There’s a significant devaluation of “in-person fun”, and it’s sad to see.
It'd be lovely to have more evening refreshments. I have various mixers for seltzer water, which helps. Also just drinking less liquids at night probably helps some with sleeping in general but I really like having something to sip on.
3-4 decaf black tea bags for a body, 2 or so random herbal teas for flavor all tossed in a large tea jug in the fridge overnight.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/611714/marijuana-use-dur...
More, you'd be surprised at how many people would have told pollsters, even in 2010s, that they were doing things like this.
Yeah, when my son was in middle school, they ran a poll. I was surprised by how many kids at his school had artificial limbs. Terrible carnage, just terrible.
Keep not telling them, by the way. All evidence I've found is that (US) life insurers can still refuse to cover you or rate you as less healthy if you admit to cannabis consumption even when it's state-level legal, and you have to sign papers that authorize doctors to disclose EVERYTHING to them to get a policy issued (at least you do once you're old enough that life insurance becomes more important).
During COVID, I was somewhat down and my GP prescribed a tiny dose of Lexapro, which did nothing but give me diarrhea so I quit immediately. But that "being treated for depression" or whatever, once disclosed, caused my next life insurance renewal to be far more expensive.
So that's why I "have never consumed any cannabis."
A 5mg edible a couple times a month is going to be way better for someone than multiple 5mg edibles per week.
[1] https://www.dea.gov/factsheets/marijuana
[2] https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/drunk-driving
[3] https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/04-01-2023-no-level-of-...
[4] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.10.21256931v...
[5] https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/a...
Doesn't mean it should not be legal or anything, but I also don't think we should disregard it.
Medical cannabis and automobile accidents: Evidence from auto insurance - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hec.4553 | https://doi.org/10.1002/hec.4553
It's definitely possible to overdose on edible marijuana, and it's not even that difficult to do.
This but unironically
– A lifelong teetotaler and son of an alcoholic
On the other hand, if this was supposed to be funny, carry on!
Arguably the friends who drink are indistinguishable from people who don’t aside from maybe some weight gain if it’s all beer. My weed friends though, you can tell they’re not doing as great, on or off weed.
The shift in perception of alcohol is certainly a good sign. Even outside of the health benefits, a night out at the bar is expensive now (at least on the East Coast) and honestly speaking other drugs are simply more cost-effective. I still have the occasional cocktail when going out with friends but now that I'm focused more on my overall fitness I find less of a reason to drink now. Still love the vibe of bars and pubs though.
Anecdotally knowing that club drugs like ketamine and 2c-b are gaining popularity, I wonder whether young people may be turning onto substances like those now or if in general Gen-Z prefers to abstain entirely.
caffeine (cafes)
Also, as it makes me tired, it also makes me less incline to go out and meet people.
Those, and other reasons generally push me against consuming it more than few times an year.
I love a good novel paired with a whisky for an solo evening in, pints with 'da boyz at the pub, and food & winery tours with couples and friends.
Why has that stopped being an option? Is it because people's parents are too scared to let them do it when they are young (we were taking public busses to downtown Santa Cruz in junior high but we were latch key 80s/90s kids with zero oversite) and so they don't realize it's an option when they are older or?
Gen X really ruined their kids in the name of safety. I don't blame Gen Z one bit, they really never had a chance at a healthy social life.
that'll be the reason in most cases.
So as far as I can tell, people (especially the young) stopped going out, and then third places started going away.
It’s not surprising a large chunk of Gen Z are choosing to stay at home when it costs that much to go out. I'm starting to think we as a society need to start subsidising social spaces. Local council owned/run bouldering gyms, meetup spaces, etc. Charging a bellow market rate fee just to get people out of the house.
I blame the internet. There just isn't much demand for couples to leave the house anymore with the world's entertainment at their fingertips. When the rest of society stays home, it becomes more expensive for those young, single people to support public spaces.
Maybe you mean for single adults? That's definitely more true, but if you are a single adult you're living in the suburbs for cost reasons, right? Zooming out to see how things would've worked for Gen Z, then yes I could agree that the suburbs were "isolating" during covid. But so were the cities, in fact way more so.
Anyway, loved the suburbs when I was a kid. They're still great today.
Solo everything is definitely happening. People are getting priced out, and the third place (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place) has pretty much disappeared everywhere.
Gen Z is considered the loneliest generation, and its easy to see why. COVID messed things up too, and there's a lot of kids and young adults that have not been properly socialized.
