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America has a drinking problem

theatlantic.com

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Re: America has a drinking problem

#331

Post by gv123 »

umvi wrote: post #172

I was watching "Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist" with my wife the other day and I commented "These characters seem to all be alcoholics" because seriously they have a drink in hand nearly every scene taking place outside of the workplace. I think part of the problem is glorification of alcohol in pop culture. Heck, at certain times of the year we look forward to watching a bunch of back-to-back alcohol advertisements (…

I said the exact same thing with my partner, I was watching true detective season 1, not one scene where the lead pair is not in office is without smoking or beer in hand.

Re: America has a drinking problem

#332

Post by TameAntelope »

Bostonian wrote: post #309
TameAntelope wrote: post #261

I'm going to generalize, but the US is more diverse (rank #90 vs #151 for Germany, #169 for France, #111 for Croatia [0]) and we also have a very painful past and present that makes us acutely aware of our inability to socialize. America also has a cultural obsession with self-reliance/liberty/frontier-as-a-virtue which makes "socializing" a bit of a taboo concept, in a weird way. It's a crutch to "need" to be around…

"we also have a very painful past and present" I don't see why that is more true of the U.S. than say Germany, Japan, Russia, China etc.

We've both refused to own our past national transgressions the way Japan and Germany have, we have more diversity than all of those countries, and have also not scrubbed all mention of said painful past from our national history like Russia and China.

Re: America has a drinking problem

#333

Post by [deleted] »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #326
TameAntelope wrote: post #261

I'm going to generalize, but the US is more diverse (rank #90 vs #151 for Germany, #169 for France, #111 for Croatia [0]) and we also have a very painful past and present that makes us acutely aware of our inability to socialize. America also has a cultural obsession with self-reliance/liberty/frontier-as-a-virtue which makes "socializing" a bit of a taboo concept, in a weird way. It's a crutch to "need" to be around…

> we also have a very painful past and present that makes us acutely aware of our inability to socialize. This is only a real problem for a small, but vocal part of the population. Most people don't think about these issues much at all.

[deleted]

Re: America has a drinking problem

#334

Post by ripdog »

>Now some grocery stores have wine bars, beer on tap, signs inviting you to “shop ’n’ sip,” and carts with cup holders.

What the hell?! That's absurdly irresponsible and dangerous considering most people travel to the grocery store in a car. Why aren't local authorities stamping down on this?

Re: America has a drinking problem

#335

Post by bart_spoon »

jmcdl wrote: post #295
maya24 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alcohol is a harmful drug much worse than some of the other banned drugs on the market.

This is a common refrain but at the same time it seems to be the one substance commonly used across most of the world since ancient times. None of the other supposedly less harmful, banned drugs are so ubiquitous. Perhaps there's a good reason for this (besides varying availability of other substances)?

One good reason is because alcoholic beverages could be stored for long periods of time and be safe for drinking. Water can become contaminated over time if bacteria is allowed to grow while it’s being stored, so it has to be relatively fresh to drink. Other options like milk would spoil quickly. Alcohol generally didn’t have these issues, giving it some utility that outweighed its advantages.

In an age where other beverages are as easily accessible for people living in the modern world, it’s utility isn’t there any more and you are left with all the downsides.

Re: America has a drinking problem

#336

Post by throwaway0a5e »

netflixandkill wrote: post #319

America has problems with drinking, opioids, meth, prescription abuse, vaping bizarre things, health care, mental health, domestic violence, domestic terrorism and violent crime, school shootings and suicides because America has a misery problem. A few decades of bootstrap vs welfare paint don't fix the rotted and failing structure of a culture, if it can even be called that anymore, that had replaced well being with…

Was that supposed to be a backhanded way to call some large chunks of Europe "undeveloped" or did you just forget about Eastern Europe and all the economically less stable countries on the Mediteranean?

Alcoholism, poor mental health care, domestic violence, suicide, etc. etc. are all alive and well on the other side of the pond too. Just not in the "scandanavia plus rich parts of western Europe" parts that HN likes to idolize.

Re: America has a drinking problem

#337

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #276
piyh wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take it to the extreme of an LSD trip, you can get something out of it that you can't get any other way. You take a day to mentally dig into your psyche and cut through so many of your mental ruts, while having some crazy hallucinations. Sobriety is great and preferable 99% of the time to me, but your framing of "escaping or distorting reality" is founded on a trust that your senses and current mental processes are o…

> Take it to the extreme of an LSD trip, you can get something out of it that you can't get any other way. You take a day to mentally dig into your psyche and cut through so many of your mental ruts, while having some crazy hallucinations. Maybe. I'm unconvinced that this is the only way to achieve any kind of insight. In particular I'd be surprised if it outperforms a cup of coffee or a rhapsodical conversation for…

> How can a high be "more real" than what you perceive through your senses?

"Perceive" is the key word here. To draw an analogy, if your mind is a computer, your senses are raw data inputs, which your unconscious mind parses, filters, and transforms before the data is eventually passed to your conscious mind. Some hallucinogens give you a peek into this process - you get to see what's going on under the hood, so to speak.

Like a young child, you might find yourself enamored by the beauty of the simple greenness of a leaf.

These substances can teach you that there are many valid ways to "perceive" an event. It's not so much that what you perceive while intoxicated is "more real", but that it's an equally valid (and sometimes drastically different!) interpretation.

They're simple lessons that can mostly be learned without any drugs at all (meditation helps), but a proper trip can hammer a lesson home in such an immediate, visceral, enduring way that I'm not sure there's a sober equivalent.

Re: America has a drinking problem

#338

Post by yosito »

dluan wrote: post #285
yosito wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> America's early history is mass drinking ... since it was first touched by colonizers.

Re: America has a drinking problem

#339

Post by lazyasciiart »

hpoe wrote: post #306
quadyeast wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well for starters you've got all the Muslims and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints sometimes know as Mormons. That's two big ole' swathes of people who probably don't drink at all.

Then you have pregnant women, and women who are trying to conceive, and sometimes their partners will also give up drinking in solidarity....

Re: America has a drinking problem

#340

Post by smcl »

Diederich wrote: post #308
smcl wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That can definitely happen when you're focussed on something else than what you're drinking (or eating!). It's gonna be even more pronounced if you're drinking, distracted and not particularly experienced with alcohol. If you enjoy what you're drinking you just need to be conscious of when you refill and you'll be fine. If you don't and you're just doing it as a sort of health thing, maybe you made the right choice.…

> If you enjoy what you're drinking ... That's the thing: I hate the taste of wine.

Yep that's why I included that :) If you're not into wine and you don't fancy anything else then fair enough, I hope nobody's pressuring you or making things weird.
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