer distinct experiences.
But I wonder the unseen downsides of having HR so powerful in an organization. From useless screening of candidates, to overly corrective actions by everyone terrified HR will essentially fire them. Maybe it would be better to have 1-2 glasses of wine during lunch occasionally. They're extra-judicial, easily the most powerful group in an organization with little oversight.
My guess is that you're in the US. Here in the Netherlands, while there's plenty to criticize or laugh about, HR is also responsible for pensions, benefits, workplace safety, reintegration from sickness, ensuring that staff is well trained for their role, etc.
At my org they also organize the Thursday evening drinks session :)
> pensions, benefits, workplace safety, reintegration from sickness,
We use Justworks and they do that all for us. You're technically an employee of Justworks, and their name shows up on your paychecks. You hook into their health and 401k benefits, and they check all the workplace safety boxes. For instance, they'll mail you posters you legally have to put up in your office to ensure you're telling employees about overtime. HR plays literally no role in any of time apart from maybe selecting the health plans, something we do once a year and roll over every time.
> ensuring that staff is well trained for their role
What does an HR person know about training for your role? Is HR cross-trained in engineering for instance? Seems wildly different from my experience. HR would ineffectively screen candidates and ask you about buzz words. So they'll ask "do you have experience in Javascript" and I'll say "no, but I have a lot of experience in Typescript" and they'll just screen me out because they'll have no context.
And HR staff is also much more social so they'll pick up on awkwardness and screen there as well, when in many fields like engineering, the tolerance of awkwardness is much higher.
> What does an HR person know about training for your role?
IME they don't know anything about the training itself. But they don't work in a vacuum, so there will be training programs set up by "regular" staff, and HR will make sure that you have access to them, that you attend your training if it's mandatory, etc. They'll also ask you if you need any kind of training you're not getting, and figure out a way for you to get it. Again, this usually involves the "technical" staff. They're typically facilitators.
This is what I've noticed in two medium-sized companies in France.
> Here in the Netherlands, while there's plenty to criticize or laugh about, HR is also responsible for pensions, benefits, workplace safety, reintegration from sickness, ensuring that staff is well trained for their role, etc.
HR is a powerful organization for a reason. Companies everywhere operate in a legal environment, and 90% of what HR does is keep the company from getting sued.
> 90% of what HR does is keep the company from getting sued
Which people would be wise to remember. HR is there to protect the company, not you or your co-workers. Sometimes these two things align but not always.
I believe this is the legal team. There are a lot of self imposed restrictions HR puts on companies, like the can't have a drink during lunch, but I don't understand how ignoring such rules leads to getting sued.
For sex stuff, sure, which was my point about women. A former employee can sue for being fired or harassed, etc. And I guess having everyone jump through hoops with training about all the various isms can provide plausible deniability when something illegal happens. But I think you're overstating the role HR plays here.
> A former employee can sue for being fired or harassed
Yes. This is where all the rules come from. It's just like airline safety or workplace safety: for almost every rule, you can find the incident which caused it to be put in place.
The problem here is you not believing sexual harassment is real, or a real problem. There have been enough women bullied out of jobs they loved by harassment from male co-workers, over and over again, and enough of them have won their lawsuits or tribunals against the employers, that there are rules against this, which will be enforced.
And enough people will have used "I was drinking" as an excuse for harassment that companies feel the need to limit their risk by banning drinking.
People get annoyed at HR for being a "compliance" role, but it's the same phenomenon as hating the people checking the fire exits, the ladders, PAT testing all your electrical devices (this may be UK specific?), making you wear a hard hat and safety boots, or making you reconcile the cash in the register with the receipts.
> The problem here is you not believing sexual harassment is real, or a real problem
???
Where do you get that from? I do think it's a problem and it becomes a problem because we accept mixed-sex work environments. HR isn't there to protect women from getting harassed, they're mostly there to protect management. Sexual harassment is still illegal, whether HR exists or not.
I don't think HR ladies are roaming factory floors making sure people are wearing hardhats. That's a managers responsibility and the company has legal obligations.
So when exactly has that non-mixed-sex workplace existed? It hasn't, the mixed nature was just buried under ungodly amounts of hierarchy full of gender defaults. With harassment just taken as a given. Partially held in check by, well, good guys who I guess have always existed, and the ones from the dark ages must have been very good given the lack of external checks, but those 20 or whatever percent who weren't must have made life quite miserable for those at the wrong side of the default imbalance. Yes, progress has happened but we should still have more of it, not less. And HR plays a role in this progress, even if at times it appears a little annoying or excessive.
There was literally a legislative marriage bar in the Irish Civil Service from 1924 till 1973.
The marriage bar forced female civil servants in Ireland to resign from their jobs when they got married and stopped married women from joining the permanent civil service.
We were far from the only country to have such mandates, and it was done so as an equivalence with the governance processes of the private sector. Divorce was only legalised in Ireland 1995.
How many lady sailors, how many lady soldiers, how many lady construction workers, how many lady ditch diggers, how many lady truckers?
In the past (and still today in many places), most of the workforce were not working in mixed gender places. Just take a look at photographic evidence of the many factories that only employed women.
Yes, that's what I meant. Employers are the deep pocket defendants that might get roped into a lawsuit resulting from bad behavior on the part of their employees.
The only problems with that reasoning is that women have been in the workplace for hundreds of years (domestic service, textiles, etc), and human resources started appearing in about 1900, approximately 50 years before mixed workplaces were common.
Most industries were almost exclusively single sex and things worked well without HR
HR was invented because workplaces didn't work well, and that was about 50 years before mixed workplaces were common. You're just projecting your biases and ignoring the facts.
Surely a comedian isn't the right person for this analysis.
The first HR departments were created to defuse feminist agitation for equality in the workplace. They were place in opposition to women's equality, not in alignment to it.
Why do you believe that HR has little oversight? HR reports to the bosses same as everybody else. They aren't some rogue insurgent organization within corporations.
I don't think we can blame this one on HR, people just aren't drinking as much alcohol, all over the developed world.
The US isn't even an outlier. I'm not sure why, I don't buy the health reason argument, since I don't think people pay attention to health studies. And they have been smoking (marijuana) which is terrible for the lungs and has other health issues. And there are problems with obesity.
It's not because of health consciousness.
Overall, people aren't drinking or having sex or going out as much, these are all in decline.
People are more neurotic now because of ubiquitous gamification and scoring. Health and aging and looks are scored, alcohol will cost you. Appearing controlled and on brand is a game, alcohol throws the game off. We’ve chosen a dry panopticon.
I'd be very surprised if a full review didn't reveal that early HR more often existed to protect high position males against females in the workplace.
Behaviors and cultural norms don't change overnight, and HR is ultimately subordinate to leadership, especially in private companies with partnership structures, etc.
Modern HR feels like a better balance, with the caveat that it will usually protect the company from any employee.
Loads of women in the workforce in WWII. Was there anything like HR? (Not counting the recruiting departments, which were focused on finding & retaining workers in a very tight labor market.)
Instead of "women in the workforce", I'd say it was changing society and social norms. A century-ish ago, in quite a few sorts of places, workspace disputes might well be settled with fists. (Yes, there were many norms and unwritten rules about that.) Post-WWII, there was a long trend of gentrifying social mores, which discouraged such things. New laws and legal norms encouraged lawsuits over things previously tolerated, or settled informally. And more than just women, civil rights laws and norms pushed into the workplace. Bring in the lawyers, reporters, new public ideals - and a business really needed an HR Dept., to prevent disasters.
if we can be in offices now without regressive troglodytes in positions of authority freely making loud racist (and completely personalized) insults directed at their non-white peers and subordinates, to the guffaws of all the other men in the room (this is an actual thing I witnessed as a young intern at a defense contractor in the late 1980s, and no I was not the victim. to get a racist incident so glaring that even in 1988, it stays in the mind of a young white 18 year old kid for 40 years, means it had to be pretty bad), HR probably didn't ruin exactly everything.
That is over the top. HR on the whole protects the employees and the organization. The experience you reference is not my experience at all and sounds disingenuous. We don't get to do whatever we want in the workplace, there are social structures that need to be adhered to. Like with any power structure there are people who will maximize their control for its own sake which is unfortunate but not an excuse to dismiss the whole concept.
Yea I don’t get all the moping in this thread about alcohol being in decline.
In my country it was wayyy to socially acceptable (almost required) to get blackout drunk every weekend; people fighting; drunk drivers; the amount of alcoholics destroying their life because it’s so accessible.
Don’t get me wrong i enjoy a drink once in a while, even getting drunk sometimes but overall it’s a terrible terrible drug.
According to the book "Drunk", the reason you drink with people is it's more likely their true self comes out and you can more easily find out if they are trustworthy and worth doing business with. Not saying that therefore you should drink, nor do I know if it can actually be backed up.
Lol I would love to see how he argues that alcohol increases creativity. This is one of those things that sound plausible but very debatable if true or not.
