My sister, who has been a step ahead of the moment ever since she was a teenager, recently told me she anticipates booze going the way of the cigarette. Probably it won’t completely disappear, she said, but over the next few decades its prominence in American life will shrink to a fraction of what it was when the great Bill Hicks measured America’s inebriant of choice against pot and found beer wanting.
An August 2023 Gallup report suggests my sibling’s intuition may be spot on—as usual.
Young adults in the U.S. have become progressively less likely to use alcohol over the past two decades, with the percentages of 18- to 34-year-olds saying they ever drink, that they drank in the past week and that they sometimes drink more than they should all lower today. At the same time, drinking on all three metrics has trended up among older Americans while holding fairly steady among middle-aged adults…
Gallup’s long-term measure of alcohol consumption asks U.S. adults whether they “ever have occasion to use alcoholic beverages.” While the national average has been steady in the low 60% range for over 40 years, the age trends reviewed for this report show that the rate has declined 10 percentage points over the past two decades among younger adults, aged 18 to 34, falling from 72% to 62%. Meanwhile, the percentage of drinkers has increased by 10 points among older adults, those 55 and older, going from 49% to 59%…
Younger adults who drink are also less likely than they were in the past to say they had an alcoholic drink within the past seven days -- an indication of being a regular drinker. The 61% who most recently reported having a drink in the past week is down from 64% in 2011-2013 and 67% in 2001-2003.
Okay, sure, drinking rates among the olds are holding steady (or even ticking up a bit, probably as an aftereffect of the 2020 lockdown—but if I owned a distillery, I might be mulling over ideas for a gradual rollout of a bottled mocktail line.
Writing for Forbes in June 2023, one Clara Ludmir ascribes the youths’ (properly pronounced “yoots”) historically tepid thirst for alcohol to the phenomenon of “mindful drinking:”
The rise of mindful drinking is driven mostly by younger generations, with youth drinking being in decline across most high-income countries. Gen-Z drink on average 20% less than millenials, who also drink less than the previous generation, mainly because of an increased awareness of the dangers and effects of alcohol and the rise of health-consciousness as a lifestyle. In fact, an overwhelming 86% of Gen-Z consumers believe that their mental health is as significant as their physical health when considering drinking alcohol…
She doesn’t explicitly mention social media as a conduit for the generational switch in consumer behavior, but (1) it’s strongly implied by references to “the NoLo movement,” and (2) in the global village you’d be hard-pressed to find a trend that isn’t propagated primarily through social media. It’s true that health & wellness have become a preoccupation of the hip and heavily online as of late, but I think we’d be too hasty in deeming popular discourse about no- and low-alcohol drinking to be the cause of reduced consumption among the younger cohort. Here we have another case where it isn’t the content, but the medium that’s the message of persuasion. Digital media rewires us to abstain from booze, regardless of what’s on the screen.
In our intensely individualist and fragmented Western world, "booze" is a social bond and a means of festive involvement. By contrast, in closely knit tribal society "booze" is destructive of all social pattern and is even used as a means to mystical experience.
—Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media
McLuhan was no authority on indigenous peoples, but his remark about alcohol in “primitive” cultures with low technology and little in the way of social specialization still appears to be more or less accurate: drinking was involved in rituals and annular celebrations, and not done casually. The idea that the indigenous peoples of North America had no experience whatsoever with fermented beverages until the Europeans brought over their “fire water” is pure fiction, as is talk of a genetic predisposition for alcoholism. They weren’t however, prepared for high-proof distilled spirits, nor for patterns of use divorced from ritual.1
Alcohol is of course a drug, and no such thing as a single-purpose drug exists. What McLuhan obliquely gets at is that the uses to which alcohol most obviously lends itself in the affluent West are neither as obvious nor eminently applicable to an integrated, materially simple, and perhaps pantheistic “primitive” society. It has been observed that people of a primary oral culture tend towards demonstrativeness and gregariousness, and the intimate familiarity of a village life in which neither privacy nor introspection are particularly prized precludes the need for lubricants to grease one’s interpersonal cogwork on a regular basis.
But social diffidence prevails in a culture of literacy, specialization, and urbanism. It has long been a truism that if you drop a bunch of office-worker white people who don’t know each other into a house party without giving them wine and beer, a gelid and awkward affair must ensue.2 Alcohol has long been the principal tool with which self-oriented and fragmented Westerners can crack their own shells when the occasion calls for it and commune in a spirit of fond familiarity.
