Anecdotally it seems like alcohol is being replaced with weed or other things. But it doesn't bode well for the future of mental health if social drinking is being replaced with solo drug use or just solo everything.
> being replaced with solo drug use or just solo everything.
Solo everything is definitely happening. People are getting priced out, and the third place (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place) has pretty much disappeared everywhere.
Gen Z is considered the loneliest generation, and its easy to see why. COVID messed things up too, and there's a lot of kids and young adults that have not been properly socialized.
And since you have to spend, increasingly large amounts, of money just to go out with friends, people will just stay home instead. Maybe that looks like chatting on discord while playing a game together, but increasingly its looking like solo activities.
Alcohol is still cheaper than pretty much all the substances that are replacing it and you don’t need to go to a bar to have it. You can get 30 rack for about $20 and hang out in a park with your buddies to finish it.
> Alcohol is still cheaper than pretty much all the substances that are replacing it
A hit of acid costs $10 and lasts for 12 hours. A 5-10mg THC edible costs around $5, maybe a bit less, and lasts for 4-6 hours. A small dose of mushrooms (500mg-1g), about the same as the edible. Little to no hangover from all of the above unless you go really hard.
(Ketamine is an exception here, unless you keep your use infrequent the steep tolerance curve will cause your costs to blow up quickly.)
Meanwhile, a pint in a major US city costs like $10 with tax + tip and lasts for what, an hour? Wine or a decent cocktail cost even more.
Seems like other substances offer the better deal here if you're looking at pure cost per hour of active effects. If you consider health effects, they win out on that score too, assuming no underlying mental health diagnoses.
> Meanwhile, a pint in a major US city costs like $10 with tax + tip and lasts for what, an hour?
That’s a feature, not a bug. When I want a drink or two, I like to know that I’ll be pretty much sober in 1-2 hours and can drive or do whatever.
Setting aside 4-12 hours of time for recreational drug use is a commitment. You’re basically setting aside somewhere between a whole evening to a half day. If you time it wrong, you’re not even sober by morning.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a social drinker and think drinking has its place. But if cost is the main consideration other substances are likely to win out. Just like how a good AAA game is better value for money than a movie, but can never fully replace the moviegoing experience.
I'm not advocating for more alcohol consumption, coming from a Eastern European country I've seen my fair share of what alcoholism can do to people.
However, it feels like there are 2 trends, none of which is good from my perspective. First one is what you mention - replacing social activities with solo ones.
Second one is overprotecting kids, young adults and everybody in general. Kids in many modern countries are glued to phones and screens in part because their parents or schools don't let them to just go find something to do outside. Let them play on their own - yes it can be dangerous, but if they break an arm or a leg, so be it. They will be fine within a month.
The lack of IRL 'third places' for young people to meet locally will only exacerbate the issue -- and probably should bear most of the blame. The car-centric infrastructure of the suburbs (well, the vast majority of America) encourages isolation and asocial behavior. It really sucks that for some, their lives will never go beyond that invisible cage.
When I was young we lived just as spread out. We just biked/skateboarded to places. We stashed our surf boards at the closest house to the beach. We made third spaces happen.
Why has that stopped being an option? Is it because people's parents are too scared to let them do it when they are young (we were taking public busses to downtown Santa Cruz in junior high but we were latch key 80s/90s kids with zero oversite) and so they don't realize it's an option when they are older or?
You might be on to something. And if you consider that the generation that's 22 -- near peak "going out" age in the old days, was in COVID lockdown during that late high school period, which for me was a huge spike in how much time I spent away from my house. That was on top of the "constant supervision and scheduled activities" regime that took over right about the time the oldest GenZ-ers hit late elementary years, and the smartphones and tablets that hit as that cohort hit their teens.
Gen X really ruined their kids in the name of safety. I don't blame Gen Z one bit, they really never had a chance at a healthy social life.
I think it’s because at that time if you wanted to socialize you didn’t have an option. Kids these days have phones and tablets and finding another person to engage with online has substituted the going out part.
Why does it have to be beach culture? Where I live now we have:
Mountain hiking/biking trails started from the outskirts of town.
Parks within town.
A downtown with parks and a lake front park with swimming, volleyball, basketball, lakefront trails, small food concessions.
A city skate/bike park.
City tennis courts.
City basketball courts.
A walking/biking trail that runs from one edge of town to another, ending in a mountain biking/hiking trail system.
All of these things are way way under utilized compared to 10 years ago even though the youth population has grown. They used to be packed. Only thing busy is the library, I suspect because it has wifi/computers/gaming computers/air conditioning but it's still only like 20-30 people.
I rarely see anyone under 40 on the mountain hiking/biking trails. Ski mountain/biking has 20 somethings but most cars are from out of town. Parks are practically empty. Mainly moms and young children. I don't go to the waterfront park so no idea, but downtown I hardly see people heading down there/coming back where before it was a constant stream. Skate park is a few parents with young kids. Tennis courts are mainly 50+. Basketball courts are empty. Bike path is mainly 40+. Town seems deserted at this point, it's wild.
We have a used bike shop with basically 'donation' bikes that are $50 and have new tires, brakes, tuned up ready to go, so I don't think it's accessibility.
I guess most of these things are aged out things, where the group that did them is now 40+, but younger groups complaining about no third spaces there are a ton they just aren't used.
My town still has quite a few third places (the mall, bowling alleys, bars, etc.) and even some new ones like a trampoline place. Most of them are struggling because the young people don't go out. Go into a corner bar on a Saturday night, and you'll see more people in their 50s than 20s. The pool league that used to run 6 divisions a week is now down to 2.
