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America has a drinking problem

theatlantic.com

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Re: America has a drinking problem

#281

Post by OminousWeapons »

fantod wrote: post #149
Barrin92 wrote: post #135

Article mirrors my experience. For context I'm German, my wife's French and we've got family in Croatia who own a vineyard so I'm used to being around alcohol and people drinking. My first impression when I spent time was in the US was indeed how bipolar drinking is compared to Europe. We probably drink a hell of a lot more in raw terms than the average American does.Two glasses of wine for dinner, another one in the…

Noticed this when I was in Germany/Austria as well. In America, if you go out drinking then that's the primary activity. It's what you're doing. But in central Europe socializing and seeing friends is the activity and you just happen to drink because that's what you do when you see your friends.

I disagree with this. Americans go out drinking with friends because alcohol helps you cut through the bullshit small talk and get to the real talk that everyone is afraid to initiate but eager to take part in. If we could all have perfectly candid conversations surrounding sensitive topics without alcohol, there would be no need for most bars to exist.

Re: America has a drinking problem

#282

Post by nick__m »

altcognito wrote: post #98
agumonkey wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anxiety in general is noticeably lower you were more anxious when you were drinking ? that's a first not to look naive, but there was a period of my life having a beer [0] was really the only way for me to exist outside my bedroom walls, i wasn't even tipsy.. I was just able to sit in a room without crippling dread. [0] I didn't drink, but the few times I did at parties I realized how drinking a bit was lifting me…

Conditions like GERD where stomach acids come up into the esophagus can be mistaken for anxiety or panic attacks. Alcohol can make GERD type symptoms a lot worse.

GERD made me quit Scotch (other spirits are probably forbidden but I love undiluted scotch) , red wine, dark beer, black and white tea and dark chocolate.

I used to have a glass (2oz) of undiluted high proof scotch a few times a week after a good workday but around 37y I had to stop.

I wish something could replicate the taste and the warmth of the Aberlour A'bunadh but alas I fear that replicating the feeling of +60% ABV without using something even more deleterious than ethanol is impossible.

Re: America has a drinking problem

#283

Post by ufmace »

laurent92 wrote: post #112
kevinmchugh wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alcohol withdrawals are serious enough that they can be fatal. This isn't true for cigarettes, opiates, or cocaine. Breaking habits is hard, but usually doesn't risk hospitalization or death.

My mother worked in a alcohol rehab center. People who drank up to 12L of wine a day (I still wonder how that works) would turn to window cleaning liquid on withdrawal. She said no-one ever quit the alcohol addiction by choice, all of them were brought here by court, generally after killing people in an accident. I sure hope people can quit alcohol addiction by choice. But you do need to rebuild all the friendships t…

I'm suspicious of bold claims like that from people observing a selected subset of a population. An alcohol rehab center, particular the type that accepts people sentenced there by a court, is likely to get few to no voluntary patients. Therefore, somebody working there will only see the people who have a serious enough alcohol problem to get in enough alcohol-related legal trouble to get sentenced to go to rehab.

I've known some people who would probably qualify as functional alcoholics, and none of them have ever got into legal trouble for it. IME, you generally have to be a wildly out of control drunk to get into legal trouble from it regularly.

I've also known plenty of people who stopped or cut back alcohol consumption voluntarily, with no help from any organized programs. It's quite doable for many people, once you decide that you genuinely want to stop, though I acknowledge that some people genuinely can't. You may infact have to change friendships and routines if some of the old ones are too conductive to binge drinking, but do what you gotta do.

Re: America has a drinking problem

#284

Post by [deleted] »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #221
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #153

It's hard to reduce the US to a single culture. Alcohol consumption habits vary greatly from region to region, or even city to city depending on where you live. I've noticed that heavy drinkers tend to cluster with other heavy drinkers. The more you see your friends and coworkers binge drinking regularly, the more you feel it's an acceptable and even common behavior. Likewise, non-drinkers tend to cluster with each o…

> Note that the median US alcohol drinker consumes less than 1 drink per week. The article says something else: >> the median consumption among those who do drink is just three beverages per week. You might get less than 1 / week by including non-drinkers, who are (according to the article) at least 30% of American adults. But they're 0% of American alcohol drinkers.