Examples by way of bullets:
The 1980s sitcom Cheers idealized the institution of the urban watering hole, presenting it as a place of wit and conviviality where mailmen, psychiatrists, retirees, law students, accountants, and others people from different walks of life and socioeconomic statuses can rub shoulders and enjoy a drink together. This rosy depiction of a place where everybody knows your name contains at least a bead of truth to life.
Before dating apps, the bar was a place where singles searched for and made themselves available to prospective mates. Breaking the ice is easier when it’s already partially thawed, after all.
Owing to economic standardization and advances in transportation, siblings, parents, and children commonly live hundreds of miles away from each other. At a family gathering where one feels obligated to enact a sanguine conviviality with people they may not have seen for months or years, alcohol reliably results in smiles and chitchat that don’t need to be forced.
At the raucous joint fraternity-sorority parties open to the general student body at my alma mater, the music usually sucked, the beer was cheap and stinky, and people drank to the point of puking over the porch rail—but I usually had fun. There was a surprising diversity in terms of the various campus cliques in attendance, especially on nights when there wasn’t anything else going on.
But let’s not get too sentimental here. The bleak counterpoint to Cheers was Moe’s Tavern on the Simpsons, which is probably more in line with most of America’s downtown bars. Sodden college frat parties aren’t associated with date rapes and stomach pumps without reason. The family reunion characterized by laughter and games of horseshoes over bottles of Angry Orchard and Modelo has its dark opposite in the Thanksgiving dinner where Uncle Spud hits the Wild Turkey and Gillian has one wine cooler too many, and their runaway argument about immigration divides the table into a pair of hostile camps rallying around the disputants. And if we really wanted to depress ourselves, we could go and look up some statistics about the number of lives destroyed by alcoholism on a yearly basis.
In spite of its obviously harmful side effects, drinking remained the collective habit we couldn’t kick. The customs surrounding alcohol were too deeply entrenched in Western culture and too adaptable to the changing circumstances of the bourgeoisie revolution and the movement from agrarian ruralism toward industrial urbanism to be easily dislodged.
What the stern, god-fearing women of the Temperance Movement failed to accomplish through harangues, propaganda, destruction of property, and monomaniacal lobbying is now being effectuated by the technological rescripting of society.3 Over the last few years, the media has been full of reports about longstanding booze-soaked institutions (ball games and clubbing, for instance) on the verge of contracting for want of interested participants among the younger generations. But more generally, I expect we’ll see alcohol displaced by different varieties of drug that more effectively complement the ways in which people use their time and relate to each other in the digital epoch.
Some reflections and speculations:
1.
Alcohol is popularly regarded and used as a social drug because it’s a body drug. Get a buzz on and the febrile commotion of a dense crowd invigorates rather than oppresses. Booze helps to relax the peculiar tension in your throat, limbs, and chest that ordinarily inhibits you from speaking to interesting-looking strangers. The drinker becomes more receptive to human warmth and affection, to hugs and slaps on the shoulder, to wanting to relate to and agree with everyone because being around them feels so wonderful and exciting to be with them, to listen to them, to see them smiling back, to experience their laughter and good vibes like a light bulb accepting an electrical current. Your brain temporarily becomes too wet, hot, and loud an environment for Melville’s “subtle demonisms of life and thought” to subside in.
None of this applies so much to technologically mediated socialization, which extracts other bodies from the formula. Alcohol turns its user into a sponge for human warmth, energy, and affection, but I don’t suppose I need to explain the nontrivial differences between a nearby eruption of laughter and an “lol,” an arm thrown around a shoulder and an emoji, or a proximate face and a representation of one on an LCD monitor. There are ineluctable physical reasons as to why boozing by oneself and going into a Discord channel or busy message board isn’t comparable to attending a cocktail party or visiting a lively dive bar.
The youths reportedly aren’t as keen as their predecessors about drinking with colleagues after work, dropping into bars, or going out much at all. And if they’re not habitually placing themselves in the settings and situations that maximize the enjoyability of alcohol, it’s reasonable to suppose they’ll be drinking it infrequently, if at all.
2.
A November 2022 article from the Washington Post calls attention to the elephant in the room.
