Millennials Are Drinking Less-But Still Not Sober - The Atlantic - 0 views
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What some have been quick to characterize as an interest in being sober might actually be more like a search for moderation in a culture that has long treated alcohol as a dichotomy: Either you drink whenever the opportunity presents itself, or you don’t drink at all. Many Millennials—and especially the urban, college-educated consumers prized by marketers—might just be tired of drinking so much.
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national survey data on drinking habits reflect only small declines in heavy alcohol use. (For men, that’s drinking five alcoholic beverages in a short period of time five or more times in a month; for women, it’s four drinks under the same conditions.)
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From 2015 through 2017, the most recent year for which data are available, the rate of Millennials who reported that they had consumed any amount of alcohol in the preceding month remained pretty steady, at more than 60 percent.
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fewer Millennials are taking part in traditional family building, and the ones doing it are waiting longer than their parents did. Now the structure of social life isn’t that different for many people in their mid-30s than it was in their early 20s, which provides plenty of time for drinking on dates and with friends for them to start to get a little tired of it.
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“Folks in the Millennial generation have maybe a better sense of balance. Some do yoga or meditation or are physically active, so they don’t need to find stimulation and stress reduction in substances.” That mirrors the generation’s general interest in maintaining its health,
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Millennials who haven’t developed their generation’s signature coping skills often use alcohol heavily. Starke sees an alarming number of people under 35 with advanced liver disease or alcohol hepatitis. As attitudes may be moderating for many young adults, plenty of others are struggling: Nearly 90,000 people still die from alcohol-related causes in America every year, and that number hasn’t started to meaningfully improve.
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“It still seems like this is a generation of self-medicating, but they’re using things differently,” says Starke, and the normalization and ever more common legalization of cannabis have a big part in that.
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A 2017 study found that in counties with legalized medicinal cannabis, alcohol sales dropped more than 12 percent when compared with similar counties without weed. Recreational legalization has the potential to bolster that effect by making cannabis products even more broadly accessible
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uicide rates are up among young adults, and prescription-drug abuse is a problem the country is only beginning to address
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Gen Z is drinking at lower rates than adolescents have in generations, and so much about a person’s lifetime relationship with substance abuse and consumption is set by use in early life.
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“For many people, when they’re honest with their friends [about wanting to skip out on drinks], their friends are like, ‘Oh my God, I was thinking about that too,’” says UNC’s Starke. “I don’t know too many people who have gotten a negative response.”