Comment by perrygeo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by perrygeo | Hacker News Reader

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There's just no compelling reason to use alcohol anymore.

It used to be a universal social lubricant, but now people stay home - the only people drinking in public are drunkards. Not a great look.

It used to be considered "healthy" to drink a bit. Twenty-one drinks a week was considered normal. Now we have decades of research meta-analysis concluding, in no uncertain terms, that the only safe amount of alcohol is zero. https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/alcohol-is-the-root-of-62-dise...

Alcohol increases anxiety. Given the zeitgeist and state of the world, it's not surprising consumers want to avoid spiking their cortisol in the evenings.

Alcohol is expensive. The cost of living is going up and wages are not. The budget has to adjust somehow - alcohol is an obvious place to make cuts.

Alcohol prevents the body from metabolizing real food. Fat burning stops while the metabolism shifts to rid the body of the toxins you just dumped in. Aside from the health impacts, you're gonna see this directly in your gut circumference via visceral fat. Considering the GLP-1 trend, beer gut is out of fashion.

So for me personally, and anyone else paying attention, there is no reason to touch alcohol. It's strictly poison and has no valid role in a human diet. Sorry farmers - maybe switch to growing something that provides nutrition and isn't toxic?

You seem pretty entrenched in your opinion, but also note that loneliness and unhappiness are at record levels.

If alcohol is part of the solution to that, then it is certainly worth considering trade-offs. A lonely and miserable life is not one worth living

Agree that the loneliness epidemic is an issue. But why would alcohol be the solution? Sounds like you implicitly associate socialization with drinking.

I do! It is very common in my culture for it to be central to social gatherings.

Being inebriated makes it easy for people to open up and bond while common interests in drinking helps motivate them to get together.

Yes but if you look at, I dunno, the entire history of the human race, for some darn reason alcohol is strongly associated with socializing.

Maybe that's a coincidence though.

The vast majority of people on this planet are teetotal. I guess they never have and never will socialize /s

Needing alcohol to socialize is not normal (though it has been normalized by some cultures). If you need alcohol to have fun, that's a sign of a serious problem that requires professional help.

>The vast majority of people on this planet are teetotal.

A citation would be nice. The WHO seems to suggest this is incorrect: https://ourworldindata.org/alcohol-consumption

Your link is a visualization of the data in the 2018 WHO global status report on alcohol and health, which is the same data I used. Quoting directly from that paper:

> Some 2.3 billion people are current drinkers. Alcohol is consumed by more than half of the population in only three WHO regions – the Americas, Europe and Western Pacific.

Globally, the majority of people are non-drinkers. It's not even close. The maps obviously tell a different story on a per-country basis. And if you live in an area with a super-majority of drinkers - yeah it's going to feel like everyone in the world drinks. But the global data says otherwise.

edit: https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789241565639

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