According to the Census Bureau’s American Time Use Survey, the amount of time the average American spent with friends was stable, at 6½ hours per week, between 2010 and 2013. Then, in 2014, time spent with friends began to decline.
By 2019, the average American was spending only four hours per week with friends (a sharp, 37 percent decline from five years before). Social media, political polarization and new technologies all played a role in the drop. (It is notable that market penetration for smartphones crossed 50 percent in 2014.)…
Similar declines can be seen even when the definition of “friends” is expanded to include neighbors, co-workers and clients. The average American spent 15 hours per week with this broader group of friends a decade ago, 12 hours per week in 2019 and only 10 hours a week in 2021.
On average, Americans did not transfer that lost time to spouses, partners or children. Instead, they chose to be alone.
No single group drives this trend. Men and women, White and non-White, rich and poor, urban and rural, married and unmarried, parents and non-parents all saw proportionally similar declines in time spent with others. The pattern holds for both remote and in-person workers.
The percentage decline is also similar for the young and old; however, given how much time young people spend with friends, the absolute decline among Americans age 15 to 19 is staggering. Relative to 2010-2013, the average American teenager spent approximately 11 fewer hours with friends each week in 2021 (a 64 percent decline) and 12 additional hours alone (a 48 percent increase).
What are we all doing during this time spent alone? If you guessed watching TV, playing video games, and swiping/scrolling/clicking through the web, you’re probably right.
3.
If you google “why is drinking alone bad,” you’ll get two kinds of results: addiction clinics’ literature and exhortations to seek help, and recalcitrant missives from advocates for imbibing in solitude. Many specimens of the latter make eloquent cases for their pastime. However—if you name an at-home leisure activity, performed by oneself, and tell me how it can be improved by a few glasses of wine or whiskey, I can tell you why a THC vape or a bit of an edible is the more sensible alternative if you’re set on not doing it sober.
If you’ve got a late afternoon all to yourself and plan to sit on the sofa and listen to a favorite album or playlist on your home stereo, watch an interesting-looking movie or select episodes of a favorite sitcom, play a noncompetitive video game, drop into a Wikipedia rabbit hole, or just loaf on the porch and watch the world go by, the mild hallucinogen is the superior choice. Every time. Not that booze can’t enhance these activities, but the difference between the two drugs here is analogous to the choice between a hammer or a brick for the purpose of driving a nail. Certainly you can get the job done with both, but the hammer is more apt to the task. Under the circumstances, it’s better to have your thoughts crackling and popping inside your head than sloshing around.
What if you’ve got the day to yourself and a room to paint? Leaves to rake? An oven to clean? A basement to declutter? Once again, if you’re compelled to use a psychoactive to make a long, tedious, and solitary task more palatable, opt for the tetrahydrocannabinols. Just a dab’ll do ya. The effect lasts a long time, and you don’t have to keep taking hits and screwing up your motor functions to sustain the good part of the buzz.
People in the modern West would have figured this out much earlier if cannabis had been as readily available and comfortably familiar to the masses as alcohol, and hadn’t been aggressively stigmatized and illegalized for two centuries. But the times have very obviously changed, and with breakneck speed after Reagan’s War on Drugs quietly slumped over and died. In the United States, the recreational use of marijuana and its derivatives has reached a height of social acceptability scarcely imaginable during the twentieth century, and has been decriminalized or even legalized in a growing number of jurisdictions. Against this background, the youngsters have had ample occasion to acquaint themselves with the difference between sitting in bed alone after eating a sativa chocolate and after pounding a White Claw Surge, and they’ve concluded that THC pairs better with idle isolation than alcohol. It’s not even much of a contest—and the kids know it.
I would also make the guess that they’re not insensible of the bad press that solo drinking has gotten all throughout their lives, and don’t especially admire the Fun Wine Aunt who might be in their family or social orbit. She might be a hoot, sure, but the thirty-, forty-, or fifty-something childless woman with a cheugy WINE TIME mug or print on her wall is more often an object of bemused condescension than someone whose lifestyle an adolescent wishes to emulate. The Uncle Spud character who comes straight home from work and consumes a six-pack of Bud Light by himself while watching the news on television was already a maligned and pitiful type, and the suave, chiseled bachelor who enjoys a snifter of brandy or a glass of expensive scotch by the fireplace seven nights a week has lost a great deal of his post-Prohibition glamor in the last few decades.
