Beer Marketer's Insights - Fearing Increased Isolation, Yearning for More Social "Vices": Commentary

Celebrity sobriety stories (and their entries into the fast-growing non-alcoholic beer business, to boot) get a lot more attention these days than thoughtful essays reflecting on the convivial joys of social drinking. So a pair of such stories, both published in notable periodicals earlier this fall, warrant attention. After the now compulsory citation of this year's Gallup poll showing a sharp drop in the prevalence of drinking among US adults, GQ contributor PE Muskowitz pairs the stat with a perhaps even more concerning one. "American adults are spending 30% less time face-to-face than they did only 20 years ago," the American Time Use Survey shows, and the figure for teens is down by half. Brooklynite Muskowitz knows plenty of young people who don't drink and plays up the health benefits of sobriety, to be sure. But "as healthy as going sober might be, the decrease in drinking in America might therefore actually be a byproduct of another emerging health trend: being more lonely and isolated," they write, "which is very bad for people's mental and physical health." Young 20-somethings "yearn for the feeling of letting loose," a 24-year-old friend told the author, "but we don't ever actually get to that point." And they're not the only ones left wondering how to relax and put their phones down without slipping into the oft-repeated downsides of drinking.Also reflecting on increased American isolation, "our vices have become more furtive and alone," lamented Dan Brooks for The Atlantic in early November. Once upon a time, Americans drank a whole lot more alcohol and were far less likely to consume cannabis. And drinking isn't the only "national vice" that's changed by moving away from social spheres into far more solitary ones, he notes. While folks often fixate on "net negative effects" of earlier "vices" drinking at bars and gambling in casinos, "their benefits &mdash; for those who pursued vice in moderation &mdash; went beyond instant gratification to something more valuable. To spend Saturday night at the bar is, in many cases, to spend time with friends and meet new people," the kind of social connection that is undoubtedly positive. Indeed, "vice can bring people out of themselves to be with others, even if that means coming together to do what they probably should not," Brooks continues before concluding with the concern that if "the new vices are so uniformly solitary" then so too might "the national character."

Fearing Increased Isolation, Yearning for More Social "Vices": Commentary

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