What’s often lost in the conversation about sobriety
Let me start this by making a point that by now should be fairly obvious: Alcohol consumption in any amount is not good for you, and it’s past time we dispense with the outmoded, misleading notion that moderate drinking can have health benefits.
This is often just a rationalization for people who choose to imbibe. It’s likely more accurate to say that drinking moderately isn’t necessarily harmful to one’s health — but it’s certainly not good, either. And for those who routinely drink anything more than very small amounts at a given time, the health hazards are numerous, because alcohol is a toxin.
There’s more collective awareness of this reality now than at any time in the past; thus, strictly from the vantage point of physical health, the hype surrounding Dry January—and sobriety more generally—makes a lot of sense.
What I find intriguing, though, is how much this trend is seemingly committed to maintaining for its followers an approximation of the experience of drinking booze even for those who profess a desire to part ways with it.
At the beginning of the year, the Washington Post ran a piece on the best nonalcoholic gins, rums, whiskeys, tequilas, and bitters, because apparently that’s a thing now. Around the same time, it also featured a profile on a woman who opened a nonalcoholic bar in D.C. after getting a DUI. And in early February, the New York Times reported on the trend of younger Americans quitting alcohol—only to switch over to marijuana and psychedelics.
I’ve personally never resonated with the concept of nonalcoholic alcohol. Does whiskey or tequila really taste so good by itself that it’s worth drinking without the accompanying buzz? If you want to stay sober, why not just have coffee, tea, juice…or water? Can the espresso martini at that nonalcoholic bar really be all that appealing without the booze and its physiological effects?
And if you quit alcohol only to pick up on some other mood-altering substance, have you really changed anything?
These phenomena seem to get to the heart of a really important question that’s too often overlooked or given short shrift in the conversation about sobriety: Why do people want to drink and/or intoxicate themselves in the first place?
A couple months ago, Elmo from Sesame Street posted a simple question on social media that quickly—and tellingly—became viral: “How is everybody doing?”
According to the Post: “While there was plenty of banter among the responses, the overall tone also reflected a sense of hopelessness that appears to be common.”
Need more be said?
Life is really hard. In this post-pandemic era of remote working and living, lots of people feel stressed and lonely, and the world is full of sources of constant anxiety and depression, whether we’re talking war, catastrophic climate change, the breakdown of social institutions, antipathy and sociopathy in our politics, or the basic lack of human intimacy and connection.
Alcohol, of course, is an easy antidote to these kinds of harsh existential realities. It’s a ready form of escapism; just crack open that bottle and start sipping, and whatever is making you feel sad, angry, alone, anxious, bored, or overwhelmed suddenly isn’t such a big deal. As the booze kicks in, dopamine activity in your brain surrounds you with feelings of contentment, pleasure, and well-being that were utterly absent just moments ago, before you poured yourself that nightcap.
Directly related to that: It’s very easy to associate alcohol with feelings of warmth and togetherness. If you drink socially, as I do, you undoubtedly share the experience that it’s a catalyst for great conversation and fond memories in pleasant settings with people whose company you enjoy. There’s a reason the term “happy hour” has become culturally and socially iconic across generations, and it’s not because of friends who get together on Friday afternoons and sip on iced teas, save perhaps those of the Long Island variety.
There’s even a theological aspect to this, I think. When I was studying counseling psychology in Seattle, I had a professor who would regularly talk about the human tendency to “seek to restore Eden”—that is, try in vain to return our existence to the state of harmony and shalom that we implicitly know is missing amid a reality of innate alienation, pain, and brokenness.
Again, alcohol (or marijuana, or psychedelics, or whatever) is a quick way to do this. Partake of it, and everything can seem right with the world. Depending on your drug of choice and how your mind and body reacts to it, you may very well feel like you’re back in the Garden of Eden for a moment.
Sadly, that moment never lasts. Because Eden is not here, not now, not yet.
Viewed through these lens, it becomes clear that our society’s culture of alcohol consumption is not at all solely a question of physical health; it’s also very much one of mental, emotional, and even spiritual well-being. And for so many people, drinking helps fill a void—or offers a much-needed relief.
Perhaps it’s no wonder, then, that there remains a desire among many to mimic the experience even while seeking sobriety—whether that be through a mocktail that still at least tastes a bit like your favorite spirit, or another mood-altering substance that maybe doesn’t have quite the same aftereffects as booze.
Unfortunately, I think this is too often left out of the conversation about sobriety and the sober-curious movement—and there’s no better example of this than the craze over Dry January, which risks becoming every bit as perfunctory and cliché as the perennial New Year’s Resolution.
You take a month’s hiatus from drinking—but to what end? To resume your regularly scheduled imbibing as of February 1? And did you honestly use that time to examine why you’re drawn to strong drink in the first place? Really, why did you partake so much during the holidays, or, for that matter, any other time of the year?
It’s April; if you participated in Dry January this year, did it make a meaningful difference for your drinking habits now? If not, why not?
If we don’t ask questions like these as part of the examination of our relationship with alcohol, we’re missing something big. And any movement toward sobriety, or even sober-curiousness, is likely to have limited impact.
