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U.S. alcohol consumption drops to a 90-year low, new poll finds

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Re: U.S. alcohol consumption drops to a 90-year low, new poll finds

#161

Post by tokioyoyo »

gwbas1c wrote: post #103
tokioyoyo wrote: post #85

A good chunk of my “fun and memorable nights” involved going out for a drink with friends/meeting new people at the bar. It’s very good if the younger generation is consuming less alcohol, but unless they’re replacing the social-aspect of it with something similar, I pity them. Unfortunately, looking at the data, it shows that people are just lonelier and hang out in social circles even less. Obviously there are prob…

Does "going out for a drink with friends/meeting new people at the bar" require consuming alcohol ? Plenty of bars have non-alcoholic beer and mocktails. I've always switched to them after 1-2 drinks.

Depends. I personally don't care about noalc, as when I don't want to drink, I just get Sprite or equivalent. Nor I ever cared if a person got noalc when I'm grabbing beer.

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...

Re: U.S. alcohol consumption drops to a 90-year low, new poll finds

#162

Post by laughing_man »

darth_avocado wrote: post #140
thewebguyd wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> being replaced with solo drug use or just solo everything. 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.…

> people are getting priced out 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.

Public alcohol consumption is pretty much banned where I live. If you go to the park and pop the top on a beer you'll get cited.

Re: U.S. alcohol consumption drops to a 90-year low, new poll finds

#163

Post by laughing_man »

atsushin wrote: post #54
chiffre01 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally it seems like alcohol is being replaced with weed or other things. But it doesn't bode well for the future of mental health if social drinking is being replaced with solo drug use or just solo everything.

The lack of IRL 'third places' for young people to meet locally will only exacerbate the issue -- and probably should bear most of the blame. The car-centric infrastructure of the suburbs (well, the vast majority of America) encourages isolation and asocial behavior. It really sucks that for some, their lives will never go beyond that invisible cage.

The suburbs used to have a lot of those kinds of places. Car-centric infrastructure is not the problem. People used to go to church, join bowling leagues, spend Sundays in the park, etc.

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.

Re: U.S. alcohol consumption drops to a 90-year low, new poll finds

#164

Post by laughing_man »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #61
atsushin wrote: post #14

There was a pretty good Kurzgesagt video posted earlier today on alcohol in general: https://youtu.be/aOwmt39L2IQ 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…

Substance use is dropping precipitously, because partying and socialization writ large are dropping. The people who party are still drinking, they're really not the ones driving these decreases. 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,…

I wonder if some of the drop is just that people are worried if they let loose a video will make its way onto TikTok and be there forever.

Re: U.S. alcohol consumption drops to a 90-year low, new poll finds

#165

Post by scotty79 »

margalabargala wrote: post #144
scotty79 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Causation goes the other way. Healthier people tend to drink more because they don't have enough signals from their bodies to respect them.

That would be a novel finding in the field! Tell me more.

https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/about-alcohol-use/moderate-alcoh...

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.

Re: U.S. alcohol consumption drops to a 90-year low, new poll finds

#166

Post by laughing_man »

linotype wrote: post #34
strangescript wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

shh, you are going to upset people that think drinking is evil and cutting it has no draw backs

It’s not evil, it’s just bad for you. A 5 mg edible a couple times a month is going to be a way better for someone than drinking multiple times a week.

There are a whole lot of everyday pot smokers out there.

Re: U.S. alcohol consumption drops to a 90-year low, new poll finds

#168

Post by remarkEon »

atsushin wrote: post #54
chiffre01 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally it seems like alcohol is being replaced with weed or other things. But it doesn't bode well for the future of mental health if social drinking is being replaced with solo drug use or just solo everything.

The lack of IRL 'third places' for young people to meet locally will only exacerbate the issue -- and probably should bear most of the blame. The car-centric infrastructure of the suburbs (well, the vast majority of America) encourages isolation and asocial behavior. It really sucks that for some, their lives will never go beyond that invisible cage.

I don't get this (very common) perspective that the 'burbs encourage isolation and asocial behavior. My experience growing up (born in Iowa, grew up in Minnesota) is really the opposite. I lived in the city but had plenty of friends in the Suburbs (Minnetonka, Edina, Eden Prairie, etc etc) and whenever I'd go over there for a sleep over or something we could wander around the neighborhood like our own little platoon completely unbothered and safe. Running across everyone's lawns, climbing the neighbor's trees, as long as we were home by dinner time.

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.

Re: U.S. alcohol consumption drops to a 90-year low, new poll finds

#169

Post by silisili »

chiffre01 wrote: post #24
atsushin wrote: post #14

There was a pretty good Kurzgesagt video posted earlier today on alcohol in general: https://youtu.be/aOwmt39L2IQ 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…

Anecdotally it seems like alcohol is being replaced with weed or other things. But it doesn't bode well for the future of mental health if social drinking is being replaced with solo drug use or just solo everything.

Everything is being replaced with solo everything. I know so many young Millennials and Z'ers who quite literally never leave the house. They're content with Doordash and their phones for media.

This is what corporations want. Lonely people are constant eyeballs . But this can't be good for society as a whole.

Re: U.S. alcohol consumption drops to a 90-year low, new poll finds

#170

Post by kingstnap »

zamalek wrote: post #62
atsushin wrote: post #14

There was a pretty good Kurzgesagt video posted earlier today on alcohol in general: https://youtu.be/aOwmt39L2IQ 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…

> night out at the bar is expensive now "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.

You don't really need to compare to developing countries.

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.

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