there are plenty of other beverages that aren't alcoholic/caffeinated than just plain water
I'm a big fan of providing other beverage types. Being able to sip a soda etc from the same kind of container as everyone else goes a long way towards blending in.
Failing to provide non-alcoholic drinks would be a faux pas even in Germany. It is indeed strange. I'd go as far as calling it worse than college-party-level planning.
Is nobody expected to drive home after the event?
Also, one of those recurring events was hosted at a startup that was, to be frank, known for "worse than college" level planning all around...
Eventually events started getting better at providing options. Probably a mix of several factors: the move to another city (local culture), career growth/level of people around me, and changing social patterns. (increasing interest in non alcoholic options/ more people willing to speak up)
If we ignore alcohol. We have few groups:
1) Coffee / tea (caffeinated so many cant sleep after them)
2) Yerba mate (isnt it the same group as caffeinated drinks? Also availability is low)
3) sugary drinks (cola, fanta, soda..) - basically liquid diabetes
4) juices (they are sugary again even if other type of sugar)
5) milk (nobody sells / buys milk?)
6) water with lemon
So if you want to sleep, dont want sugary drinks you are left with water with lemon.
Just avoid the over-industrialized ones, like you'd do with normal beers.
Also laguinitas hopwater is the bomb and I like it better than actual IPAs
The other options I can think of are are flavored seltzers/flavored water, Mocktails/virgin cocktails/Shirley Temples, agua fresca, non-alcoholic beer, and herbal tea. Availability varies, of course.
Teetotalers might be there physically, but they’ve opted out of the shared experience of making themselves vulnerable.
In west coast tech companies with young people of both sexes, I absolutely refuse to drink due to not wanting to be accused of harassment or inappropriate behavior. I'm not a creep, but am older and not really attractive and am treated to a different standard.
Sounds paranoid but have had coworkers accused, penalized, or fired after these events.
I've seen outings in Asia where there's lots of non-sexual touching, arm around shoulders etc, and yet that would be like insta-problem between sexes on the west coast. Getting buzzed means you aren't on high alert for this sort of thing, hence I'll nope out of putting myself in this situation.
But I suppose alcohol is bad for basically everyone, and the others opt in to that risk as well.
Fructose seems to be the worst carb for me, but I also limit the other carbs (glucose and starch) and one of my guesses as to why I need to do that is that if I eat more than about 12 to 20 g of carbs in any meal, a decent amount gets converted into fructose (e.g., by my liver). I believe that if I had more muscle mass, I could get away with eating more carbs (because my muscles would convert much of the glucose in my bloodstream to glycogen before my body could convert it to fructose) but it is hard for people my age to increase their muscle mass much.
Note that I assiduously avoided refined sugar (e.g., molasses or monk fruit extract or any other refined sugar, by itself or added to processed foods) during the decades during which my cognitive decline was progessing, and that is was only after I started also avoiding fruits and honey (except for a few low-sugar fruits, which in my case are frozen raspberries and frozen passionfruit) and vegetables high in carbs (like winter squash, carrot juice and more than one or two carrots per meal) that I stopped and partially reversed my cognitive decline.
I suspect that I'm far from the only one whose cognitive decline was caused by excessive consumption of carbs because of things I've read, e.g., https://news.cuanschutz.edu/news-stories/study-suggests-fruc...
(People who advise avoiding carbs often extol the benefits of ketosis. I tried ketosis, but do not like it. I've seen things that say spending too much time in the ketotic state can damage the heart, and my heart starts doing funny things when I spend too much time in ketosis, so I eat enough carbs every day to avoid ketosis, which is not much carbs.)
Weird advice considering your body literally turns food into sugar anyway. I suspect folks saying that sort of thing are quacks or using sugar as a scapegoat for excess calories.
Empirical answer: different sensation basically the minute it enters my body, from refined sugar. I don't enjoy that feeling it and I could feel it in a blind test. My body and brain do not feel good on such sugars, and avoiding them entirely is a good way to remove the craving for them.
Scientific answer: fruit sugars are slower to take up than refined sugars, when delivered in as juice or in fruit.
So yeah, if the bar has Diet 7-up or Diet Caffeine Free Coke, then I'm fine, but at least in the NYC area I've not really ever seen that at a bar. They're not even guaranteed to have them at grocery stores.
As it stands, the one thing that basically every bar is guaranteed to have that's sugar free and caffeine free is water, so that's what I end up defaulting to. It feels a bit lame but I really like being able to sleep.
Bonus, it looks like an alcoholic drink if you’re a woman and don’t want to give the idea that you might be pregnant, which is an issue which women trying to grow in corporate situations face at events, when in reality they simply don’t like drinking and/or don’t want to be around a bunch of men getting hammered who may potentially have sway over their careers.
I might steal this.
And yes, perrier or just soda with lime is also perfectly acceptable too.
Read "What the Door mouse said."