I think it's more likely that it reduces your tendency to discard ideas that on the surface seem bad. Some of those seemingly bad ideas will turn out to be good, so if you take them seriously you'll look more creative, even though you didn't actually come up with any additional ideas.
Yes even that framing is a bit extreme. It increases your risk tolerance.
So you're more open to new creative ideas, they don't even have to be that crazy, merely not the status quo.
In my own case it does (or at least the first one does) because it reduces inhibition from creative impostor syndrome.
It also helped occasionally in severe OCD crises when no other strategy would break a cycle of compulsion: literally a single shot of alcohol will.
And it can help if I am stuck in self-defeating ADHD loops.
None of these things are advisable or worth the health damage even small amounts of alcohol could be causing. The only thing that is worth say a dozen units per year is reducing social anxiety. There are people I only know because I had a rare drink.
Weed massively increases creativity in everybody I asked, sure as hell does for me. Its not very controllable, ideas comes semi-randomly and works with topic processed previously, but damn so many results are actually good and stand test of time (I mean decades, like apartment interior design).
Alcohol? Social lubricant for sure, but creativity is contained only in the mind of a drunken fool who thinks better of his ideas than he should. That I never experienced, nor have witnessed and I certainly didn't avoid such situations.
While I don't agree or disagree, we had a rule with my grad school colleagues and prof that we couldn't have certain discussions if four people had a pint in hand and the fifth was there drinking water, taking notes lol.
I suspect that alcohol was a technology invented to protect the society from psychopaths. The psychopaths do not have instinctive empathy, but they can pretend. Alcohol ruins their ability to keep control, so when they get drunk, they will say or do something crazy that you will remember the next day.
It would make sense that when psychopaths get the power, they will eliminate the detectors.
> the reason you drink with people is it's more likely their true self comes out and you can more easily find out if they are trustworthy and worth doing business with.
This doesn't work when you're a person being encouraged to drink in an asymmetric power dynamic and it turns out the people you're drinking with are monsters. You end up in a tragic story like what happened in the Dartmouth Predator Professor Gang and perhaps the recent Cornell case as well.
College students have basically stopped drinking. I had a recent Berkeley college grad tell me no one drinks at Berkeley anymore because they're afraid it will shrink their brain. Things are just so competitive that having fun in college is a complete afterthought. It's constantly chasing grades, internships, side projects, networking, job interviews etc.
Not in the UK from what I can see, there's stories about it in the news but try actually going to hackney on a saturday - it's full of 22 year olds drinking (and also often smashing loads of bag...).
Maybe that's not a representative sample but young people still want to socialise and at that age you can get away with it so why not.
Having said that, the UK is absolutely a nation of pissheads, the US has always has that puritanical streak
There's a pretty strong observation bias when it comes to college drinking. The social gatherings of basically anybody who does drink ends up involving drinking, which pushes out the non-drinkers, until you end up with two completely distinct social circles. To add to the effect, alcohol is wildly useful in socializing with strangers, so the non-drinkers know far fewer people.
Thus, if you ask someone who does drink they'll probably say "everybody drinks, except for a few people", and if you ask someone who doesn't, they'll assume most people don't, except for the minority of people getting loudly drunk in public. That was true even where I was at school, where polling found that 70% of the student body was drinking on the weekends.
Seem so on the whole in Europe in higher-income countries. But the decline seems to be slowing.
(It is surprisingly difficult to find annual alcohol consumption statistics on google. It feels like swimming upstream. It keeps giving me data on alcohol-associated deaths, or total alcohol+tobacco spending!)
WHO dataset, alcohol pure litres total per capita annual [0]
Switzerland (4th biggest decrease):
2020: 11.4 litres
2024: 8.8 litres
UK:
2000: 12.3 litres
2024: 10.4 litres
Ireland:
2000: 14.78 litres
2024: 10.27 litres
There are some countries which have seen an increase over that time period:
10 litres alcohol is about 100 bottles of wine a year (exactly 100 at 13.33% alcohol content).
I drink a lot of wine, but 1 full bottle is too much to have regularly. A half bottle - two generous glasses - is more reasonable, but you'll still feel it the next day. And 10 litres of alcohol puts you at 8 generous glasses a week.
> surprisingly difficult to find annual alcohol consumption statistics on google. It feels like swimming upstream.
Seems like the WHO might not have generated a per country per capita alcohol consumption dataset after 2020? Imagine COVID + US defunding in 2025 (~20% of budget) caused a lot of turmoil in lower priorities. :(
Average person drinks 9 litres of alcohol per year factoid actualy just statistical error. average person drinks 3 litres per year. Wendt Georg aka "Norm", who spends the majority of his life in a bar in Boston is an outlier adn should not have been counted
I wondered how demographic change was affecting this, and it does appear to be the case that 20% of that change in the UK is due to the Muslim population doubling.
> 10-15 years ago it was expected you would have 1-2 glasses of wine at lunch as a front office guy / banker while talking shop. Now you will get a trip to HR unless meeting a client or in a place that still allows it.
It's been like this in America for decades. Even places with "beer on tap" the expectation is you don't drink until after the work day. If you were pulling the tab at lunch you'd get a talk from your boss and eventually HR
It wasn't this way always (obv?). In the early 80s it was still acceptable for the entire engineering dept to get sloshed at lunch w/o any expectation of getting work done upon return. The salesdroid would sometimes accompany us. This was at a very large mostly defense contractor on the east coast of Florida.
I assumed that the culture changed at some point between the 1960s when it was normal for a corner office to have a full liquor bar in it (according to mad men) and the 2000s.
I have the inverse experience in Europe; my former boss would almost force me to drink when we went out for lunch sometimes.
There was rarely a meeting with him where I didn’t come home buzzed.
The same phenomenon holds for both wine and baijiu — young people are drinking less of either one. In China, over the past years, even Moutai, the country's most famous liquor brand, has seen its sales decline. This really does seem to be a global trend.
How much of this is due to famous podcasters? There's the Huberman obsession with alcohol being poisonous, the looksmaxxing, and then you can argue, good science that shows it's bad.
It's influenced me - I was drinking probably 2-3 drinks every night for decades, and lately I've cut down by 60-80 percent weekly. That's still poisonous though, if you ask the GenZ social media world.
I'm pretty sure the causality is backwards. People aren't drinking less because they hear people saying it's poison, people are more willing to tolerate people calling it poison because they're drinking less. People have preached about the evils of drinking to excess as far back as we have records of people discussing stuff. It just got ignored, because it's a crucial social lubricant, and thus everybody imbibes anyway. With the rise of addictive social media and gaming, we've seen a decrease in socialization in meatspace, and that's where people drink. If you're missing out on the positive aspects of alcohol anyway, then it's a lot easier to listen to people talking about the negative aspects. And then those voices get amplified to justify not doing the thing you weren't doing anyway.
We have hard data now on the negative impacts of alcohol, even from moderate amounts. Research shows it is carcinogenic. Back when I was a kid there was talk of light drinking being good for your health.
We also have strong data on how its bad for your sleep.
Much of the talk of alcohol being poison in the past was from drunk driving, spousal abuse, spending all the families money. This largely applied to drunks. But now the data has come in a way that doesn't involve any of these traditional ills is still bad for you.
Very possibly. For unintended pregnancies, it's a coin flip whether the parents are old enough and have enough money and education to give their child the best possible care. Even having both parents around is not a given.
It's probably a combo of the legit science that there really is no safe/good level of drinking from a health perspective (and previous studies saying otherwise are bunk), and all the podcasters/influencers extolling the virtues of not drinking.
Why We Sleep really impacted my view on drinking. It really does mess with your sleep, so I keep my drinking to occasional and on the light side.
Wearables also play a role in this. I had two beers between like 5:30-7:00 on Saturday and my sleep data was messed up. We are talking two 5.5% beers at dinner on a 220 lb man.
It's much harder to ignore the fact that alcohol has all these negative effects.
Still, I think drinking occasionally while socializing is a good thing, and that people becoming hermits is a huge negative.
How badly was the sleep messed up, is the trade off? Sometimes two beers is useful as a social lubricant or just a relaxing aid. Stress at work and spiraling rumination does a terrible thing to my sleep as well.
I think there's optimization culture and then there's excess. Drinking 2-3 drinks every night for 15 years probably was excessive for me. But one or two nights where sleep is affected per week is tolerable. Life is short, and deprivation might make it a little longer but life's not supposed to feel long (as in living life means doing a little bit of harm here and there).
Personally I microdose THC via an extraction I make myself(somewhat ironically using alcohol). Can’t do it in the mornings as I wish though, society still hasn’t caught up with a more heterogeneous drug use, only caffeine and tobacco are erlaubt…
I wish I could do anything with THC. It's not illegal under Ohio (where I live) law anymore.
But my job involves chemical plants and oil refineries, and they use DISA, and DISA drug tests everyone thoroughly.