[deleted]

Re: America has a drinking problem

#285

Post by dluan »

yosito wrote: post #270
dluan wrote: post #257

America's early history is mass drinking. Rum was 'invented' in Barbados in ~1650, but beer, wine, and brandy have been drunk in the Caribbean and Americas since it was first touched by colonizers. Wayne Curtis reported that in the 1600/1700s the average person aged 15 years old and up drank 6 gallons of pure alcohol a year, equal to 75 fifths of 80 proof rum a year, or roughly 5 shots per day. Continental european e…

Getting drunk is not a "colonizers" thing, it's a human thing. People have been getting drunk for tens of thousands of years, all around the globe.

Where did I say it was a colonizers thing?

Re: America has a drinking problem

#286

Post by k__ »

I didn't drink since the pandemic hit.

Didn't miss it, because I only drank at parties and even then I didn't drink at every party.

I like being drunk sometimes, it can turn a boring event into a fun night. But I don't think, I need it more than a few times a year.

Re: America has a drinking problem

#287

Post by PragmaticPulp »

quadyeast wrote: post #249
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #153

It's hard to reduce the US to a single culture. Alcohol consumption habits vary greatly from region to region, or even city to city depending on where you live. I've noticed that heavy drinkers tend to cluster with other heavy drinkers. The more you see your friends and coworkers binge drinking regularly, the more you feel it's an acceptable and even common behavior. Likewise, non-drinkers tend to cluster with each o…

that chart does not make sense to me unless >10% of Americans are AA. I can't think of anyone, besides non-drinking Alcoholics, that have less than 1 drink/wk

> I can't think of anyone, besides non-drinking Alcoholics, that have less than 1 drink/wk

Most people I associate with don’t drink anything on an average week.

It’s likely that you’re in a bit of a bubble if you can’t think of anyone who doesn’t drink in an average week.

Re: America has a drinking problem

#288

Post by swiley »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #3

The statistics about alcohol consumption are so stunning that I often wonder how accurate they are. If these numbers are correct, the top 10% of alcohol drinkers consume the equivalent of 10 drinks per day : https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/25/think... The unit for a single drink is a fixed measurement, so someone pouring a tall glass of wine or a very stiff drink could be consuming 2-5 “drinks” in…

10 drinks of 100 proof vodka is ~200 ml (less than two thirds of a coffee mug.) That sounds like what I did pretty often in college (I remember saying I liked college at the time, in retrospect I may have been lying.)

Re: America has a drinking problem

#289

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

StavrosK wrote: post #250
azinman2 wrote: post #207

Having lived in the UK and the US, I firmly disagree. I had never seen drinking at the extreme levels until I went to the UK. I seriously doubt the entire articles premise that somehow alcohol binging is unique to the US. There are a lot of counties with a lot of forms of alcohol out there…

It's not unique to the US, but the US shares a culture with the UK in this regard. It's not similar to other countries I've been to (or lived in). In Greece, for example, it's not uncommon to see teenagers being served/sold alcohol, just because it's not a big deal. People go out, they have a drink or two, and they go home. In the US and the UK, if you aren't drunk when you get home, it wasn't a good night. Nobody he…

The UK is an outlier in western europe (I think this is your point), but having lived in both countries, they definitely binge drink more than Americans.

Re: America has a drinking problem

#290

Post by Tyr42 »

svachalek wrote: post #127
handrous wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have some similar thoughts about this. Take Internet media streaming: am I happier being able to watch any of 10,000 things with no effort, rather than having maybe a couple dozen at hand and the ability, with some time and effort, to acquire one or two more if I really want them enough? Or is the ability to select exactly a certain thing to watch with low effort just scratching an itch that only exists because I c…

There was a book about this called the Paradox of Choice. Basically, that we want choices but they make us less happy. There's a related phenomenon, I don't know a name for it, where given a choice between convenience and happiness people will almost always choose convenience, generally without even realizing they've made a choice. Our genes have a deep, deep preference for minimizing energy expenditure.

This happens with video games too. Players hate restrictions, but if they were removed, would get board and stop.

For a recent example, look at Valheim. They explicitly block you from using portals to move metal ore, which forces you to use a cart or a boat to move it. Suddenly I was a highway engineer for a few hours and pay more attention to harbour than before and had a blast.

Yet there are mods which remove this restriction, which removes this experience. Why build a highway if I can just drop a portal down?

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