And since you have to spend, increasingly large amounts, of money just to go out with friends, people will just stay home instead. Maybe that looks like chatting on discord while playing a game together, but increasingly its looking like solo activities.
Alcohol is still cheaper than pretty much all the substances that are replacing it and you don’t need to go to a bar to have it. You can get 30 rack for about $20 and hang out in a park with your buddies to finish it.
A hit of acid costs $10 and lasts for 12 hours. A 5-10mg THC edible costs around $5, maybe a bit less, and lasts for 4-6 hours. A small dose of mushrooms (500mg-1g), about the same as the edible. Little to no hangover from all of the above unless you go really hard.
(Ketamine is an exception here, unless you keep your use infrequent the steep tolerance curve will cause your costs to blow up quickly.)
Meanwhile, a pint in a major US city costs like $10 with tax + tip and lasts for what, an hour? Wine or a decent cocktail cost even more.
Seems like other substances offer the better deal here if you're looking at pure cost per hour of active effects. If you consider health effects, they win out on that score too, assuming no underlying mental health diagnoses.
That’s a feature, not a bug. When I want a drink or two, I like to know that I’ll be pretty much sober in 1-2 hours and can drive or do whatever.
Setting aside 4-12 hours of time for recreational drug use is a commitment. You’re basically setting aside somewhere between a whole evening to a half day. If you time it wrong, you’re not even sober by morning.
My understanding is that the evidence suggests that light social drinkers tend to be healthier and live longer than people who drink not at all.
If you went out to all those same events and just drank non alcoholic drinks you’d be healthier.
It's not any new research. Just a simple conclusion from the entirety of research in this field. All research shows that there's no safe dose of alcohol. That starting to drink never improved anyone's health. So if there's correlation between health and moderate use any causation that might be there can't go from alcohol to improved health. So it most likely goes the other way around. Or both things are a result of other factor. For example affluence. It is known that more affluent people drink more and at the same time more affluent people have better health. "moderately" is just roughly the level where damage from alcohol balances out the health surplus of whatever caused them to drink more.
I'm not advocating for more alcohol consumption, coming from a Eastern European country I've seen my fair share of what alcoholism can do to people.
However, it feels like there are 2 trends, none of which is good from my perspective. First one is what you mention - replacing social activities with solo ones. Second one is overprotecting kids, young adults and everybody in general. Kids in many modern countries are glued to phones and screens in part because their parents or schools don't let them to just go find something to do outside. Let them play on their own - yes it can be dangerous, but if they break an arm or a leg, so be it. They will be fine within a month.
This is what corporations want. Lonely people are constant eyeballs . But this can't be good for society as a whole.
You can still go out with friends and enjoy festivities while "blending in". People are often more caged if they're drinking and you're not and that subtle camouflage can help alleviate that social awkwardness.
Alcohol's primary purpose in our society is as a social lubricant. It both lowers inhibitions, and in the expectation of its doing so creates spaces with freer acceptable behavior. Cannabis doesn't currently fill that niche, because there aren't really spaces dedicated to its consumption.
I feel like you're missing the point. The bar a necessary part of the equation because alcohol has a social monopoly on physical locations.
"They" will make it cheaper. If you look at the cost of alcohol in developing countries, it can be way WAY cheaper. The profit and tax margins are currently colossal, both of which can be changed by big booze.
Making alcohol is not hard. It's not technically complicated, it's not dangerous, it's not capital intensive, it's not laborious, and the inputs are all cheap commodity goods.
If you went and bought a big barrel and some other equipment, you could make alcohol for literally pennies per can.
Is it? That same video, in the last 2-3 mins, mentioned all the positives of alcohol and ton of possibly related fallout from social drinking going down. People being lonely and depressed instead of socializing.
If I had to choose between living an extra few years but being lonely and depressed vs living a few less years but enjoying them a bunch more I'd choose the enjoyment.
I get that *maybe* that can happen without the alcohol but it's not happening and my experience is that alcohol is a net positive at the moment, until some substitute appears.
Also, different cultures have different associations with alcohol. My opinions on alcohol changed over my life:
As a child my parents offered me a sip of wine/beer/etc and it tasted horrible so I had no interest.
As a teen I happened to get interested in a religion that said "no alcohol" and so I saw it as a bad thing.
As a 20-25 I gave up the religion but it was "designated driver" time and I was happy to be that and so alcohol had this negative "drunk drivers" association.