I can count on getting a test that involves hair, urine, and breath samples at least twice per year. (It's supposed to be annual and random, but "random" seems to be rather heavily-weighted.)
THC hangs out way too long for that.
It's stupid: A person can be completely ripped on booze every night and cocaine occasionally, or live entirely in a world of psychedelic drugs like LSD or mescaline and that's... fine, I guess?
I have an acquaintance who works for Chevron in a normal office job. In California, only the refinery workers get regular drug tests. In Texas, everyone does. And this dude used to smoke a fair amount of weed. It’s a good job, so he stays clean, but there’s really no reason to require it of someone in his role - he has never even been to one of their refineries.
I work inside of these plants, but only just barely. I'm not turning wrenches and cutting pipes and stuff; instead,.I work on the back ends of their radio systems.
I just drive over to the radio shanty near the tower, park, and walk inside to poke at a computer or move a wire or whatever.
A friend of mine does work on the corpo AV systems for some of these same places. This doesn't ever put him inside the plant; he's always separated from it by a magical chain-link fence.
He was rather surprised when I told him how arduous the drug testing was, as he was never required to do anything like that (and wouldn't stand a chance at passing if he were).
I struggle with ADHD, have been for years, and no pharmaceutical drug helps, while they all have severe side effects. Meanwhile every time I take a single drag of my friend’s joint, I feel most relaxed and have most coherent thoughts, while able to pull the exact words from memory I need. A single drag, mind you.
I have not heard a single doctor talk about microdosing THC as a cure for ADHD and I wonder if my experience is coincidental or there’s really something there?
This is basically what I've replaced with my tincture.
I used to roll the smallest doobies you can imagine(one drag joints basically). However since it's terrible for the lungs, I've completely replaced it with my shot.
The effect is slightly different but it works well against my ADHD.
Definitely something, there's an intersection between THC and neurodivergence for sure. One line of thought relates to the amygdala, the idea is that reducing the activity in that brain regions creates a sort of "space" for other things to get processed, like emotional memories from the hippocampus, so the limbic system is involved.
The subjective experience has a loose correlation to mindfulness meditation which has also been linked to the amygdala/hippocampus processing loop.
I still enjoy drinking a bit but agree with your take in principal. I'd rather smoke a joint, take an edible, or drink a thc drink most nights than go for alcohol, and it strikes me as odd that although it's been fully legal in my country for years, it would still be wildly more taboo than alcohol in the workplace, even though nearly everyone probably does something outside of work.
Taking THC at night is not good for you health either. That's going to mess with your sleep, which will have all kinds of long-term health impacts on you.
That's not been my experience at all.
I sleep like a baby thanks to it.
We're all different with different needs.
Read the sibling comment from 'cromka'. That's my experience as well.
I'm taking a break due to anticipating a drug screening, but REM suppression/interruption is a thing with cannabis and I've been having horrible trauma nightmares without it. Drug screenings are anti-human and it's ridiculous that due to federal prohibition companies aren't required to respect medical cannabis prescriptions.
Same here. I've tried edibles multiple times as they're legal here. The experience ranged from mildly bad to horrible. I either felt like a zombie (not relaxed) or became paranoid and anxious. I had to come to the conclusion it just doesn't gel with me.
CBD does seem to help with my joint and muscle pains though.
Same here. I've never had a good experience with weed. Smoking it or edibles. I feel like the former doesn't do anything for me and the latter just sends me into a panic state from which I can't come down for several hours.
You're looking at covid. Look at the 25 year period from .90 in 2000 up to 9.3 by 2008, then flat until covid, then a bump during covid times before lowering at 9.5
Sure you can say it's reduced from a peak which happened to coincide with an unprecedented pandemic. Wake me when it's back to the 9.3 norm of the 2010s let alone the 9 it was around 2000.
Now it's quite possible that fewer people are drinking at all, but of those who are drinking, they are drinking more.
Or it's quite possible that annecdotes about who you see in the gym and on instagram are just annecdotes
(for what it's worth I have seen data showing under 30s are drinking less in 2025 than under 30s drank in 2005, or 1985, etc, which would imply over 30s are drinking more to make up for it, but I don't have it to hand and it may not have been US specific)
> I still see construction workers drinking a can at 6:30pm however.
At least here in Germany, this is all but gone. Our version of OSHA cracked down on that hard simply because of all the accidents that happen when you combine alcohol, a lot of intake of alcohol due to the reality of physical labor (aka, sweating) and heavy machinery.
And on top of that the police in rural areas also enforces alcohol limits these days.
Nah it’s just a (small) drink (Bierchen) you’re having with coworkers at the end of the working day (Feierabend).
Doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a party.
My dad spent a lot of time in Spain back in the day and was a regular at a local cafe, where he'd get a coffee and a tortilla (Spanish omelette) for breakfast. The cafe was popular with construction workers too and they would order the same, only they would top it off with a shot of Carlos Tercero, the cheapest brandy.
That's very unusual for 20 years ago. I remember this from my childhood, 60 years ago, where this was common. But even in the 90s that had stopped almost completely.
You misspelled meth. Roofers do meth. Outdoor trades do uppers. Indoor trades smoke weed. Everyone smokes cigarettes. Except the electricians, they smoke pole. Everyone knows that.
Maybe we live in different parts of the country but in bavaria it’s completely fine and common to have a beer at lunch, both blue and white collar workers
I saw that in Rome 13 years ago. Three road workers pulling up some bricks to access a utility. One guy in the hole, two guys outside the hole, one with a tallboy beer, at 930.
I'm sure it comes with a lot of problems but there's something to be said about a relaxed society.
Oh. I can't decode American 12 hour formats, that shit is too weird and convoluted. I thought you meant at 0630 in the morning which ahsolutely used to be a thing in construction here.
Same with anything that requires a security clearance. I know a lot of good engineers and they all tell me it's tacitly accepted a few of their coworkers are functioning alcoholics. Because that's the only drug they're legally allowed to do
Canadians are fixing this. They are allowed to smoke pot in Canada. But then they get US clearances to work with US forces (ie NORAD). So the US clearance people are tolerating it. Change has to start somewhere.
Is that true about the army? Seems like in the navy they do everything they can to stop sailors from drinking (probably resulting in the opposite effect)
I think they have practically unrelated causal factors.
About children the case is quite obvious. We created the cultural environment in which children are considered no less human than productive members of society and deserve if not the same amount of resources, then more. This order aligns well both with Western worldview and with human biological nature, so people are easily accepting and strengthening it.
But if we are spending on a child as many resources as on productive members of society, that means for fertility rate 2 we should forgo half of our resources. So on average to forgo half of your work for children are not very tempting, but to spend on children less is sociocultural unacceptable. The only solution? Less children.
I think fertility rate 1.5 is already pretty high for such environment and only show how strong biological drive to procreate for humans is. And government's attempts to increase birth rates by spending more seems like rather terrible idea: that only will increase cultural expectation on children costs and effectively will lower the birth rate even more.
I actually think lack of religion is one of the major reasons for a declining birth rate. The church was an important third space.
Even now in the Korean-American community, the running joke is that if one suddenly starts going to church in their 20s, it's only because they're looking for a romantic partner.
The "Bangladesh Miracle" says otherwise: by intensive effort the birth rate was brought down from 6.7 to 1.89.
(people keep forgetting how much reducing population growth and teenage pregnancy has been an explicit policy goal for decades! Getting it down to replacement rate is good, now we're arguing about the other direction needlessly)
That's because they have arranged marriages, and Muslim women have no choice in the matter. Men don't need to be good at socializing with women to reproduce when women are treated as property.
Citation STRONGLY needed. Best case would be correlation, not a causal relationship, between factors that limit alcohol consumption and things causing lower birth rates and "epidemic loneliness".
Some counter theories: People have fewer kids not because they drink less, but because children are extremely expensive, wage growth has been stagnant, women make up a larger share of the workplace (and don't want to lose their spot), and birth control is more readily available.
People are lonely because: women are capable of larger roles in the workforce and it's upended social expectations, therapy has caused people to avoid others that they deep destructive/negative in their lives, technology has caused us all to be alienated, or society has shifted but culture hasn't caught up to these changes (assuming they're lonely at all and not just experiencing the same existence previous generations did but now with constant news cycles and the ability to tap into 24/7 feeds of people having fun).
It's a shrinking market, but it surely doesn't help that people are simply boycotting US goods.
For example: Swedish sales for US wine was down around 20% in 2025. The overall decline was about 10%. In a shrinking market, you don't want to also have a shrinking market share.
I'm sure the figures are similar in other countries - and this year it's going to be very different in Canada as well. I imagine Canada was always a big importer of US wine seeing as it's close by and they don't have much domestic production.
Seeing many people comment that they drink less; I'm happy to report I still try to drink as often as I can (Which is still not as often as I want).
Yes, but many of those wineries import their grapes from California (or other places).