The least socially active generations in history have ample cause to be sensitive to how the psychoactives on an unprecedently diverse and expansive menu comport with a solitary lifestyle, and apparently they’re coming to the (correct) conclusion that alcohol isn’t the best option available.
4.
When PepsiCo first branded its sugary, high-caffeine soda Mountain Dew as “game fuel” in 2005, it could do so with confidence because it knew it wasn’t bullshitting. Not entirely. If Mike’s Hard Lemonade had taken that tack for an advertising campaign, it would have been laughed out of town—and the gamers would have been guffawing the loudest. Even when taken at a low volume, when its initial and temporary stimulant-like effects are most pronounced, alcohol won’t improve or prolong one’s performance in an activity that requires fast reflexes, fine motor skills, and an alert mind. But a strong dose of caffeine will.
Since the early 2010s, the video game industry has been bigger than Hollywood. If you’re a American adult who plays no games at all, ever, you’re in the minority now. By some accounts, video game fandom has at least partially taken on some of the social affiliative function that rock genre fandom served during my own adolescence. A twenty-something who plays games and takes them at least somewhat seriously knows they’d do better pounding cans of Red Bull than Coors or wine coolers during a long Tears of the Kingdom session. Nicotine helps, too—and nowadays, thanks to tobaccoless vape devices and oral nicotine pouches, the user needn’t worry about stinking up the room, or bother with dirty ashtrays and spit receptacles. And if they’ve got a prescription for time-release amphetamines, surely they’ve discovered that their “medicine” enhances both their performance and their pleasure while they play Helldivers 2 on a Saturday afternoon.
In case it needs to be clarified, I’m talking about playing games in a room by oneself. Having a few friends over and guzzling a case of beer while playing Mario Kart together, or visiting a Barcade and setting down one’s gin and tonic to take the 2P controls beside another buzzed and out-of-practice Mortal Kombat II player, are very different things from marathoning online ranked matches in Street Fighter 6 or chugging through a demanding single-player game like Elden Ring at home alone—which is how Americans most often play their games.
It’s a simple hypothesis, but I don’t think it’s an unsound one: the more time Americans spend playing video games by themselves, the less they’ll be inclined to drink—because other drugs (THC for low-maintenance chillout games like powerwashing simulators, and stimulants for more intense/competitive ones) do more to elevate the experience than alcohol.
5.
As we’ve discussed before (and not that it was ever an original observation on my part), the hegemonic social media platforms whose the rise marked the passage from the decentralized “Wild West” internet into Web 2.0 tapped into a once-in-a-generation well of genius by recruiting a gigantic army of unpaid laborers to manufacture content for their sites, day after day, hour after hour. And their collective userbase was glad to do it: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc. gave people an opportunity to punch out messages to the world and share their creative projects, and given the platforms’ size, they could reasonably expect to reach some smaller or larger appreciative audience. Before the pathway to a career as an influencer became a defined track following step-by-step benchmarks, a lot of the early stars of social media got famous by accident. At first, they only wanted to reach people—to socialize, albeit in a rather unidirectional and prophylactic sort of way.
But even for the social media user who isn’t striving to become rich and famous through their output, content creation is effectively a mode of (or rather a substitute for) human interaction. The effortposter on Reddit, the prolific user of Tumblr, Twitter, or TikTok, and the reader of the Washington Post or New York Times who leaves two- to four-paragraph comments on their favorite columnists’ articles every week tend to think about what they’re doing in terms of participating in a conversation. So does the artistic hobbyist who regularly posts illustrations or comics on their platform(s) of choice, the fan of a hot TV series who sees every new episode as fresh material for memes, the imageboard user who edits and posts pics mocking some drama queen of an influencer whom they love to hate, and the Instagram user who glams up their selfies in Photoshop even before subjecting them to the in-platform filters.
Even if none of these activities are guaranteed (or even likely) to lead to sponsorships and revenue-sharing deals, they can and do make people popular. Substantive and thoughtful comments and posts get upvoted and replied to. Funny homemade memes, good illustrations, sexy photos, and competent digital animations get Liked & Shared. Small message boards and fandoms celebrate the competent and productive illustrators, fanfic authors, animators, and authoritative effortposters in their midst. Perhaps you yourself are one of fewer than a hundred people following some thoughtful person on Twitter or Substack who isn’t aiming to become a power user, but whose updates are nevertheless always welcome whenever you spot them.
