Peanut Buttering

Alcohol as Chesteron's Fence

I seem to encounter a lot of people my age who refrain from drinking alcohol. (See appendix for why the data do appear to validate this trend, or trust my gut feeling anecdata and read on.)

But I worry that alcohol consumption is a Chesterton's fence: something we ought not change without understanding the reason it exists in the first place.

Yes, alcohol is literally poison, and it's possible to have fun without drinking. The reasons for not drinking are both varied and reasonable. I myself drink very infrequently.

But someone needs to make the case in favor of alcohol too! Humans have gotten drunk for thousands of years, and our social structures have evolved alongside it. As with any ecosystem, removing something as pervasive and potentially load-bearing as alcohol can have unforeseen consequences.

The two benefits of alcohol I'm most afraid for society to lose are these:

  1. Going out for drinks is a great low-stakes social activity and third place. Where do you go to hang out with someone in the evening? It's dark, so the park won't work. The coffee shop is closed. Your studio apartment is too small to host. Okay, I'm circling around it, but grabbing drinks is the obvious answer. Like it or not (and hey, I honestly don't like it!), a bar is the mainstay destination for a casual evening hangout. If third places are dying, increased teetotalism is the nail in the coffin.
    • Aside: I suppose a similar argument could be made for cigarette smoking -- the death of the social smoke break will leave us socially impoverished! But... actually maybe?
  2. Alcohol helps people let their guard down, which unlocks relationships that would not have otherwise formed. Socializing can be scary! There are definitely socially anxious or otherwise reticent people who loosen up under the influence of alcohol, their drunken vulnerability becoming the fertile ground where seeds of deeper relationships can be planted. If they give up alcohol without solving their underlying social anxieties, now they're still socially anxious but have lost their one effective life hack for getting over the hump of acquaintanceship, and will probably be a bit more alone and isolated.

There's plenty of ways to solve the first one without alcohol. Coffee shops can stay open late, bars can serve mocktails, other types of third place can emerge. But if we just take drinking out of the equation in an environment where we don't yet have these solutions, we're going to lose out.

And as for the second, well, to me it feels like a harder pill to swallow. Sure, people can go to therapy, they can work through their anxiety, they can learn to be comfortable in their own skin. But this is all really hard to do! What if there's always going to be some portion of humanity that's shy and anxious, and the only reason they survive is the same way humans have done everything important: TOOLS. Tools like alcohol. In an alcohol-free future, those in this group may feel as unequipped and (socially) malnourished as a bison hunter without a spear.

Look, I don't know. Maybe we regain a collective IQ point from avoiding the neurotoxicity of alcohol and we net out in the positive. But I'm sincerely worried that in an era the U.S. surgeon general calls an "epidemic of loneliness and isolation", we might not want to throw out the ol' reliable social lubricant just yet.

Appendix: Alcohol usage is declining among U.S. young adults #

Per Gallup:

Why? Gallup explains that the biggest contributor is demographic shifts in that age group toward racial groups that have a lower rate of drinking. However, even adjusting for race, the rate of drinking has still dropped by about 10% over this period.

The rest may be due to deliberate reduction in alcohol intake over health concerns: the share of Americans age 18-34 who believe drinking in moderation is bad for your health increased from 34% in 2018 to 52% in 2023.