My wife and I participate in this boycott and were drinking a sparkling white from Mission Hill Winery which is one of the biggest BC wineries. We noticed the label said something like "Produced in Canada" and then listed grapes imported from California.
Wines that are produced from 100% BC grapes are labelled "BC VQA" and only 19% of the wines in BC are BC VQA.
This was a temporary measure for a couple vintages/years after a frost decimated nearly all the vines in the BC Okanagan. The regulators stepped in to allow relaxed importation rules to help wineries survive. A winery like Mission Hill typically grows and sources all of its grapes within BC.
I think this is temporary and related to crop failures when a lot of BC berries froze. AFAIK they grow their own grapes otherwise. Who knows for how much longer and if the climate will allow growing grapes sustainably at all in those places.
The wine from Canada is not good, unless you like dessert wine/icewine. Maybe there are some exceptions for riesling but it's too cold to grow nice vines there.
You can't be making such blanket statements. There are a lot of great wines. Some of the best syrah I've ever had is from BC, and there are plenty of other great wines.
My response to this would be drink more Syrah from Northern Rhone, because there is no producer in Canada that is producing Syrah anywhere near the quality (find me someone trying to claim they are; they cant the soil and climate are too different) . You can say it's subjective, but we both know it's not. I made one exception, Riesling, because their are some good expressions in cold weather.
I had wine from the niagara peninsula - it was either cabernet or a cab/merlot red blend. I enjoyed it as much as I enjoy most dry reds (which is a lot). It wasn't exactly the rival of France's appellations (high bar) but still very good.
That's because the LCBO has a monopoly on wine sales in Ontario and it's very difficult for Ontario wineries to get their good wines into the LCBO. It's a combination of shelf fees, minimum volume requirements, and an idiosyncratic evaluation system where their participation costs are not covered.
Spend some time at wineries on the Niagara escarpment and you'll find some great wines, especially whites that benefit from the limestone heavy soils. Even the large producers that have a poor public reputation for quality (Trius, Iniskillin, etc.) have much better wines available on site that never make it to the LCBO. For the most part (some exceptions), the people who run these wineries are wine enthusiasts who genuinely care about quality. Prices for that quality are higher than other wine regions with more favorable climates, higher production, and lower labour costs though, that is true.
> but it surely doesn't help that people are simply boycotting US goods.
Seems like that would be such a negligible number that, while it doesn't help, it doesn't hurt either. It's just statistically irrelevant when it comes to a global market like wine.
Exactly. Nobody was buying US wine, even the experienced winos and wine distributors for fancy dining that i've met here in Italy probably have never drunk US wine. Maybe new zeland, australia, south america, but i've never heard of somebody drinking an US wine.
And they weren't boycotting it, it's just not a good enough deal to buy from our prospective, even when people are looking to spend good money, there is better stuff to buy from elsewhere.
I think that trying to explain the reduced sales of California grape growers in terms of an international boycott of US products seems like highly motivated reasoning, not factual reasoning.
US exports have been growing every year since the pandemic low of 2020
We obviously do not have full data for 2026, but the first half is higher than the same time in 2025. But this is really driven by economic activity, so if there is a global recession, you can expect fewer people to buy US goods, just as you can expect Americans to buy fewer foreign goods. The 2020 low was not because of a boycott, but a general economic decline, and as far as I am aware, no boycott of US goods has ever been detected in the trade data, it's always been a media affair or hyperlocalized (e.g. some people boycotting Apple or Windows or Google seem to be the most common media stories).
And I think this is a pretty general situation, e.g. consumer boycotts rarely show up in trade data - to hit trade data you need government sanctions, nothing else moves the needle.
Noted elsewhere, Canada accounts for more than a third of US wine exports [1], so the trade-war with Canada in 2026 surely wasn't helpful either to keep export-volume at 2025-levels...
In a story explaining California wine growers pain, be aware that 98% of California wine is consumed in the US. Exports are negligible.
This is like when a story about housing costs was posted and the Canadians chimed in that the US housing woes are due to not having access to Canadian lumber, and the board had to explain to him that that 80% of lumber used in US production is sourced domestically.
The story is way more complicated and hides where the pain points are.
The real average is closer to 25% of lumber coming from Canada but if you look at specific types like SPF which is important for framing, it’s almost evenly split between US domestic and Canada-sourced. Douglas Fir is heavily sourced from Canada. But some lumber like SYP is almost all US domestic.
And in terms of particular states, tariffing Canada sourced lumber has outsized impact because Canadian lumber has a freight advantage so getting US sourced lumber is going to drive up prices even if Canadian is avoided.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the wine story was equally complicated.
Apart from the inflation mentioned above, there are a multitude of factors at play that cannot be determined by just looking at aggregated numbers. The price of some goods, for example, has skyrocketed due to general scarcity (electronics, oil...). Fx got worse for the dollar vs other currencies. And are numbers only for goods, or do they include services?
It is definitely a reality that certain goods have seen localized boycotts, like alcohol in Canada, and some services have had to change (data sovereignty in Europe got a lot of traction).
I think comparing by tonnage would be more apt than comparing dollar figures which are subject to a lot of external factors, including currency exchange rates and inflation.
Also, the idea that California wine - of all products - is very sensitive to exports is a bit strange since although California wine sales account for more revenue than the entire wine industry of any other country -- 68 billion dollars worth of sales each year (https://wineinstitute.org/our-industry/statistics/california...), the state exports relatively little, only about a billion dollars of California wine is sold abroad. So 98% of California wine is sold within the US. Only 2% is exported.
And yet there are so many people on this board that are convinced that Europe, of all places, is somehow responsible for driving California wine grower sales woes.
It's pretty funny if you think about it, you have some Bosnian dude and when you tell him that Ford is facing a sales slump he immediately shoots back -- it's because the Bosnians are no longer buying Fords! Truly an amazing example of economic narcissism.
TOTAL Retail value (includes markups by wholesalers, retailers and restaurateurs), NOT Sales Revenue.
> "only about a billion dollars of California wine is sold abroad"
That's Sales revenue [1]
> "So 98% of California wine is sold within the US. Only 2% is exported."
The data is right on the page you shared.
Total shipments 2024 [0] (in millions of 9-liter cases):
California wine shipments to US and export: 232.3
California wine shipments to US: 203.5
--> Export: 28,8
So the export volume in 2024 appears to be >12%, not 2%
There's no data for 2025, but wine exports fell by ~20% in 2025 [1], if TOTAL wine shipments fell equally this is quite a strong dent in volumes already in 2025. So 2026 doesn't look rosy to begin with before any trade-war being added...
> "It's pretty funny if you think about it, you have some Bosnian dude [..]"
So by my thinking, one billion is not 12% of 67 Billion. Indeed, it is less than 2%.
> Let's not do that please.
I agree that we shouldn't do it, or rather that commentators shouldn't do it, but I don't agree that we shouln't talk about commentators doing this.
You literally have this situation. Only 2% of California wine goes to the export market at all, and people are literally arguing that their personal boycott of some nation that doesn't even account for a billion in sales is driving California wine export woes. It is a bizarre form of economic narcissism and my example was apt.
As already stated, this is the ESTIMATED RETAIL VALUE of the wine, NOT the Sales Revenue.
You then conflate this with the EXPORT VALUE of Californian wine, which is not the retail value but the price the winery is selling the wine for to a foreign buyer.
Apart from that the value also doesn't matter, in the context of AMOUNT of grapes purchased the QUANTITY of wine produced is more relevant than the VALUE created with it.
> "You literally have this situation. Only 2% of California wine goes to the export market at all, and people are literally arguing that [..]"
Again, it's not 2%. You literally need to read the sources you cited yourself. They provide good data to educate yourself and see where you're trying to force a conclusion without the proper facts.
And nobody is "arguing" what you state. The OP stated "It's a shrinking market, but it surely doesn't help that people are simply boycotting US goods." and you're trying to ridicule him for that without having any leg to stand on...
Does it matter? Both are small nations that do not account for even 1% of global wine consumption and not even one hundredth of one percent of California wine consumption.
Doesn't it seem like ethno-narcissism to think that a boycott by some members of a demographic responsible for less than one hundredth of one percent of sales is the reason why a specific foreign company is having struggles. When there is the very obvious explanation of the whole world drinking less wine. We are going to skip the obvious universal explanation and go to the niche ethnic explanation?
> seems like highly motivated reasoning, not factual reasoning
Drawing conclusions by presenting total US exports doesn't seem like factual reasoning. Most exports are of non-consumer products, which aren't as influenced by boycotts. A true analysis would take into consideration items that consumers can chose to boycott.
I don't find your general data on US exports very convincing for this case.
Is there any way to separate US exports of consumer products (which would be affected by consumer boycotts) vs. US exports for industrial products or capital goods (which I wouldn't expect to be affected by these boycotts)?
It is entirely possible that specific consumer-focused industries (wine, tourism, etc.) are being strongly affected by international boycotts and having decreasing exports, even while industry/capital-focused exports (petroleum, plastics, weapons, medical equipment, telecom equipment, data centre electronics, etc.) are increasing at a faster rate which would hide the consumer boycott effect in total export $.