On the internet, we exist as broadcasters of ourselves and viewers of our peers. Socialization consists of the production and consumption of content. And let’s underscore production here: all of the people described above are putting in work.
By contrast, consider what’s happening when you’re describing your weekend or articulating your thoughts on some political matter to a friend at a coffee shop or bar. As you speak, you’re responding to overt and subtle cues from an listener, whose attentive presence is an encouragement and an impetus to continue. Their instantaneous feedback keeps you going and provides prompts; the very act of speaking to a confidant or a small group of friends tends to reveal to us what we want to say while we’re in the middle of saying it. We’re apt to enter unawares into a flow state.
What we’re describing here isn’t some sort of analog, primitive mode of content creation—it’s socializing, it’s people mutually, directly, and continuously reinforcing each other.
A blank text field provides none of this: until you hit Send, you’ve got to provide your own stimulation as your own audience. (This is what melodramatic scribblers call “the terror of the blank page,” or something like that.) Typing out a text update on Facebook or Twitter, a post on a message board, or a reply to a thread, you’re left in suspense as to how it will be received—not unlike turning in a quiz or a short essay to an instructor and waiting to see how they grade it.
Illustrators, photographers, animators, videographers, etc. probably have an easier time of things, since it’s easier to self-stimulate with an inchoate visual object than a string of characters that must be parsed line by line to have an effect—but their work requires extended periods of effort and concentration, too and their final assessment of it may depend on how many intangible approval tokens are tossed at it by invisible peers across a period of hours or days. And in the long term, the overarching project of profile curation—the increasingly de riguer work that goes into controlling the composite image of the self seen by a discarnate audience of classmates, colleagues, friends, acquaintances, dates, and strangers—demands attention to detail, self-exertion, and a not insignificant amount of time.
The uploading of social and cultural life to networked digital platforms has brought about a perverse merger of labor and leisure wherein building and sustaining relationships, attaining a sense of belonging to a group, feeling recognized and appreciated, etc., are accomplished through what is essentially unpaid cubicle work in a new setting.4 We sit alone, gazing at a screen, clicking and composing and deliberating, trying to maintain a reasonably high level of productivity and standard of quality in our output—not for the sake of holding down a salary position or exhibiting our deservingness of a raise, but merely to understand ourselves as existing in an efficacious and meaningful sense.
And as anyone who’s been to college in the last twenty-five years will tell you, a lifestyle in which one routinely spends hours parked in front of a computer and grinding through assignments and projects is hard to maintain without chemical aids to give one a little extra stamina and pep. Caffeine. Nicotine. Amphetamines.
In the technofeudal society of the n-way spectacle, Adderall supplants the cocktail as a social drug. Or, rather: it becomes a pseudo-social drug for a pseudo-social society.
6.
My wife and I have been to events headlined by Chase & Status twice in the last six months, and both times I was astonished by the size of the venues and the crowds. It’s kind of hard not to feel cheated, really. The East Coast drum n’ bass scene was already evaporating when I started going to parties in the mid-aughts, and I was tremendously bummed out when dubstep smothered it by the end of the decade. Lately it’s been coming back in a huge way, but I’m fucking old now. At the second event we went to, we didn’t even see Chase & Status because by 1:00 AM, we were too tired and sore to go on—and their set hadn’t even started yet. Life just ain’t fair.
At any rate, there were easily a couple thousand or more people in attendance at each of the events we went to, and a fairly large proportion had obviously been born between 1997 and 2002.
We won’t be doing any dilatory quibbling about generational stereotypes and exceptions to the rule here—but I wasn’t at all surprised to see so many youngsters around. My inexpert sense of Generation Withdrawn is that when it wants to go out, it prefers to go out big. They’ll arrive in droves for a giant festival or rave, especially when it involves an idolized musician or a particular genre of electronic dance music—convening as members of a tribe or cult to revel in the “mystical experience of being in very large gatherings,” which McLuhan (incorrectly) called “Darshon” and attributed to Hinduism.
The long lines of young people at the bar came as no shock, either. My provisional guess about the generations most profoundly nativized to Web 2.0 is that they might not be inclined to drink as casually as older cohorts, but will do so festively during Saturnalian events like these, where a drug like alcohol comes into its classical Dionysian application as an expedient in the pathway to spiritual ecstasy.
