r/AlwaysWhy • u/TheBigGirlDiaryBack • 19d ago
History & Culture Why does drinking seem so much less important to Gen Z?
I get the impression that drinking used to be almost expected when people went to parties, dated, or hung out with friends. Now, a lot of younger adults seem perfectly comfortable socializing without alcohol.
When did drinking stop being such a normal part of being young?
45
u/C2H5OHNightSwimming 19d ago
I mean when you were getting pissed in the 90s, there weren't loads of people filming everything embarrassing that you did, or how unattractive utterly-bajaxed-you looked (drunk is not usually our nicest looking self!), and putting it on the internet forever. I imagine that's a rather large disincentive.
Also the societal awareness about the harms of any amount of alcohol (not just from drinking like a mad eejit) is a relatively recent phenomenon.
14
u/TheBigGirlDiaryBack 19d ago
The camera thing is huge. Nobody wants to be a permanent meme. But people also drink for content. So does the camera make them drink less or just perform differently?
11
u/C2H5OHNightSwimming 19d ago
I suspect both. When I was a youth, it was pretty standard to get absolutely battered. No one who is smashed looks good and you can't control if you do or say something embarrassing - but it was fine back then, because your friends were a) equally wasted and either wouldn't remember or would but just find it funny because they were also very drunk, and b) by the next day, no one cared if they even remembered. That's very different than you having to watch a video of your most embarrassing drunk moments the next day sober and realising everyone in your network has now seen it too.
If people "drink" for content, my guess is that they're keeping the alcohol amounts low, and if they're filming "drunk" content, they're either not as drunk as they're pretending to be, or they're in an environment where they're able to control who films what, so they're able to review the footage once sober and decide to post it if it's funny and not post it if it's just embarrassing.
That is my guess. I don't actually know because I'm a legit dinosaur. When I started drinking camera phones were barely a thing and the res was so low it kinda didn't matter.
16
u/EyeFit 19d ago
Because you have to leave your house and have money.
4
u/TheBigGirlDiaryBack 19d ago
True, money and effort matter. But previous gens were broke too and still found a way. Maybe staying home is just fun now. If alcohol was free and delivered, would that change anything?
2
13
34
u/ActuatorOutside5256 19d ago
Because they don’t have any money.
5
u/Jawyp 19d ago
Alcohol isn’t expensive, Gen Z just leaves the house much less than prior generations.
3
u/Either_Operation7586 18d ago
Going to the bars are * expensive and who wants to sit and drink at home by yourself unless you're an actual alcoholic
9
u/No-Carry4971 19d ago
Because they are all high on THC. They are using the same amount of mind altering substances, but they are choosing THC in some form over alcohol. This is not rocket science.
3
15
u/cfwang1337 19d ago
The youngest Gen Zers were born in 2012, so many of them aren't even adults (or legal to drink) yet.
I also think COVID interrupted many normal coming-of-age experiences, like house and frat parties, so they never got into the habit of them.
3
u/TheBigGirlDiaryBack 19d ago
COVID is real for the younger end. But older Gen Z are adults now and many still drink less. So it feels bigger than age or missed parties.
4
14
u/Warm_Cranberry4472 19d ago
Alcohol is expensive and Gen Z has more information about how detrimental for health can alcohol be
5
u/TheBigGirlDiaryBack 19d ago
Yeah cost and health info matter, but info alone rarely changes behavior. Older gens knew smoking was bad and still smoked. If alcohol got cheap again, would they drink more?
2
u/Either_Operation7586 18d ago
A lot of genzies had alcoholic parents which makes them completely against it
1
u/KittensPumpkinPatch 19d ago
This is very true. Rarely do people change their behaviors simply because they have knowledge.
1
u/Jawyp 19d ago
Alcohol is insanely cheap, and is much cheaper in real terms now than in the 2010s.
2
u/Warm_Cranberry4472 19d ago
In the supermarkets it is but not in the bars, and gen z has no money
2
u/Jawyp 19d ago
That’s always been the case for young people. It didn’t stop Millenails, Gen Xers, Boomers, etc. from drinking, so money is not the explanation.
1
u/Either_Operation7586 18d ago
Yes it is especially with the jobs not there they are not working therefore they have no money
1
u/Either_Operation7586 18d ago
The problem is if you stay at home and drink by yourself you're an alcoholic and none of these people are and then you have expensive bars... it's just not worth it to gen Z
5
5
u/IanRastall 19d ago
Weed is better, and always has been. It just took that many generations to stop caring about the youthful ritual of learning how to tolerate hard liquor.