This is an incredibly disingenuous and specious argument.
The discussion is about US wine production and consumption. You present the aggregate total vale of all US exports in US dollars to 6 significant digits. Does the variance of the volume of wine exports in litres even show up in those 6 signifcant digits?
Consider: (1) is six significant digits of precision justified, or is it insignificant accurancy? (2) Do those aggregate numbers take into account inflation? (3) Do those aggregate numbers take into account the (not insignificant) devaluation of the US dollar? (4) Do those aggregate numbers include both goods and services?
No, if you were to make an honest argument by quoting US exports, you need to limit it to the volume of US wine exports in litres. Misdirection can be a great tool of propaganda but is not a useful contribution to interesting intellectual discourse.
I responded to the claim that this was due to a boycott of US goods writ large, not a specific boycott about wine.
What would be the reason to boycott wine only and not other US goods? What about the US wine industry is controversial that does not apply to the other industries?
So I wrote that there is no evidence of boycotts showing up in trade data, which is true.
Then, after doing some digging, so I pointed out that almost none of California wines are exported anyway. So obviously this cannot be the result of foreign boycotts.
So let's get back to the "incredibly disingenuous and specious argument", and start with the dictionary definition of those and go from there, because that accurately describes how I view your response.
> I responded to the claim that this was due to a boycott of US goods writ large, not a specific boycott about wine.
While boycotting iPhones might be difficult, taking the Cabernet one shelf over takes almost no effort or negative impact to the consumer. It's rarely more expensive to switch from a US wine e.g. French or Australian. It's sold in the same store.
For the specific example of Sweden, every single wine bottle in every store is sorted by country in the store. And it sits above a price sticker with the flag of the origin country on it.
That's wildly different from similar choices e.g. when you pick a can of Hellman's Mayonnaise, there's no US flag under it. But for wine in particular, the country of origin is almost always known to the buyer and involved in the process, even if Sweden stands out as an extreme due to the flag being under the bottle.
That's why I believe the boycott which isn't a boycott on US wine but on US products in general, is _most notable_ for wine or in some other case not notable at all because it's a small effect and consumers don't always know what is American and what isn't (Hellman's example). But for wine, everyone knows.
The difference between the general slump in wine sales (10%) and the decline in US sales (20%) could have more factors, such as price. But it's easy to assume - and polls suggest - that consumers really do avoid the US wine.
Long time casual wine drinker (and occasional beer), I find myself drinking less and less. Two reasons: first drinking a glass of average wine for the sake of having a drink makes no sense anymore. I prefer to have a drink more seldom but pick a better wine, that I actually enjoy. Second, as I get older I see that even a modest amount of alcohol has negative effect on me: during the day I get groggy, during the night my sleep is worse (I know, counterfactual, but so it is).
It's long known that drinking alcohol disturbs your sleep. You're getting slumbery and probably will fall asleep easily but the sleep will not be as wholesome.
Same here. Perhaps this is something that doesn't happen to people with a robust tolerance, but I'll never test that theory. Maybe before cell phones and Netflix, people just slept a lot more to compensate.
I think different types of alcohol have quite a different effect on me now (40yo) - wine will get me mellow and sleepy, beer would get me to be more social, whiskey will make me more energetic / risk taking.
Knowing that I can tune my level of enjoyment of whatever is happening.
Though there is an old saying from where I grew up - alcohol is stealing happiness from tomorrow to have it today.
And that has always stuck with me - whenever I drink I get a bit happier that instant and feel worse more tired the next day.
And that is ok if I am going to a social event and I want to get the most out of it, and I know next day will be chill anyway - who’ll can make the “chill” time even more chill.
You're just describing normal aging though. People have been experiencing this (particularly #2) since time immemorial. The question is why young people are not arriving to fill the void left by you (and me), as they always have. I agree with other posters, it's some combination of economics, weed, and culture.
> during the day I get groggy, during the night my sleep is worse (I know, counterfactual, but so it is)
Have you tried lighter wines or prosecco? I've had some summer wine from a grape variety called Inzolia in Sicily. Quite light on alcohol, tasted a bit like lime water.
My experience is that grogginess really depends on the wine that you drink, but it always ruins my sleep if I exceed two glasses (150 ml). For instance I would almost never drink high alcohol (>13.5%) or high sugar content Rieslings. They almost always give me headaches.
Interestingly this was basically what started it for me. Empty calories and research showing it literally inhibits muscle gain irregardless of the caloric effect since your body basically switches to "get this shit the fuck out" before continuing to be normal.
Secondary benefit for me was all the other stuff. Now I find that the once or twice in the entire year where I might have one drink it only takes like one drink to already feel it.
The impact on our sleep is one of the main reasons our having a beer or glass of wine with dinner trailed off. Sometimes now we go months in between any sort of alcohol.
se here. i enjoy beer but annoyes me that they all have the same 5% alcohol content. its too much, I just like the taste, I don't want to be sleepy. non alcoholic beers taste terrible
Fortunately, this is not universally true anymore.
There are now beers brewed with extremely low-alc yeasts (which have a trait that makes them unable to digest maltose) that make <0,5% alc beers with good flavours. This combined with sour malts and good hops can give you great flavours. These low-alc yeasts remove the need to maltreat the beer for removing the alc. And it is often OK to have 0,5% alc -- maybe not during pregnancy, but to avoid the annoying 5% alc. It's most probably not the industry cheap shit though.
There's also the possibility to just stop the fermentation with normal yeasts at any point, e.g., at 1% alc. I've had a couple of very good beers like this, too.
There is a new method for 0,0% beer. I sometimes drink a 0,0 mixed with lemonade (called Radler in germany) after sport. There is also Fassbrause which is not a beer at all (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fassbrause ) but tastes a bit malty
The ones in Japan are fantastic. I'm addicted to them. The Asahi 0% alc, 0% calorie beer is 70% as good as their regular beer in my opinion. Unfortunately it's around the same price.
Disclaimer: I lost my sense of smell due to a head injury, so that does muddle my ability to taste things. But I think with beer a sense of smell is less important
I swapped my daily beer for Heaps Normal XPA, which I felt was about 80% as good as regular beer. Then after a few months of that I realised I no-longer craved a beer, so swapped to sparkling water.
Now I only drink maybe once a month. It's great. Happy I kicked the mild habit.
I still enjoy one or two beers at the end of the week, but happens fortnightly ish now - for exactly the same reason. I've also gone to drinking sparkling or soda water at home with a squeeze of lemon, completely replaced the soft drinks at the same time. The amount of sugar in the beer was surprising and the low/no alc options really did help move away from them in excess.
Might be a market issue. I grew up along beer drinkers and over the past few years, so many good alcohol free beers have entered the German market, that a lot of them shifted almost fully to alcohol free beers.
Got any recommendations for good German ones? The market in the UK has been improving a lot but I do still think a lot of them taste like socks, I'd be interested in trying some more high-quality German options if I can find them over here (Aldi/Lidl probably my best bet).
I like Störtebeker Atlantic Ale, IPA style beer. Very drinkable. Available in most super markets and Späti's (late night shops). Here in Berlin there's also the Brlo Nakid which is similar in taste.
If you want a pils style beer, Jever Fun is pretty hoppy. Krombacher has a decent 0.0 beer as well. A bit on the sweet side for me but I have that sometimes. I also recall seeing a beer that was labelled as Feinherb at some point that was pretty tasty. The exact name escapes me.
Several of the Bavarian beer hall style helles beers now also come in alcohol free versions. Very drinkable. They taste very similar. Bayreuther is one that you might find in some shops.
Many of the Hefeweizen varieties also exist in alcohol free versions and are pretty drinkable. Most places will have that available.
Not German but some bars now have Guinness 0.0 in cans. Haven't seen that in the supermarket but it's a near drop in replacement for normal Guinness as far as I'm concerned and I tend to order that when I see it available.
I stopped drinking alcohol a few years ago but I still enjoy going out with friends who do drink. Mostly people barely notice what other people drink. And the lack of a hangover after a good night sleep is a nice bonus. Although you can overdo it. I always joke about all of the downsides of drinking beers without any of the upsides.
Erdinger Alcoholfrei was a low alcohol German "health drink" before it was popular - has been around for about 25 years. It's fairly available in the UK.
I don’t know where you live but here in the UK and in Europe you can find all sorts of beer from 0 to 5% (and more of course), even in local supermarkets or draft in a pub. And yeah the 0% taste bad, but a 0.5 to 3% can be great, I’m sure you could find some online if you’re willing to, search for “table beer”, “small beer” or just low alcohol beer.
And in terms of non alcoholic beer, “lucky saint” tastes great (0.5%) and is very popular in the UK, lots of pub have it on tap.