So as far as I can tell, people (especially the young) stopped going out, and then third places started going away.
I just went a looked up my closest bowling alley. 4 people, 2 games mid day Saturday and it was $180 AUD.
It’s not surprising a large chunk of Gen Z are choosing to stay at home when it costs that much to go out. I'm starting to think we as a society need to start subsidising social spaces. Local council owned/run bouldering gyms, meetup spaces, etc. Charging a bellow market rate fee just to get people out of the house.
I don't get this (very common) perspective that the 'burbs encourage isolation and asocial behavior. My experience growing up (born in Iowa, grew up in Minnesota) is really the opposite. I lived in the city but had plenty of friends in the Suburbs (Minnetonka, Edina, Eden Prairie, etc etc) and whenever I'd go over there for a sleep over or something we could wander around the neighborhood like our own little platoon completely unbothered and safe. Running across everyone's lawns, climbing the neighbor's trees, as long as we were home by dinner time.
Maybe you mean for single adults? That's definitely more true, but if you are a single adult you're living in the suburbs for cost reasons, right? Zooming out to see how things would've worked for Gen Z, then yes I could agree that the suburbs were "isolating" during covid. But so were the cities, in fact way more so.
Anyway, loved the suburbs when I was a kid. They're still great today.
Comes down to the execution I would think. I've lived in well-planned suburbs like South Pasadena with tree-lined streets, easy to bike, restaurants nearby but there are many where you need a car to get anywhere, maybe weaker social cohesion, etc that can be alienating.
The suburbs used to have a lot of those kinds of places. Car-centric infrastructure is not the problem. People used to go to church, join bowling leagues, spend Sundays in the park, etc.
I blame the internet. There just isn't much demand for couples to leave the house anymore with the world's entertainment at their fingertips. When the rest of society stays home, it becomes more expensive for those young, single people to support public spaces.
That was never the suburbs I grew up in. You had to drive to go anywhere, and it was spectacularly lonely. I've spent my whole adult life avoiding such places.
Long ago, if you had to drive to go anywhere, your house must have been surrounded by oodles of other houses and hence friends existed to hang out with before some friend could drive. Once someone could drive, the friend crew was good to venture elsewhere.
The problem today is the nanny states don't allow a 16-year-old to transport other kids in their car until many hoops are cleared. We collectively decided that such social/transportation kneecapping was riskier than having our kids be lame during their sophomore/junior year of high school in the suburbs.
>car-centric encourages isolation
Not in the slightest, in fact, growing up and just driving around when younger was exactly the peak of socialization. Being in a 15-minute city as a young adult would be horrifying, being exposed to the rampant crime, violent assaults and homeless open air drug use. You got it backwards my man. The proof is in the pudding.
Yeah, I have a hard time thinking this is specifically a good thing. A better relationship with drinking is not something to argue against, of course. But I find the dysfunction in so many people that take a strong stance against it rather hard to ignore, as well.
Everything is being replaced with solo everything. I know so many young Millennials and Z'ers who quite literally never leave the house. They're content with Doordash and their phones for media.
This is what corporations want. Lonely people are constant eyeballs . But this can't be good for society as a whole.
Yeah my guess is that this stat won't survive a booming economy. Younger generations are social drinkers and they are skipping drinks when eating out and going out less in general since they're cash strapped.
So it's meaningless in this regard, but the stat might still be useful in showing just how fucked the economy truly is.
You can get the social upside with adaptogens which are increasingly showing up in canned drinks or drinking kava with friends. Alcohol doesn't have a monopoly on that.
We could, but we don't. Alcohol currently has a defacto monopoly on lubricated social spaces. Distant second is nicotine. Nothing else comes anywhere close.
When I replaced social drinking with solo drinking, I actually drank less (and at a slower pace). Without exception, every bad hangover I've had was from social drinking.
I find this dichotomy a bit strange. A lot of people consume alcohol alone and in many cases this ends up badly for them (no need to speculate about foreboding - the body (and the bodies) of evidence is readily available). Cannabis can be very common in and around social settings, depending on where you are in the world. Other drugs are also pretty much everywhere, including social spaces. They are just more invisible due to their illegality.
This line of thinking has been heavily questioned in recent years. People who never drink typically have a strong reason (recovering alcoholic) for which they have already suffered long term damage. Even people who “don’t drink” can be convinced to imbibe a bit on a special occasion (New Years, graduation, wedding, etc).
That assumes you'd be the same amount of social at those events without alcohol. If a beer or two takes the edge off and you're able to relax and relate and socialize and you're happy, vs you're nervous and uptight and are alone in a crowd, you don't get the same benefit. It's not called a social lubricant for nothing.
It's not any new research. Just a simple conclusion from the entirety of research in this field. All research shows that there's no safe dose of alcohol. That starting to drink never improved anyone's health. So if there's correlation between health and moderate use any causation that might be there can't go from alcohol to improved health. So it most likely goes the other way around. Or both things are a result of other factor. For example affluence. It is known that more affluent people drink more and at the same time more affluent people have better health. "moderately" is just roughly the level where damage from alcohol balances out the health surplus of whatever caused them to drink more.
Since opium dens fell out of favor, the only psychoactive substances that have dedicated social spaces are booze (bars, nightclubs) and nicotine (hookah lounges, cigar clubs). This could change, but it hasn't yet. It sure seems like society's just swinging antisocial.
And also, a decent chunk of alcohol consumption must be solo? I'd bet alcohol is broadly more social, but I would also wonder if that would change if more public gathering places served weed in some form.