My second guess is that the Zoomers who stopped by the bar for more than one drink were probably doing so because they couldn’t get their hands on any MDMA—which, notwithstanding the health hazards, is once again the superior tool for the situation, and the savvy kids know it. If the venue had been at liberty to sell molly at the door for $25 a pill, the bartenders would have spent most of the night handing out water bottles and making Shirley Temples.
Not only has the thoroughgoing transformation of our way of life rerouted our habits away from situations where alcohol is best and most appropriately used, but other technological advances have obsolesced it were it might have otherwise remained indispensable.
From a 2021 article in the Atlantic:
The early Greeks watered down their wine; swilling it full-strength was, they believed, barbaric—a recipe for chaos and violence. “They would have been absolutely horrified by the potential for chaos contained in a bottle of brandy,” Slingerland writes. Human beings, he notes, “are apes built to drink, but not 100-proof vodka. We are also not well equipped to control our drinking without social help.”
Distilled alcohol is recent—it became widespread in China in the 13th century and in Europe from the 16th to 18th centuries—and a different beast from what came before it. Fallen grapes that have fermented on the ground are about 3 percent alcohol by volume. Beer and wine run about 5 and 11 percent, respectively. At these levels, unless people are strenuously trying, they rarely manage to drink enough to pass out, let alone die. Modern liquor, however, is 40 to 50 percent alcohol by volume, making it easy to blow right past a pleasant social buzz and into all sorts of tragic outcomes.
“Without social help” is the key phrase here. Do we suppose a group can effectively regulate itself when its entire way of life is in a irreversible and catastrophic spiral of collapse?
We must once again underscore that in the “primitive” tribal society with which Western life is so often contrasted, being surrounded by complete strangers would have been a rare event indeed, and probably an occasion for a fight-or-flight response rather than mere social discomfort.
For further reading about the Temperance Movement: a 2016 article from the Guardian about how Prohibition wasn’t as simple or even as spectacularly unpopular as popular histories suggest. The TLDR of it is that temperance advocates were more opposed to saloons and high-proof spirits than to alcoholic drinks per se.
Always keep it in the back of your mind that your posts, comments, and uploads are why Meta is worth $1.2 trillion (as of this writing).
This is just my experience, but I've noticed people have cut it down in the Arab world and the UK, too. It's a phenomenon I ascribe partly to people becoming over-numbed and deciding prioritising...well, actual living. I also suspect that social media is slowly going the same way.
Great essay, as always. Wish I had more to contribute than stray and disconnected thoughts.
I believe I have the answer to this. It has mostly to do with the nature of work. For simplicity let's look at work as defined by what males have contributed to society throughout history (calm down everyone; like I said, it's for simplicity).
For the majority of human history male work has been physical labour. There were a very small percentage of men who acted as the brains of the operation with the remainder acting as the limbs. Take for example building a bridge. One head engineer, some skilled foreman, and a boat load of labourers who may or may not have been slaves depending on time and place. Most of the work was just: 1) show up, 2) lift/move/hit/place objects as directed, 3) go home. Complex understanding wasn’t really part of the process.
Small personal anecdote. At 17 I got my first summer job as a labourer in a stone quarry. My job was to take a hammer and chisel, split apart giant limestone obelisks, and pile the resultant slabs. It was the most physically demand thing I have ever done in my life and the first 2 weeks I would cry every morning from the pain of the previous day. By the end of the summer though I was able to stay up drinking until 1 am any night of the week, wake up at 5 am, be at work for 6:30, and work all day as if I was just hanging out working on my tan and being paid to essentially work out all day. Wow, rereading that I feel as if I was living some primitive untelevised version of Jersey Shore or something..
Fast forward past university and into real working life. In my 30s as an electrical/mechanical technician I found I drank much, much less simply due to how it would affect my ability to do my work. You cannot effectively trouble shoot complex electro-mechanical systems running on ¼ faculties.
Now, at 42, as I’m studying electrical engineering, I find there’s simply no time to spend on the drunk/hung over/recover cycle. It’s essentially impossible to learn and implement triple integral calculus applied to a 3 dimensional flux density equation while alcohol is having any effect on you. If I drink now, it’s in extreme moderation only as a small treat in between semesters.
As society progress technologically our work is less and less physical and more and more intellectually complex. Alcohol just doesn’t have much of a place in that kind of world. Other drugs do (as you’ve pointed out), but the days of daily depressant indulgence are on their way out.