In the UK it's common to have 3.4% beer/ale (for ABV >= 3.5% the duty is higher) but there are little options between 3.4% and <=0.5% (alcohol free). I find 3.4% to be a good trade-off between the taste and the alcohol content. I do drink Lucky Saint occasionally but find it less pleasant than various 3.4% ales.
One of the things I miss the most (on a daily basis the most) about the UK is the beer. What you're suggesting just doesn't exist in the USA. Really and truly doesn't.
(Though, as others in this thread point out, NA beers are more common, and better, than they used to be. They're not the same thing, though.)
i am in Paris, and I don't see much variety. Obviously there is so much more choice in big hypermarkets, but I don't go there daily, unlike my local, 30sqm store next my apartment
The French beer scene has improved over the last 10 years but yeah, it's still quite limited in terms of selection. When I was first visiting there really wasn't much at all outside of Belgian beers, though I've since had a few very good beers from Paris and other parts of the north of the country. Usually only finding them in larger markets, though, as you say.
The UK's beer scene is wildly different to the rest of Europe, and not something that we've managed to export very well. Hell, we could even export cask ale (rare outside of the UK) to Paris without it spoiling these days, yet nobody really does. Whether it's due to taste or the awkwardness of casks I don't know, but I do think it would meet with success in Paris if someone did it properly. Not all beer has to be refrigerated and fizzy. We have so many varieties that you just don't get with fizzy keg beer, and much of it notably weaker in alcohol content. Some examples:
Mild at ~2.5% (made from reusing the materials used to make Bitter), Session at ~3.5%, Bitter at ~4%, Best Bitter at ~5% etc. IPAs are the hot thing even over here now but we get notably more variations in those than most places too.
I'd be curious to know from anyone in Germany if they have equivalents to these sorts of categories, as what we get from Germany over here tends to all be about the same strength.
Due to ADHD meds I do now have to drink less, and the best non-alcoholic beer I've found so far is Guinness 0%. I'm not a massive Guinness drinker, it's alright but there are other stouts I prefer, but the 0% version is surprisingly close to "real" Guinness and has none of those sock-y flavours that most non-alcoholic beer has.
It is indeed a completely different scene, which is genuinely interested in variety.
It's a bit of a cliche but you really can split Europe into "beer country/wine country/spirits country". France, Italy, Spain and Germany west of the Rhine are wine country. Munich is clearly beer country. And Germany has focused on perfecting a very narrow set of light beers, if you want diversity of taste that's all in the wines. Similarly you're not going to get Parisians interested in beer diversity when they have French wine to argue about.
(It is possible that climate change will shift this; England is starting to produce a few pretty good wines)
Guinness 0% is fantastic. Unlike a lot of brewers the Guinness company were very keen to retain their standards rather than slop out an inferior product to tick a box.
It is. Actually the best candidates for 0% seems to be the IPA beers as the bitterness adds this little "punch" classic zero alcohol beers seems to suffer from.
In the US market, at least, the quality has improved dramatically over the past few years. Several established breweries now produce alcohol-removed versions of existing beers, with varying degrees of success - but in general my experience is that alcohol-free dark beers work better, the increased maltiness does a better job of hiding what's missing. IPAs and lagers can end up tasting somewhat thin compared to the normal version.
There's a few things I miss about the UK, and one of them is easy availability of beer that's less than 5%. Unfortunately that seems to have been creeping upwards - the shift to craft keg (rather than cask) beer seems to have been accompanied by moving more in the direction of US-style stronger beers. Several breweries do still produce milds that are in the <3% range, but it's increasingly hard to find them, even in pubs that used to be reliable suppliers. It's interesting how cultural this is.
Real ale has plenty of lower alcohol percentage options:
My faves are Harvest Pale 3.8% and Our House 3.4%
I also like mild which is often <=3%
0% Guinness is the only beer I would say that matches the taste of alcohol based beer. The others can be ok, but taste too malty, the flavour is off somehow. Also having 2 or more none alcohol beers seems to also make me feel "hungover" in a way, maybe due to additives.
It might be worth it to check out what the market offers. Here in Germany lots of well known brands have started to cater to the non-alc consumers for the last few years. I like eg. Andechser Hell alkoholfrei. The increased competition resulted in some good nonalc beers from reputable wellknown brands
The US market is having a boom of craft NA beers and many are really good. Athletic, Go Brewing, and Sober Carpenter are my main go tos. Guinness 0.0 scratches an itch, but I find it a little sweet. The NA Corona with a lime slice is almost indistinguishable from the original. Strangely I find the Stella NA very good (I don't normally drink the regular Stella).
If you like sour beers my experience is they are nearly identical to their native counterparts.
I generally find the breweries that focus completely on NA beer better than existing players who are adding NA to their line up.
In the twin cities, one big brewery, Bauhaus, went out of business briefly and got bought and reopened by ABV, a company that specializes in NA, alcohol-adjusted, and THC beverages, https://www.bauhausbrewlabs.com/blog/Blog%20Post%20Title%20O... . Now you can get beer in full strength, session, NA, and THC. It seems like a sign of the times, but I'm happy to have more choices and as I get older I don't feel like drinking the strong IPAs like I used to.
I've started drinking malt beer. I think it's basically pre-ferment beer, so it's non alcoholic and a bit sweet. I like to mix it with Sprite Zero, something like 3 parts malt beer to 2 parts sprite. It's also good on its own.
It's delicious and alcohol free, it does have a lot of calories but mixing it with calorie free soda gets you a bit more bang for your calorie buck so to speak.
Guiness Zero is my go to for a sipping beer when I'm actually in a pub. I like a pine needles and lemon IPA when it's very cold but they get a bit much when you're having a few over a long evening.
It used to be true for all non-alcoholic beers in Sweden but it is not true anymore, do it is very possible that all non-alcoholic beers are actually bad where they live. Or they just base their comment on old data.
Others have me ruined that NA beers are pretty decent these days. But I've also taken to literally watering down my beer. I'll pour half a can and fill the other half of the glass with water and ice. Then later do the same with the other half. Still tastes decent, but really cuts down on the alcohol.
I’ve recently been in Spain and the non-alcoholic beer was great. To be fair I can’t remember the last time I’ve had alcoholic beer because of the same reasons many people mentioned already, so maybe it’s just a matter of getting used to it.
I think the trend has been a small (and making shrinking) contingent of alcoholics/"beer enthusiests" that are the backbone of the beer industry, and they always lean towards favoring higher alchohol
Can recommend: Mash Gang, We Can Be Friends, Erdinger 0% and I actually quite enjoy Peroni 0% on a summer day. I’m also told that Guinness 0% is pretty good - but I’m not a big Guinness drinker.
It’s weed. A whole cohort of people and kids are no longer drinking alcohol (like they did) or never really started because THC and/or CBD is now legal in vapes, gummies, drinks.
I visited Charleston and was surprised they’ve only legalized THC insofar as THC drinks are available at bars. But a lot of the young people were drinking cans of it instead of spiked seltzer, which was the only alcohol anyone was holding. No beer, no wine.
Similarly: they all were smoking computers—not a single analog cigarette in sight. Tobacco farmers in shambles?
It's also the economy. Everything is expensive. Young people are less successful than ever before (at no fault of their own). When it costs $10 a beer with tax and tip, most young people simply can't afford to do that with any regularity.
It's also also competition. In 1970, your option was to stay home and watch one of three TV channels and that's it. Now, your options are literally to watch any movie ever made, watch any TV show ever made, or play any game ever made... all connected with your friends online.
It is a part of it, but it's not just weed. I would argue the economy is the most impactful factor here.
Those don't contain tobacco, nor nicotine derived from tobacco. I'd be surprised if tobacco farming was still lucrative, except maybe the fine stuff for cigars, but that was always a relatively small market compared to cheap cig tobacco.
I'd be surprised if any one selling tobacco products were swimming in cash. Single use vapes are expensive compared to cost but there are tons of sellers. If you buy vape juice you can get something like the equivalent of 100 packs of cigarettes for $15. Vape shops jack up all the prices but there are 5 shops on every street and they always seem empty and I'm convinced they are mostly just laundering money.
I'm Gen X. I lived my best life in the 80s and 90s, socializing, partying (frat boy years included), with alcohol as the main social lubricant. After Covid, almost everyone in my circle stopped or cut back on going out to bars and drinking, me included. It wasn't the price of drinks. Something about the lockdowns simply rewired the social norms (and our brains).
I feel for the farmers. I still miss a nicely chilled Margaret River Sauvignon Blanc now and then.
The thing is, over lockdown I stopped drinking socially. And then I realized I didn’t miss the feeling of intoxication. And then I realized my sleep got a whole lot better.
And then lockdown loosened, so some friends and I went out for drinks for old times’ sake, and I felt awful, both that evening and the next morning. My tolerance for alcohol is just gone, and I don’t have any particular desire to get it back.
I had the same realisation but before COVID. I had a friend who didn't drink, but he was always the most fun person to be around. I realised you didn't need alcohol, or any drugs, to have a good time. Without alcohol I was funnier, had more and better sex, slept better, and had no hangover the next day. I never looked back really.