Around 26-30 I got in a relationship with some who liked to drink socially. I tried it, nothing tasted good and it gave me a headache so after a few months I went back to not drinking as i got nothing positive out of it.
As 30 something I moved to Japan where (1) I no longer had to drive so no worries about drunk driving (2) my friends/co-workers/classmates introduced me to izakaya culture - being with friends for 2-6 hours, drinking and snacking and talking. And sometimes going to 2nd, 3rd, or 4th outings. Now, love that experience and I wouldn't give it up for almost anything. I love being with my friends, and, as the video pointed out, the alcohol works. The experience is different than without alcohol, and in a positive way. Remove it and it's influences and I think the experience would die out. I certainly don't like the negative health effects but I'm not going to give up hanging out with friends and the drinking, for me, is a positive part of that experience.
Here's a talk about how alcohol helped civilization
There must be something I'm not understanding about "izakaya culture", because that just sounds like hanging with friends without a specific activity planned so you just talk shit, have a drink and eat (whether at home or different places around town), maybe someone breaks out a pack of cards?
Someone's house might not be clean, they have to plan ahead. Someone's house might not have snacks. They either have to get some or else do potluck but potluck requires everyone to plan ahead. Someone's house likely doesn't have as much variety so people have to settle for what's available. Someone's house doesn't have a waiter and cooking staff so people can be stuck in the kitchen. I guess you can order doordash/pizza to solve some of that. Though if you want something else it's not going to arrive in 3-5 mins like an izakaya. It will be 20-40mins. Someone's house might not seat as many people (regularly had 25-30 people show up). Someone's house you might need to keep quiet (like an apartment). Someone's house might have pets (so people with pet allergies can't come).
Yea, I know you didn't say "someone's house" but I don't know where else I could break out a deck of cards. Most restaurants/bars won't allow it AFAIK so that's what made me think of people's homes.
What you describe sounds very similar to going to a pub in Britain, a tapas bar in Spain or a beer hall in Germany. (Presumably some traditional American equivalent, but I don't know the name.)
"And sometimes going to 2nd, 3rd, or 4th outings" is called a pub crawl or bar crawl in English.
I mean, I understand the economics of it. Rent, wages, pricing, supply and demand, etc.
But, like, how messed up are things that hooch is too expensive. Like, it literally grows on trees (if you leave it there a bit). Booze is the thing where sales go up when things get worse (lipstick too, right?).
I'm not saying this is a bad thing that we're not drinking as much, but I am saying that not drinking as much is a sign of really bad things.
I'm a party drinker, but whenever I see someone who does not drink he gets bombarded with "why not?" "You just did not have the right kind of beer yet" "just one?" and that is incredible sad.
Sadly social gatherings such as "meetups with friends" and "attendance at parties" is also dropping :( Kurzgesagt just had a video about alcohol and the social aspect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOwmt39L2IQ
Edit: Oh, and the trend for non-alcohol wine and beer is also a big plus.
The pressuring usually worked though.
When I realized that I was hurting those people by pressuring them into drinking, rather than stop pressuring them, I stopped inviting them to social gatherings that involve drinking altogether.
Sure it is bad for your body but when used in moderation the benefits are much much more than that risk. What a scam the weed culture is. Maybe we should ban it again together with the social media to save the birth rates and the society in general.
"Sometimes I will say things I don't actually believe so we can have a more lively debate."
What's so controversial about it? What is the last time when a joint got someone laid or made friends?
Surely you jest..
The strange tone in your writing reminds me of Dinesh from the Silicon Valley series :) I'm sure you are one of the cool ones with the good hairstyle who doesn't need alcohol unlike the lesser people haha.
Alcohol is not about being so drunk that you do degenerate stuff and fuck people you don't like. It's about easing the social anxieties and improving the mood together with a good company and some music.
But you don't know me and no, I don't have "a good hairstyle", and no, I'm not "one of the cool ones". I'm just as average as anyone.
"fertility rates" and people getting laid are two very different things. People don't have sex only to produce offspring.
And the world could use a lot less people anyway, so I don't see it as a bad thing if fertility rates drop, no matter the cause, even if the drop is significant. The world will be fine with a billion or two less people, in fact it may just improve some situations.