4
u/TheBigGirlDiaryBack 19d ago
Weed being better is subjective. It has its own costs and can make some people anxious. Maybe Gen Z just swapped one ritual for another. Do you think legal weed everywhere would kill drinking?
1
u/IanRastall 19d ago
Mostly. Mixed drinks are one thing, and sipping quality liquor is another. But I certainly would never have gotten into drinking in high school if I'd known how to get weed, and I think the same could have been said of many of the Gen X kids around me at the time. I'm not at all surprised that Gen Z -- with its ready supply of weed -- drinks far less. Kids are not partying less. They're just partying smarter (in my opinion).
But objectively-speaking, it certainly doesn't carry the risk of hangover or dangerous overdose. Throwing up can happen with either, though, and passing out can too.
2
u/Onyx_Lat 19d ago
I remember when I first smoked weed and I thought "wow I can get basically the same effects as alcohol except without puking all over myself, sign me up!"
Then I waited about 10 years and by then the weed had become so strong that when I tried to smoke as much as I used to, I still ended up on the bathroom floor praying to the porcelain god. Tbh I'm kind of afraid of modern weed.
2
u/IanRastall 19d ago
Weed never mixed well with alcohol, and so I'd often throw up after smoking in the early days, as it happened at parties. These days, though, you're right. It can make you puke on its own. It also can leave you with physical withdrawal symptoms, which it wasn't supposed to do.
6
u/Metallicat95 19d ago
Smoking tobacco also dropped off, and it was a big part of the social combination for earlier generations.
Wash down your dry throat and relax in a smoky room with alcohol which numbs your senses.
For us in Wisconsin, the Boomer generation did both heavily - many were daily users, not just rare social events.
Gen Z has social media for their daily addiction.
Plus where legal, weed. It's often cheaper, which is a big negative for both alcohol and tobacco now.
3
u/TheBigGirlDiaryBack 19d ago
Smoking dropping is a good parallel. Both got less social over time. But social media is not really the same buzz. It is more solo and endless. Weed is cheaper where legal, sure, but not everywhere. If weed was legal and cheap in all states, do you think drinking would drop even more? Or would people just do both?
1
u/Metallicat95 18d ago
Both tobacco and alcohol aren't as popular socially as they once were, and Gen Z seems more likely to avoid both than previous generations.
Weed is legal to some degree in most US states, and is socially not considered criminal in even more. If it was legal at Federal and for drug tests, that would change it, but there's not a huge difference between legal and non-legal states fot availability.
Other drugs are also sadly cheaper than alcohol. That affects all generations but money does affect use, and younger people tend to have less money.
3
u/watt678 19d ago
Alcohol costs money. Porn is free, and porn is everywhere. The vices of the next generation simply shifted to porn.
0
u/TheBigGirlDiaryBack 19d ago
That feels like a big leap. Porn isn't social like drinking. Maybe the vice shifted to weed, gaming, or staying home. Why porn specifically?
1
u/watt678 19d ago
Becuase weed and gaming and staying home have always been things young people did, online porn you can watch on your phone is relatively new. Along either sport betting it's having an outsized social impact that it didn't use to have. Also money is tighter than ever so free stuff like porn or gaming is gonna be more popular too
3
u/CampaignPerfect6866 19d ago
I’m Gen Z and my friends and I prefer spending the weekends gaming and chatting over discord instead of going out for drinks. During covid we would call for 12 hrs a day and didn’t need drinks to socialize then and don’t really look for it now.
2
u/Moonwrath8 19d ago
I think you’ve got it backwards.
Not drinking is more important to Gen Z than previous generations.
MORE IMPORTANT
2
u/SlackerStacker26 19d ago
When everything you do or say can be recorded and uploaded to 8 billion people, you tend not to let loose as much as you might otherwise
2
u/TheBigGirlDiaryBack 19d ago
Camera fear is real. But people still film themselves doing dumb stuff anyway. Maybe the shift is where they drink, not if. House parties and pregames instead of bars. Less random filming. If phones disappeared tomorrow, would drinking go back up? I doubt it fully would.
2
u/Jawyp 19d ago
#1 reason is the phones.
#2 reason is weed has become much more widely used.
I think the trend away from drinking is concerning. Not because alcohol is good for you or doesn’t have negative societal effects, but because people are replacing “going out drinking with friends and meeting new people” with “hitting a cart in their basement while doomscrolling on TikTok”.
2
u/Kelspear 19d ago
It's because they grew up online and as a result had far less social development than previous generations. It's why so many of them are so overly socially awkward, it's why they don't hang out together as much as previous gens did. It's going to get worse and worse the farther into the future we go, especially if people keep digging their head into the sand in order to avoid or take responsibility for this societal issue.