Nowadays I'm older and not looking for sex so don't take part in that scene. I would say a few years ago when I would go out there was still some peer pressure to drink and I was considered odd going for non-alcoholic options. But nowadays it's not weird at all and the alcohol-free options are much more numerous and varied. Lime and soda was my go to for years but now I'll partake of an alcohol-free beer or cider.
I found the opposite effect from covid personally as a 'zillennial'. As soon as the lockdowns and 'rule of six' were over the first thing me and my friends did was rent a nice house in the middle of the Welsh countryside and have a massive multi-day party. We all felt that lockdowns had stolen what was left of our early 20s from us and wanted to make up for it!
I often wonder if there's a lot of national differences here, in the UK people for the most part wanted to reverse everything about the covid norms as quickly as possible after Partygate and all the political drama. People are still drinking less but it's because pints cost >£6 now in a lot of places, nothing to do with an outbreak of temperance.
> People are still drinking less but it's because pints cost >£6 now in a lot of places, nothing to do with an outbreak of temperance.
Yep, same over here in central europe/balkans.
Covid came, bars were closed, bars reopened with limited seating, prices went up, tourism restarted, our city center became a tourist trap, prices went up, and higher prices then radiated outside the tourist traps, and well... it doesn't add up anymore.
Sure, college students and highschoolers can buy cheap wine or booze and drink in parks, even in below freezing weather, but sitting in a bar has become very expensive.
As a fellow Gen Xer I identify with this. More and more of my friends drink less and less and when they do they prefer a cocktail instead. I think wine has lost the appeal it used to have in the early 2000s. The cost of a glass of wine in the restaurant doesn't help either. As an ex-avid wine drinker, I would be hard pressed to spend more than $30 of a bottle because of the diminishing difference in incremental quality after that price point.
Yeah it’s probably both at once though. At least my experience has been that spending some time away from alcohol made the negative effects more apparent, and simultaneously, time marches on, making the negative effects more pronounced.
They can heat the grapes and sell the juice, it's fantastic - I just got a 3 l canister of fresh grape juice to drink on the weekend (since it's harvest time for vineyards, fresh from its producer, no additives, no preservatives, not even filtered). The taste is unlike anything
from this world - I'd compare it to liquid honey, which only goes to show what industrally processed stuff the shops are feeding us with.
Nah. They're smaller, usually sweeter and have big seeds. I actually prefer the taste of wine grapes, even though they're harder to eat. Just has a few over the weekend. Also the wines that retain the seed or grape skin aroma taste great.
Anyway, wine is about at least 3x more expensive than grape juice so it's better ROI to sell good wine. They could make alcohol free wines, but in my experience everything I've tried sucks, just like alcohol free beer.
You're right that some are way too acidic and astringent. Usually the kind that you'd age for longer and have more complexity would make poor juice but excellent wines.
There are plenty of varieties of grapes that do well as juice and wine. It's just the type of wine that you'd age very little because it would lose the acidity and temperament too quickly if aged.
Technically yes, but it would be unprofitable to pivot. (Presumably whoever you bought your juice from was planning to make juice, and budgeted accordingly.)
They might want to consider also making Federweißer. It has less alcohol, is carbonated, sweeter, and fresher. I generally really like it even though I'm not the biggest wine fan.
In Austria we call it Sturm. Especially this time of year people love to drink it, but drinking it in large quantities will cause unwanted bowel movements.
It's amazing to me how everyone is so sure of their pet theories. Young people are socializing less! It's GLP-1s! Pot is pushing out wine! Or is it craft beer! Or liquor! Or Covid made us all drink less!
How hard is it to say you just don't know? The reason we have researchers and sociologists examine this stuff is to look at actual data and come to a better conclusion than rando Internet person that pulled it out of their ass.
Looking at the current state of politics, it's basically impossible for most people. Even agnosticism is not that widespread, and that's a known position. It's not even that with most topics.
European wine merchants periodically produce gluts of wine. Supposedly it was so bad wine batches were thrown away or poured into drains (doubtless a wondrous occurrence for the drunks passed-out there!)
I don't think this is the generational reasons this article is making it out to be.
We would drink our share of Californian wines, but after the trump trade war, war on Iran, and everything he's done to destabilize the global economy... We decided to stop buying anything American.
> while young people are drinking less alcohol due to health and financial concerns
My observation is that gen-z spends less time socializing in real life, and drinking remains a social habit for the most part at a younger age. While they drink less, cannabis, vaping and psychedelics are on the rise.
It's a nice claim to say they are more responsible, but it tells an incomplete story.
I don't think the science is settled, but the idea that there's a lot more to do at home to stay occupied and entertained rather than going outside is factually true.
When I was growing up, there were only a handful of channels and then cable. Compared to what we have now, that was the Dark Ages. There's so much you can do on a screen now that's compelling.
Infinite scrolling on Shorts, YouTube, video games, social media, hanging out with people online, chatrooms—combine that with Uber Eats, and you can do whatever you want.
The one thing that will make you want to go out is, of course, meeting someone to have sex with, but that's become weaponized, especially for young adults.
Boys being called creepy and predatory for making the wrong move was always an issue, but now you can be shamed online with a video as proof. Why take the risk when you can meet somebody online?
One big problem is a camera in everyone’s pocket together with a culture of posting everything online.
In an environment like that getting drunk just isn’t very good for your life/career. Even something as small as going to the dance floor when you are not really good at it takes a lot more from you when there is 5 cameras recording you the moment you look stupid/funny dancing.
The above statement can be read as disagreeing with the validity of the statement. IDK why OP would try to refute a meme's existence and not the sentence the meme semes to be supporting. Why did you believe that was their intent?
Actually, most women don't like being assaulted, regardless of the attractiveness of the assaulter. Additionally, this is true of humans generally, not just women.
It's really gross that you think of women as so alien and inhuman.
If you like reading sci-fi, I’d really recommend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_(novel) to get some perspective on the extreme of a life where everything you do is potentially visible to any and everyone around you.
what i've derived from my north american anecdata is that any kind of flirtation or even just talking to a stranger about a neutral topic is increasingly automatically graded as creepy. I'd say the social fabric has simply degraded to the point that people have forgotten how to talk to one another, social atrophy i guess. In my northern europe experience women deflect attention with much less fearfulness, and I'd say people just have much higher trust towards one another.
I'm too old, and my kids too young, so the current landscape is foreign to me.
As an outside observer, could it be that manosphere influence has an undue effect on young mens behavior, which (if true) would indeed be creepy for a lot of (most?) women, regardless if the execution is awkward or not.
I was certainly awkward in my teens/young adulthood, but in my singular experience, the maturity and confidence didn't come from acting cocky or showing off, but just treating anyone I had an interest in as a person first and foremost, and being comfortable and even open about my awkwardness and shortcomings.
That did wonders. Also accepting that a rejection doesn't mean a personal slight to you, nor a failure in appreciation of you from her, but merely a lack of mutual interest, which is also fine.
Awkwardness doesn't come across as creepy to you, but it may to other people. The vast majority of men aren't harassers or abusers, but a lot of women revel in the power to label them "creepy".
If I were young I would stick to dating apps exclusively, since everyone on the app has already signaled a receptiveness to advances.
Vast majority of men are not accused of being creepy. I also dont know what "women in power" have to do with dating or hook ups, are you trying to hit on a boss or something?
And I mean, yes, obviously if you are looking for hookup, you should go to where hookup looking people go. That is not something specific to modern society.
My observation is that the young people who do drink aren't going for beers and wines, which are tastes that can take time to acquire, they're going for sweet liquors and premix cans of fizz.
Getting Gen-z to even get close enough to the glass to smell a nice red is a challenge. And when they do, they seem to recoil rapidly.
Lord Byron famously had a tame pet bear at university; he did it because the rules forbade pet dogs explicitly. The police state has been going for a while :)
Apparently until recently there was no rule about skinning bears in the dorms at Cornell. Kids at college can still be kids, at least until the administration catches wind of it
There was no police involved. The police state attitude verbiage used by the OP refers to the constant monitoring of children and teens, by parents or other guardians, using things such as Apple FindMy to the point where teens can’t be mischievous to the degree they were able to in the past.
There’s also the implication that the repercussions are worse.
> My observation is that the young people who do drink aren't going for beers and wines, which are tastes that can take time to acquire, they're going for sweet liquors and premix cans of fizz.
Born in 1999, I qualify as GenZ. All my peers drink beer, which is unsurprising given the strong cultural presence. But more and more people have been moving to alcohol free beer, which is becoming more and more widespread. Loads of breweries reacted and started with alcohol free beers, even the ones you would have never expected, like Augustiner Bräu in Munich.
Pretty much all surveying data for my home country for the last few years suggests that GenZ is just drinking less alcohol overall. While there probably are some shifts within the consuming population, that does not fully explain the shift away from the alcoholic staples.
