Giving up alcohol has made me feel a lot better. It hasn't cured all my problems but it has made life easier. Heavy drinking put me in situations that were dangerous and I don't miss that at all.
If one to two drinks per week, or a glass of wine with dinner with friends increases your overall happiness because you had healthy relationships, or because you met somebody who opened up some other opportunity for you, that probably is an overall net positive compared to not drinking and thus perhaps not going out.
Inb4 "you shouldn't need to drink to have good friendships" yeah okay but sometimes it can just be fun to loosen up a bit and have a good time with your friends and i don't think looking back on my 20s i'd trade my fun nights out for the alternative (staying in and likely grinding CS. counterstrike, not even computer science). YMMV.
I'm a bit confused by the conflation here. You can drink alone or socialize sober. It may be the case that kids these days are socializing in person with friends less, but it's almost certainly not because they're drinking less.
andsoitis•1mo ago
taylodl•1mo ago
Maybe Dry January should be Dry Wine January?
smurda•1mo ago
“A lot of people who don’t currently drink are people who used to drink heavily, or who have health problems that led them to quit...” said Keith Humphreys, PhD, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and the Esther Ting Memorial Professor. “That skews the data, making moderate drinkers look healthier by comparison.”
https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2025/08/moderate-alcohol-c...
taylodl•1mo ago
guga42k•1mo ago
it will and it does. anybody who owns a smart watch with heart rate monitor can observe it. the proverbial glass is very visible as a spike of resting heart rate and especially horrible on HRV.
besides, there are "glasses" which can take full 750ml bottle. may be most people don't go such extreme but still very good to fool themselves about alcohol volume consumption