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.
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.
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.
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.
For reference, that will get you and your friends absolutely blasted for way more than a single evening.
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.
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?
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.
that'll be the reason in most cases.
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.
with public spaces and resources, then.
Where I am, people raised holy hell about e.g. a skatepark being built.
So as far as I can tell, people (especially the young) stopped going out, and then third places started going away.
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 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.
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.
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.
This is what corporations want. Lonely people are constant eyeballs . But this can't be good for society as a whole.
Also, as it makes me tired, it also makes me less incline to go out and meet people.
Those, and other reasons generally push me against consuming it more than few times an year.
I love a good novel paired with a whisky for an solo evening in, pints with 'da boyz at the pub, and food & winery tours with couples and friends.
So it's meaningless in this regard, but the stat might still be useful in showing just how fucked the economy truly is.
My understanding is that the evidence suggests that light social drinkers tend to be healthier and live longer than people who drink not at all.
If you went out to all those same events and just drank non alcoholic drinks you’d be healthier.
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.
caffeine (cafes)