> they're going for sweet liquors and premix cans of fizz.
Not surprising, sweetness literally mutes palate sensitivity. Genzers are the most sugar addicted generation, from a very young age. It would not surprise me to see research in some future that this massive early life sugar exposure comes with muted development of taste.
There's untold levels of chemicals in wine. Organic wine is BS in Europe, organic vineyards actually use more chemicals like giant quantities of copper sulphate. The US is actually a lot better than Europe in this regard.
Source: My father owned a vineyard in France before he keeled over with a subarachnoid haematoma after drinking 3 glasses of Rose at lunchtime.
And these things were cause and effect by some proof? Because there are plenty people who drink a bottle of white, red and/or rose for lunch here their entire lives to old age.
The point is the chemical levels in the wine. The anecdote about my father is just that. Please don’t trivialise that just to point score, it’s bad taste.
I used the anecdote to illustrate I have some experience in the wine industry, having worked hands on for a few years. My father studied chemistry at Cambridge so his understanding of wine chemistry is, or was, expert level.
I’d say the burden of proof is on you though, can you supply epidemiological evidence that wine isn’t harmful to health, if you’re going to advocate for the alcohol industry?
> Please don’t trivialise that just to point score, it’s bad taste.
Apologies; that was not my intention; I was reacting to your chemicals claim only.
I am not advocating; I am saying that I don’t believe it’s the other chemicals, it’s just alcohol, which is the poison in wine. They have 0.0 wine here which is just real wine with the alcohol removed after; that has then, I assume, the same chemicals and drinking that is harmful?
> I’d say the burden of proof is on you though, can you supply epidemiological evidence that wine isn’t harmful to health, if you’re going to advocate for the alcohol industry
I do not think anyone would argue that alcohol consumption is good for your health, regardless of what kind of alcohol.
I'm not really making any strong claims except that people should look into the chemicals in wine. It's a complicated story. Unfortunately many of the USDA links are dead so this is the best evidence I have for the difference in wine standards in Europe vs the US.
But is that alcohol or the other chemicals was my point; GP seem to imply it was the other chemicals; I doubt that. But yes, no alcohol would on average make you live longer.
It'll be decades before we know the true effects of the chemicals other than alcohol that are evidently present in wine, but TFA is known to pose serious health risks.
Not the parent, but I have heard of this as well.[0] The advice in the article is to try to drink wine that is 2010 or older.
But I do raise my eyebrow at the suggestion that US wine is somehow in a better situation and am not inclined to believe it unless someone provides sources.
[0]
"Alarming’ increase in levels of forever chemical TFA found in European wines"
Thanks, it'd be interesting if there was an empirical testing study that reflected how much the labeling prevents the chemical contamination like the one observed in europe.
Not the parent, but I have heard of this as well.[0] The advice in the article is to try to drink wine that is 2010 or older.
But I do raise my eyebrow at the suggestion that US wine is somehow in a better situation and am not inclined to believe it unless someone provides sources.
[0]
"Alarming’ increase in levels of forever chemical TFA found in European wines"
I told an anecdote for illustrative purposes and made no explicit links. Others have assumed the link however.
My purpose was to draw people's attention to some lesser known aspects of the wine industry which I think are consequential, and I was illustrating I have some insignts into this that people that haven't worked in the industry probbaly don't.
Most notably the chemical alcohol is known to cause all sorts of health problems and is present in wine.
If you are going to talk about "chemicals", you should be more specific. Most chemicals are harmless, some aren't. Most likely alcohol is the most toxic chemical in wine by a wide margin.
You could also have just glanced at the rest of the thread where I've given far more specific evidence.
I'm rather glad I've drawn people's attention to the issue, despite having to endure extremely patronising comments like yours.
Second, I clearly have skin-in-the-game here because you did read the first comment, so everyone that thinks it's OK to make jokes like the dihydrongen monoxide one (well done that was clever in 2015) can go forth and multiply.
> You could also have just glanced at the rest of the thread where I've given far more specific evidence.
You have not. Maybe you think you have, but just linking to the name of a chemical is not a cogent argument that that chemical in the quantities present in wine, are harmful in any way, and certainly not an argument for it being more harmful than the primary ingredient.
> having to endure extremely patronising comments
Apparently not patronising enough...
> so everyone that thinks it's OK to make jokes like the dihydrongen monoxide one
You really believe that alcohol is equivalent to water in its toxicity?
Look, i'm sorry for your loss. However you are basically spreading pseudo-science here. Doing so has potential to harm a lot of other people too.
My grandfather used to burn sulphur strips to clean the glass demijohns. I guess this is why most wine carry a sulphate allergy label these days. Apart from this, I don't recall any other "chemical" being used, other than sugar.
Of course, this was decades ago and today would be called "artisanal" wine making.
> I guess this is why most wine carry a sulphate allergy label these days.
Partly. There is some natural level of sulfites present in wines - very dependent on the terroir, and then the rest comes during the manufacturing process; some sulfites may be added directly so the wine does not spoil.
There are wines that do not contain any added sulfites and even then may cause trouble to the sensitive persons if the sulfur content of soil is naturally high. Some manufacturers therefore also add info about total measured sulfite content to the label.
And nowadays, not only demijohns or wooden barrels are used to hold wine; of course stainless steel vessels, but also concrete vessels and even things like the Georgian qvevri underground clay vessels or amphorae are having a comeback.
I hope wines don't contain enough sulfates to trigger "allergies" because it would actually be toxic.
Sulfites and sulfates are very different, though related, and the sulfites are the things in question that have required warning labels.
I hate to be the grammar scold constantly, but swapping "i" for "a" is a weird category error and it's quite the deadly difference, like lowercasing "MegaBytes/MebiBytes" or capitalizing "kilobits per second", geez.
Chemistry has a lot of fiddly notation. My mother summed it up thus:
Johnny was a chemist.
Johnny is no more!
What Johnny thought was H2O, was H2SO4!
You can't generalise from one wineyard in one country, but you know that. And France is hardly an organic wine leader.
Copper sulphate is a fungicide used for centuries and is pretty safe (so safe that my chemical engineer father was willing to use it in his otherwise completely sans-chemicals garden). Organic wine not only does not use (other) fungicides and herbicides; it also does not use other chemicals and processes in later stages of winemaking.
Before 2004 Germany had a %vol limit for selling alcohol to 16 year olds. In 2004 they changed the law such that it is not based on percentage, but whether it contains distilled alcohol to prevent under 18 year olds from drinking sweet alcopops, which apparently was a big thing back then.
US politicians have been at war against teenage drinking since the 1980s when the minimum drinking age was raised. Gen Z social trends helped it along, but this is the desired outcome of bipartisan policy going back decades.
With US legal drinking age being 21, this eats into drinking at university/drinking after work, which is very much where bulk of socializing for young adults happens. Can't imagine it's not hugely affecting adulthood habits.
All thanks to crashing the economy and making the act of spending $15 on a low quality beer untenable for young adults giving 60+% of their income to rent.
Alcohol tax would have been a simpler and much less destructive means of achieving such a goal, but I guess breweries can't lobby when everything else is collapsing too.
When they introduced the higher alcohol tax here in Australia back in 2006(ish), all it did was push us to find ways to make it ourselves. Went from cheap to unbelievably cheap but completely unregulated. Who knows what the alcohol content of some of that stuff was. There are some vague fuzzy nights from that period.
Personal responsibility is what you focus on when you are talking to an individual. If you are trying to make your life better, or someone you know's life better, it is great to talk about personal responsibility and making choices for your life.
But that doesn't apply when we are talking about society wide shifts in behavior. It isn't like people suddenly got genetically better or worse at taking personal responsibility. If suddenly a lot fewer people are making healthy decisions, that isn't because we just happened to birth a bunch of people who don't take personal responsibility. Something has changed. Individuals have a lot of control over their own lives, but at a society level all of those individual decisions average out, and you are left with a representation of the effect of society.
Yes people can get swept up in things and be unaware of downstream consequences of their actions, but you can also become informed and decide to change your behavior, find ways to mitigate damage, or communicate with others the damage/solution. How easy to wave your hand at the government or a corporate entity and abdicate responsibility, the parent is correct; personal accountability is faster and more effective than government regulations that also have knock on effects. My regulation example would be how cars in north america became less popular when fuel economy regulations were applied to them, but not SUVs creating the monster car epidemic we all live in.
1. 10-15 years ago it was expected you would have 1-2 glasses of wine at lunch as a front office guy / banker while talking shop. Now you will get a trip to HR unless meeting a client or in a place that still allows it. I imagine similar things in other areas. I still see construction workers drinking a can at 6:30pm however.
2. For good reason, "we were both drunk and X happened" doesn't work as an explanation anymore. Turns out that was a big a part of it.
The only real place people are still "expected" to drink is the army (cos there is nothing else to do) or meeting some boomer client. Younger people just do other drugs/stimulants.