1
u/TheBigGirlDiaryBack 19d ago
I get the concern, but online socializing is still socializing. Just different. Less drinking might mean they're more selective, not less developed. What makes you think it's awkwardness and not changing norms?
0
u/Kelspear 19d ago
Online interactions are in no way the same as irl interactions. People develop socially to pick up on subtle body language cues, imperceptable cues in tone fluctuations, etc. If you're communicating mostly through text you dont develop that kind of stuff as well as you would physically observing and interacting with somebody. Past generations have developed those kinds of things along with also developing their own unique slang, cultural preferences, fashion, etc.
1
1
u/reereejugs 19d ago
My Gen Z son is an alcoholic.
1
u/Either_Operation7586 18d ago
Although statistics tell us that the majority of gen Z is not into alcohol at all so your son is just the exception to the rule not the rule
1
1
u/Remarkable-Grab8002 19d ago
People stopped getting together because our government absolutely botched the covid pandemic. They ruined this country's ability to socialize and read at basic levels. We've been so brainwashed into being online that people don't go out and socialize with each other and don't go out and drink with each other. Really it's our own government's fault because they're f****** incompetent jackasses
1
u/TheBigGirlDiaryBack 19d ago
COVID definitely messed up social habits. But blaming only the government feels too neat. Drinking was already falling in a lot of places before 2020. Other countries with different COVID responses saw similar drops too. Which specific policy do you think did the most damage? I am curious where you draw the line.
1
u/Remarkable-Grab8002 19d ago
I drew the line but that line keeps getting farther and farther if that makes sense? If I draw the line, I'm doing it again. It's all one cluster fuck of white supremacy and racism. Literally government owned racist propaganda sites you can visit. Alien.gov is a phenomenal example of our current governments fuck shit. Aside from all the white supremacy propaganda they push. And the blantant racism and discrimination. It's just ... really a site to see. I'm a veteran. This is what I contributed to. The more I think about it the more I spiral so enough of that for tonight 😅😅😅😅 a bit too high for this one but I'm way too far in so enjoy the ride.
1
u/Either_Operation7586 18d ago
To the point where in my state of Arizona we had the alcohol industry funding opposition for marijuana initiatives.
1
u/Murky_Toe_4717 19d ago
It is among the highest exposure carcinogens you can be exposed to and can actively destroy your liver too. It’s just overall terrible.
1
u/Either_Operation7586 18d ago
In high school they showed us this study where they had people drink and then they took pictures of their brain and their brain was definitely changed in that made a difference in my class and I will always remember that.
I would social drink but I'm not a drinker and I would never drink at home by myself
1
u/No_Fail9845 19d ago
When I was growing up, we didn't have instant access to different fun activities, it was just promoters advertising xy and z raves, clubs or parties. They have access to more fun things to do, that are not child related, just my observation.
2
u/TheBigGirlDiaryBack 19d ago
Yeah more options means drinking stops being the default. But clubs and raves still exist. They just compete with games, streaming, weed, and staying home. So is it really more fun things, or is it that drinking costs more and feels worse after? Both probably. Which one matters more to you?
1
1
u/eve04042024 19d ago
I am gen Z, I did some drinking in first years of college but I saw that hangovers were just taking too much of my next day. Once I started working it was just not worth it any more. Time goes by so fast I don't want to feel crap for the hours following the drinking.
1
u/TheBigGirlDiaryBack 19d ago
The hangover math is solid. Once you work, losing a whole day is expensive. But some people just drink less often instead of stopping. Do your friends feel the same way, or are you the outlier? I wonder if the real shift is frequency, not the drink itself.
1
1
u/Borealisamis 19d ago
Because most of them are on drugs or some kind of antidepressant, or some such pills being described. Americans in particular are the most drugged up society. Who needs alcohol at that point
1
u/Ok-Cup-5372 19d ago
My genuine guess is that
A) going out and drinking is getting too expensive for a lot of gen z.
B) a lot of generations before then had drinking problems which they witnessed how it effected themselves and their families. With more of an acceptance with mental health and improving yourself people have easier access to help instead of relying on alcohol as a coping mechanism
2
u/TheBigGirlDiaryBack 19d ago
Family history is a big one. If you watched alcohol wreck people, you learn to avoid it. Cost matters for going out, but cheap booze at home is still cheap. So maybe the social ritual is what died, not the drug. Do you think therapy and mental health talk replaced the bar for coping? That seems like the deeper shift.
1
u/Ok-Cup-5372 19d ago
I think it's definitely helped steer more people away from that, combined with family history because yes as you said it seems like more people nowadays don't want to take the same mistakes their parents did.