Now you have an entire generation of permanently in therapy pill poppers or weed smoking loners. An entire cohort of Biedermeiers, bores and shut-ins. Here in Germany where the drinking age is 16 it was always funny to see US expats let loose when they realized that teenagers can legally drink and don't need to do it secretly
These days you have people in their mid 20s watching 10 hours per day of right-wing influencers online because they can't talk to women instead of going to a party and getting drunk and laid. It's honestly no surprise the world's craziest autocrats tend to be teetotalers, it's how you breed yourself an army of frustrated followers
That being said: If you don't want to drink, don't. Life is too short to spend time with people who don't accept you for who you are and what you want to do.
I have that problem with candy and junk food. Other people have it with video games.
It's better not to judge.
Obviously there are problems with over-consumption, and addiction. However, what is life, if not a large collection of your memories?
Plenty of bars have non-alcoholic beer and mocktails. I've always switched to them after 1-2 drinks.
The reality is though, alcohol lowers your inhibitions, and sometimes it's a good thing. Again, I have to emphasize the whole moderation part, and how alcohol might be awful for some people, so obviously refrain from it. But actively discouraging any sort of drinking...
I find the problem much more to do with the availability of entertainment. Before social media and YouTube, you just got bored staying at home all day and would naturally go out and socialize. Nowadays, everyone is just plugged into a never ending stream of TikTok brain rot.
Also, most of those activities aren't really a Friday/Saturday 10PM activity. Thinking about university days, I had 6-9PM classes on Friday, then go out with my friends to banter, watch people and just shoot the shit at the bars. Obviously it's not super healthy, but we're not talking about binge drinking 10 pints.
20 years ago, when "1 drink a day is healthiest" was all over the news, I said cheers and picked up the habit. It's kind of hard to break, considering that I really, really enjoy the flavor of alcoholic beverages. Alcohol, as a solvent, allows for flavor profiles that just water don't allow.
Plenty of people who drink age well and plenty of people who don’t drink don’t age well.
Statistics say something about aggregates, not individual data points
The latest data can be wrong. No different than how there was a period of time where UV light was considered this evil to avoid, and now we know it's actually pretty critical to get sunlight in moderation (and completely avoiding UV causes its own issues). This seems to be a problem with US health science where they will find something bad like partially hydrogenated fats (a terrible man made substance), and then go on to claim "fats are bad" (this is back in the 90s ish). The health system just ignored the long history of diets that were relatively high in fats (actual good natural fats), and tried to use "data". Ultimately data is only as good as our ability to measure, which is limited with something like the human body. That overcorrection has since come back to a more reasonable middle point but still has some issues.
It's undisputed that drinking a lot of alcohol is bad for you, but I don't see clear data for the grey area. If I fed a rat a whole bunch of vinegar day after day in large quantities it would get health problems, yet drinking a bit of apple cider vinegar, salt and vinegar chips, etc. are all fine, likely beneficial (pickled vegetables are good for you).
I'm not saying that there's any proof that alcohol is beneficial yet, but the lack of clear data for that grey area of risk is interesting. In Japan for example it's believed that drinking sake in moderate quantities has health benefits.
I guess going back to the sunlight analogy, it's hard to believe that a substance that has been around as long as alcohol has could be so toxic that occasional consumption has any meaningful negative effect.
Back to my prior example, there was a time when US health science said "saturated fats are bad", I think they went even so far as to say trans fats are good. The reality is that saturated fats affect cholesterol but aren't objectively bad.
We know NOW that your body needs sunlight, but there was a time when people were all the way to the other side, sunlight avoidant and using sunscreen all the time.
I think I'm sensitive to this because of the bullshit science around salt and high blood pressure as another example. Its finally been recently debunked that salt doesn't permanently affect blood pressure, but an elderly family member of mine was told by a doctor that eating salt would increase their already high blood pressure, and it led them to being hospitalized in bad condition because they stopped eating any salts at all.
As a side comment it's interesting that you used the word 'poison'. I have been seeing that word thrown around a lot in the articles too and it seems like a stretch, like a word used to try to scare people. Technically spicy food is a poison (your body is telling you to not eat that thing), there's even literal poisons like certain sushi (blowfish) that are used to create a unique taste by eating just enough of it. I don't have a background for the technical classification of substances, but the word poison for alcohol kinda feels like calling weed a neurotoxin.
That sort of thing makes a difference as the knowledge percolates through society.
This should be the case.
Instead, you're seeing people turn to "quiet night at home" types of recreational drugs.
For me, I'd rather have more in-person social time and a few beers, whatever the health effects may be. The benefits of social time always felt well-worth it.
thinkmassive•14h ago