The sun is out, the football is on, beer gardens are packed and sunset-pink shots of condensation-frosted palomas (the new negroni) are plastered across Instagram, but I bet someone in your life has given up drinking. Maybe more than one person. I know lots (if you count parasocial “knowing”, and I don’t get out much, so I do). Sobriety is everywhere; I downed two long reads on the subject just last week. Reporting spans personal reckonings, generational nuances and shifting advice (Ireland has adopted tobacco-style warnings on alcohol). Sobriety is chic, too: it made a list of “new status symbols” in Grazia (though so did orange wine; they contain multitudes).
Never an early adopter, I am finally experiencing sober curiosity. I don’t have a problematic relationship with alcohol: we are more than Facebook friends, but hardly Liz Taylor and Richard Burton. In my formative drinking years, I took antidepressants that made my hangovers so frighteningly dark I was turned off drinking for a decade. I enjoy a dirty martini or a margarita now (both vehicles for the one substance I really have a problem with: salt), but remain relatively take it or leave it. I’ll have a drink if I go out (so, almost never) and my husband and I have one most Friday and Saturday nights, but I don’t miss it when it doesn’t happen.
I could easily give up. So should I? An article on the “deeply personal” process of deciding whether or not to drink in the New York Times quotes a major meta-analysis in 2023 that demonstrated a “statistically significant increase in risk for all-cause mortality” for women who drank just under two drinks a day or more, and for men who consumed more than three a day, which makes it sound like a no-brainer. But, as a researcher explained, expressed in terms of life shortening, it’s not dramatic: “Two drinks a week, that choice amounts to less than one week of lost life on average.” It is still better to quit, and the newly sober say their skin is brighter and they have more energy; as someone with the sparkling dynamism of one of those frogs that resembles a sullen avocado, I’m tempted, but ambivalent.
Why? I don’t have a problem with alcohol, but I have a huge one with comparing myself with others and, historically, with self-denial (an eating disorder in my 20s), and that can be a toxic cocktail: anything you can give up, I can give up better. I worry I’m considering sobriety mainly for fear of missing out.
I wonder, too, whether the social and ritual function of alcohol is sometimes more important – for me, just me – than the tiny incremental health benefit I would get from turning down a drink. Those Friday nights, when my husband gleefully opens his cider and I make myself a martini that is 50% olives, are a key moment of couple communion (recent research suggests partners with similar drinking habits might live longer). There are other people in my life with whom a shared drink occasionally feels significant, too. Like a pandemic pet, I don’t socialise well – I’m prickly, uptight, anxious – and while booze doesn’t make me fun and spontaneous (it is not a magic potion), I think accepting, taking part in, a shared experience sometimes makes a difference.
Alcohol and its rituals still have social and cultural power – just saying they shouldn’t won’t instantly change that. As research continues and policy changes, that may drain away – it happened (mainly) with cigarettes. But until then, my answer to the New York Times’ question, “Is that drink worth it to you?” is probably, yes, sometimes. Even from a worried well perspective, a healthy social life provides “powerful protective health effects”. Of course, you can have “healthy networks of social connection” without alcohol – hundreds of millions of people do – but it’s unhelpful to ignore how many are still lubricated by it.
This stuff really is deeply personal: whatever anyone decides is fine and none of our business (something I know many non-drinkers struggle to get drinkers to accept). I’m just conscious that the thorniest part of re-evaluating how we deal with alcohol as a society might be our individual relationships with it as social animals.
• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
