Drinking: why are we in denial about the fun bit?

Picture by Mauricio Mascaro

I was recently on the hunt for some good drinking anecdotes. My tasting events are built around a broader narrative from alcohol history, but without amusing tales and trivia, they’d be a bit dry for an audience getting steadily merry. So I googled "drinking stories". A bit vague, sure, but sometimes casting the net wide brings in a good catch.*

It might not surprise you as much as it did me, but entertaining tales of mischief were not what the internet bestowed upon me. Nope. Instead, I found tales of woe, recovery, trauma, shame, and abuse - towards the self and others.

In previous essays, I’ve explored the historically precedented conditions that have led us to a point where hedonism has become unfashionable. But I’m not interested today in the socio-economic reasons behind the decline in alcohol consumption. I want to talk about the attitude shift.

Not “Why are people drinking less?” but “How has our attitude to it changed?” How is the decline in alcohol consumption being felt in culture, in conversation and in the stories we tell about it?

Let’s begin with what the data tells us. In the UK, over a 10 year period the 16-24 age group showed a significant drop in both the amount of people describing themselves as teetotal and the average units consumed by drinkers. Meanwhile, older demographics remained relatively stable, and in some narrower brackets, there’s even been a slight increase.**

So this shift isn’t across the board. It’s generational. And when younger people turn away from drinking, it doesn’t just affect the stats, it affects the tone of the entire conversation. Popular media and internet culture disproportionately cater to a younger audience, and when that audience stops romanticising or glamourising alcohol, it alters how we all talk about it.

This change creates a kind of feedback loop. The more the harms of alcohol dominate the discourse, the more it feeds into an ambient anxiety about drinking and the less acceptable it becomes to talk frankly about enjoying intoxication. 

It’s not that these are bad conversations, they’re responsible and frankly overdue. But they’ve pushed aside something else. We’ve stopped talking about how inebriation is usually a positive experience. ‘Drunk’ used to describe a spectrum of intoxication, and that spectrum had an incredible array of vocabulary to describe specific places on that spectrum. ‘Drunk’ has now become synonymous with extreme intoxication, what we may once have called ‘paralytic’. We still just about admit to being ‘a bit merry’, but we’ve distanced ourselves from ‘drunk’ and attached baggage to it. Perhaps this is because from the perspective of the sober, it’s all ‘drunk’ and we’ve taken that on. 

Which, when you think about it, is very strange. I host tastings for a living. I talk about flavour, provenance, ritual, history -  fascinating things all but I’d be foolish to pretend these are the primary reasons most people drink. The altered mental state is central. It’s unarguably the most universal part of the experience, and yet it’s rarely discussed without guilt or qualification. We are happy to talk about the morning after but descriptions of the night before seem to avoid reference to the lubricant which showed us the door to a good time.

Even in nature, the drive for intoxication appears across species. Birds and bees may stumble across fermented fruit by accident, but many mammals, including elephants, monkeys, and reindeer, deliberately seek it out. There’s debate around intention, of course, but the patterns of behaviour suggest they enjoy the sensation - whatever that sensation means in their neurological terms. In that sense, the desire to drink isn’t just cultural. It’s natural.

So what’s changed?

Getting Drunk Has Become a Boring Topic

With fewer young people drinking heavily, “messy night out” stories have become passé. They no longer land at the pub or the party in the way they used to. For the older generations, most of us got bored of talking about it beyond a certain age anyway. The conversational well of ‘drinking banter’ ran dry when we were in our mid 20s.

Tone of Popular Media Has Shifted

Mainstream portrayals of alcohol have evolved. The sitcom drunk, once a staple, is now a rare sight, or portrayed with more complexity and consequence. The wild party montage still exists, but is rarer.

Even in music, things have changed. Musicians still reference drink, amongst other things, but often with a darker edge or an air of detachment. You don’t hear many 2020s equivalents of “Gin and Juice” or “Pass the Courvoisier.” Once we drank “a whiskey drink, a vodka drink, a lager drink, a cider drink”***, now “everybody at the bar” is only “getting tipsy”.

We’re Making Drinking Justifiable, Not Joyful

Among drinkers, there’s a tendency now to frame alcohol consumption purely in terms of taste and sophistication. We say “I love the botanicals” or “this pairs perfectly with cheese.” It’s all true, but also… it’s a bit of a cover. We’ve swapped honesty for respectability. The altered state becomes a guilty secret, something we downplay or dress up in language of self-care and discernment. Focusing on quality over quantity is a fine thing but you’re allowed to acknowledge you’re happy.

We’ve Pathologised Pleasure

This one’s more philosophical. But as mental health awareness has risen, so too has our scrutiny of anything that might interfere with our mental stability. In that context, drinking becomes suspect. Not necessarily wrong, but risky. And risk, in an anxious age, is less fashionable than ever. 

We still drink. Many of us still enjoy it. But the way we enjoy it, and more interestingly, the way we talk about it has changed dramatically. It’s good for someone like me, whose job is storytelling that responds to this desire to get more from drinking than just the biological effects. But I don’t think this subconscious framing of intoxication as a moral failing is especially useful to the human experience. 

Don’t misunderstand me, I think awareness about your preferred level of inebriation is better than the 1990s ‘race to closing time’ mentality, so maybe we just need a new kind of drinking story? One that doesn’t glamorise excess, but doesn’t ignore the altered state either. One that accepts the complexity of drinking in the modern age but leaves room for laughter, looseness, and a little bit of shared release.

* I’m not a fisherman so can’t confirm this metaphor. It sounds good though.

** Office for National Statistics ‘Adult Drinking Habits in Great Britain 2005-2016’

*** To be fair, this sounds like a staggeringly terrible mix of drinks