Why is everyone ‘sober-ish’ all of a sudden?
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Have you noticed that your friends are a little less fun? That everyone leaves a dinner party earlier? That their stories are less wild or funny or revealing? This may be because so many people have decided to cut down on their drinking after a spate of ominous articles on how alcohol, even in moderate amounts, increases your risk for cancer and other serious health problems. After years of pushing the benign myth that a glass of wine a day is good for the heart, it seems the medical establishment has abandoned hedonists and pleasure seekers.
Is there a safe amount of alcohol? It turns out no. For this and other more amorphous reasons, I have noticed increasing numbers of people around me are sober-ish. They drink only socially or only two glasses of wine a week or only in restaurants.
They are not willing to give up drinking entirely, which feels like too vast and depressing a surrender of life’s pleasures. So they make rules for themselves. Someone I know has a new ritual of drinking a nonalcoholic beer with nuts on her terrace.
Another friend told me that she used to drop by for drinks at friends’ houses in the evenings, and now it is just as often tea. One obvious problem with this new responsible, upstanding mode of socializing is that it shortens parties. When people are drinking, time blurs and the evening spools out pleasantly.
No one thinks about a meeting the next day or getting the kids off to school. But when they are having maybe one glass of wine, the evening ends promptly. There is no lingering, no new bottle opened, no children awoken by noisy guests, no wine bottles left on the table by tipsy hosts.
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