Introducing the New Casual Sobriety

Right now, as I write this, I’m hungover. I told myself I wouldn’t drink this week – after a particularly heavy weekend that may have involved jelly shots – but then my brother came to town. So we went to the pub – what else were we going to do? Drinking pints is Britain’s major national pastime, up there with bootlicking and talking about the weather. Except, there are signs this booze-soaked cultural attitude might be shifting – and I’m not just saying this because I’m 30 and I can’t take the pace any more. A growing number of people are waking up to the fact that perpetual hangovers and comedowns aren’t all that fun, and are deciding to give it all a rest. We are entering a new era of casual sobriety.

Only a decade or so ago, the word sobriety was associated with serious addiction issues requiring rehab or Alcoholics Anonymous. Nowadays, it seems like everyone is on temporary pauses or circuit breakers from drink or drugs. Former sesh gremlins now celebrate being 20 days sober on Instagram with screenshots of sobriety apps to prove it, and Google searches for “sober curious” have risen 96 percent worldwide in the last year. Even songs aren’t getting pissed any more – DASH Water analysed lyrics for the top 10 songs of each year since 2012, and found that “drunk” references in chart-topping songs are rapidly declining. It seems sobriety has become more of a lifestyle choice than a life sentence for some, as more people experiment with curbing their intake long before hitting rock bottom.

So what’s behind this social shift? Is it all tied to optimisation culture – are days spent in your pants lying on the sofa and watching Hot Ones now considered wasted, in the quest to be fitter, faster, and more productive? Do people want to feel a bit less shit, or are we all just too skint to drink?

It’s probably all of these things, all at once, according to Ali Ross, a psychotherapist and spokesperson for the UK Council for Psychotherapy. “I think casual sobriety has come about from a combination of: alcohol gradually becoming more unaffordable, tuition fees going up for students, housing becoming increasingly unaffordable, people being more self-aware, and there being more exposure via internet, books and podcasts about the benefits of abstaining from alcohol,” he tells VICE. “Many people discover it’s simply not worth drinking any more.”

According to Ross, “there’s less pressure or social expectation to drink, and so people are more likely to stick to their choices than getting pressured back into drinking.”

That being said, he thinks this phenomenon doesn’t necessarily track onto recreational drug use. “When people choose to abstain from drugs it tends to be far more about the way their drug use is affecting their functional life and is coming more from a response to feeling addicted, getting into serious debt, losing friendships or partners, or becoming less productive at work,” he says. “Essentially, casual alcohol sobriety seems to happen more in people wanting a better quality of life; drug sobriety tends to be more about stopping life getting worse.”

This difference might explain why abstinence from alcohol is increasingly understood as a kind of lifestyle hack rather than a sign of dysfunction. “I didn’t even know casual sobriety was a phenomenon with a name,” says Alex, 23, “but I really do resonate with the term.” He started a “sober period” on August Bank holiday weekend. “I had a month until my masters deadline and I needed to be all systems go,” he says. But he noticed positive changes almost immediately. “I found I had more energy, slept better, became more productive and spent less money, so I decided to keep it up.”

This seems to be a common story. “I went sober about 18 months ago,” says Will, 32, whose name has been changed for privacy reasons. “My moods levelled out a bit, my mind felt clearer, it was easier to get up in the morning, and I just really didn’t miss coming home drunk and waking up hungover,” he says. “There are loads of non-alcoholic drink options at pubs, so you can be at the pub drinking with other people and not feel like you’re missing out.”

When Aisling, 40, cut out booze in 2019, she also started out thinking sobriety would be a blip. After experiencing some health issues, she embarked on a detox diet for a few months with a vague plan to reintroduce alcohol around Christmas time. “But I just didn’t feel like it when the time came,” she says. Since then, she’s only drank on a few special occasions. “I don’t say I’ll never drink again, maybe I will,” Aisling says, “but now I’m about to turn 41, I was feeling hungover after one glass of wine and that’s just not worth it for me.”

It seems we’re at a bit of a cultural tipping point in the UK. According to Forbes Advisor’s British Booze Index, 43 percent of Brits have tried reducing their alcohol intake. Behind this stat though, there is also a clear generational shift in attitudes. Nearly two-thirds of people aged 18-34 are reportedly trying to cut back on alcohol, followed by 42 percent of those aged 35-54. By comparison, only 37 percent of those over 55 are looking to reduce their intake – considerably less than their Gen Z and millennial counterparts.

“As a 40-year-old, I consider myself to be caught in the middle of two vastly different generations,” says Matt Pink, sober coach and co-founder of the Dryy app. “Our parents were boozers, big time. Our kids are much less interested in alcohol and that leaves us, looking up at the generation before, wondering if we could do more with our life,” he says. Pink went sober three years ago after realising that, while he wasn’t addicted to alcohol, his relationship with drinking was having a negative impact on his life. “Since knocking the alcohol and drugs on the head myself back in April 2020, I’ve seen a huge shift in the number of people taking a break from the booze and it is showing no sign of slowing down,” he says.

Pink believes the social shift towards alcohol-free living is being accelerated by the boom in online health and fitness influencers who are proudly proclaiming their abstinence. But it also seems to stem from an increased attention on mental health. “I mainly decided to go sober because of my mental health,” 26-year-old Amber says plainly. “I live alone, and I found the experience of being hungover without anyone around just too depressing. My mind would honestly go to really dark places.” Her drinking was taking a physical toll, too. “The time that really put the nail in the coffin was when I was sick in London Bridge station earlier this year.”

When she first went sober, Amber felt like she was “seeing everything through rose-tinted glasses and felt quite euphoric”. But she’s wary of the way sobriety is often pitched as all upsides. “All the #sobergirlsociety stuff I find to be quite cringy,” she says. “Sobriety is ultimately really hard. It means a whole new way of socialising.” Her best friends have been really supportive, but “a lot of people have had an exterior response of, ‘That’s so good,’ and then gradually stopped inviting me to things. I think a sober person, for a lot of people, is still really hard to untangle from a boring person,” she says.

She continues: “I think it’s an affront for a lot of people. Someone being sober forces them to look at their own behaviour, and that’s something they might not want to do.”

Amber just wishes people understood how detrimental her relationship to alcohol actually was. “While I was by no means an addict, I definitely struggled to stop drinking when I started. I was always the last person out, and the person willing other people to get another drink. People fail to acknowledge that part of me when they think about why I’m sober,” she says.

Having now been sober for 18 months, Will says he doesn’t really think about his sobriety very much. What he has realised though, is “how extreme our party culture is and how insidious our drinking culture is” in the UK. “We drink all days of the week and at all kinds of occasions. It’s just not like this in other parts of the world,” he says.

Perhaps then, rather than seeing this all as a seismic social shift towards sobriety, we should view it as a much smaller step to where a lot of cultures around across the planet already are. After all, why should abstinence be seen as more extreme than drinking yourself into the gutter on a regular basis? “I enjoyed alcohol for a long time and will probably go back to it at some point,” Will concludes. “But when I’m walking home sober and see people absolutely wrecked, stumbling home or vomiting, it’s really not a good advertisement for it. It makes me glad it’s not a part of my life anymore.”

@eloisehendy