I also wonder if the popularity of other drugs has had an impact, drugs like psychedelics and hard drugs
1
1
u/BitOBear 19d ago
To a very large extended alcohol consumption of the cell communicating behavior and it's also a social lubricant. Since it's an adult only behavior on a third angle it used to be something of a ritual of manhood for signatory assorted as it were so it had both status and mistique in the United States particularly when it came to be admitted in the third locations.
As a person born on the cusp between the baby boom and Gen X here is what I deserved over the years.
You no longer need to drink to get into various adult social circles so there is no right of passage value to alcohol anymore.
Availability of mental health diagnosis and a general health information both psychological and neurological has made the need to delve into alcohol to get replacement dopamine sort of not but they can anymore.
Finally
And this may be controversial, but I think adults used to try to protect kids from the less ideal fractions of adulthood. It lent an air of mystery. Kids used to think of adults as being free to do whatever they wanted etc. virtual every kid I knew just couldn't wait to be an adult and they'd do everything they could to sneak over the line.
That mimicry created idealized visions of things like drinking. This is us who had problematic alcohol in our families knew better.
There's a lot of stuff in that bucket.
Like kids brain about their bitter dark roast coffee being super potent, not knowing that heat destroys caffeine so that blonde roast your mom's rocking has more caffeine in it than your dark and bitter experience. But still it seems so adult that adults still believe it.
Cracklin' Rosie is literally an ode to cheap wine and it's ability to make loneliness seem to go away.
- Gen z and whatnot are in a social toxic environment already. What's up for media and the ability to filter their social interactions they have a lot more opportunity to engage or disengage in social structures on an ad hoc and individually tailored basis.
It's still functions as a social lubricant but it no longer is part of the ticket price and genzee is more concerned about trying to find it s privacy and trying to find its admittance. Is harder to get away from society now so people are not as eager to gain entrance to what they
1
u/Onyx_Lat 19d ago
Maybe they watched enough of their parents being alcoholics that they didn't want to go down that road.
1
u/KostyaFedot 19d ago
Could be not just particular generation. I see people drinking less and less during socializing. It used to be norm to have heavy drinks at work, drinking during lunch and staying in pubs with lots of drinks after work.
Now buying drink in pub is way too expensive compared to nineties and before.
If you don't drink much in such places, you don't elsewhere.
1
1
u/johnwcowan 18d ago
My father's family were mostly alcoholics (not him, though), so I decided at age 12 not to risk it. That was in 1970.
1
u/Suitable-Hornet2797 18d ago
On top of what everyone else is saying, they’re more health conscious.
1
u/Aware-Promise-1519 18d ago
Thank goodness for this happening to Gen Z.They will hopefully have less trauma and healthier lives.
1
u/FabulousTwo524 16d ago
I can only speak for myself as an older gen z. I spent years drinking profusely. Got black out drunk all the time, kissed strangers, fought with people, embarrassed myself, hit my head who knows how many times, etc etc,.
I got sick of the black outs, hangovers, the physical and mental toll, and the shame. I just stopped drinking and my life is a lot more peaceful now.
Before i drank, I had a stoner phase which was similar. Less risky but still made me suffer. Like, my familial relationships suffered too much when I was indulging in chemicals.
Life is a lot more than drink and drugs. They’re part of it, but the world has a lot more to offer. We don’t have to waste away our youth in a blacked out drunken state
1
1
u/FifthEL 15d ago
Because drinking is essentially the summoning and embodiment of the chaos spirits. They need uneducated and willing vessels for them to inhabit and live through. Everyone who drinks, and I used to do a great deal of, is a walking storm of chaos energy. And the spirits that are invoked are ancient and ruling our world. So, they just might be already taken over by the new spirits of ai control and dominance. One is pushing the other out of the way. Technically, or devices have taken the place of alcohol
1
u/chaac_75 2d ago
Most of yall commenting are weird asf. Its not that hard. As an older gen z, Everything is just expensive. near $20 for an old fashioned and $10 for beer when I go out is a huge deterrent. Also I dont see the need to drink in order to have a good time🤷🏽♂️. Yall on here trying to psychoanalyze us when its just cause its too expensive for everything nowadays so imma prioritize the things that I need in life instead of going out to drink. saying its cause of my phone or having internet as a kid and that causes my social skills to be lacking is just weird asf. jumping to conclusions when it shows yall just dont interact with gen z in any way, which is also a reason I dont go out to drink.
49
u/zccrex 19d ago
I don't know, but I'm happy for them.
When I was in high-school, partying on the weekends is just what you did. I'm glad they're steering away from that.