By Alexandra Rix

In a time not so long ago, sobriety was terminal. To give up drinking meant that you were an alcoholic, and to be an alcoholic was to have an incurable disease that is laden with years of prior shame. You were cast aside at family parties, uninvited to weddings, and you spent most of your social energy drinking bad coffee at AA meetings while you listened to other sick people sit in their shame. You were herded into alcohol-free zones, away from polite society. This is a stark contrast to the sober movement and community that I have found myself belonging to in 2021. My life looks a lot more like prosecco picnics and ice-cold beers in beer gardens (sans ethanol). Hell, I might even go clubbing again one day. 

Millennials get a lot of shtick for being (you all know where I’m going with this) snowflakes and for belonging to the generation of participation trophies. We’re told that we’re soft and lazy because we have never had to work for anything or go to war, and I am sure that in some ways we do lose out with this ‘you’re trying your best even though you literally haven’t left the house this month or eaten anything other than ramen and cheerios’ attitude. However, it’s hard not to acknowledge the many areas of life that this attitude favours: sobriety is one of them. 

Millennials see sobriety less as a punishment for someone’s inability to drink responsibly or moderately. Instead, it’s this wonderful gift that you can give to yourself. In the millennial’s never-ending search for mindfulness, peace, and clarity by whatever means, those means are often forgiven, even celebrated. Being selfish and taking time for yourself? Celebrated. Spending money on things that make you happy, including indulging in delicious foods that set off your dopamine receptors like it’s mardis gras in your brain? Celebrated. Life is stressful, and we understand that. We support people in their endeavour to just get through the day. But we do so with the science behind us and internet communities where we can find the support or influence to make those decisions. 

Boomers, unfortunately for both them and us, were raised with harsher expectations and less emotional leniency. These fed into their relationships with alcohol. Alcohol was used by them and their parents to destress because it was one of the only options for unwinding at the end of the day and if they decided to not partake, for whatever reason, then that was their problem. They weren’t lucky enough to live in the era of accommodation and understanding that we do.

The way we use social media and the kinds of social media that we use are also key players in the intergenerational sobriety shift. I’m part of a lot of sober communities on both Facebook and Instagram. The boomer and millennial social media platforms, respectively. Nothing is more obvious from a minute or two of browsing than the open-mindedness of sober millennials versus the black and white attitude that boomers have to other people and their sobriety. I, like many other sober millennials, enjoy alcohol-free alternatives to round out movie nights and brunch. The overwhelming majority of sober boomers on recovery Facebook pages, however, are vehemently against them and, in my experience, seem to actively gatekeep sobriety. Smoke weed? Get out of sober club. Take anti-depressants? Door is over there. Drink alcohol-free beer with your pizza? That has a 0.5% alcohol content and gtfo. How do I know that this doesn’t appear even nearly as much in the millennial sober conversations? Because we have the sober subgroup of sober curious – people who choose a majority sober existence because they want to, not because they have to for their own health (which is more often the case with sobriety).

Millennials have a talent for finding their people. We embrace our differences. We create our own communities rather than shoehorning ourselves into groups of people who we don’t feel at ease or at home with. That’s why sobriety can look so different to so many of us; we let it be. We don’t alienate or dictate what people’s experiences should look like to them. We urge people to support their friends and family and to listen to them during these transitional periods. Basically, we have come a very long way from approaching alcoholism by shoving our loved ones into an AA meeting and avoiding the topic of conversation thereafter. We seek out like-minded people to celebrate our new ways of life with; we embrace change and the positive effects that it can have on our future instead of stewing in shame and obsessing over the past.

Alcoholic. Alc-o-holic. Al-co-ho-lic. No. This word has never felt right to me. I simply do not feel diseased. I don’t feel dangerous or untrustworthy because I used to throw up on myself and cry a lot. I don’t feel like a social criminal that my friends need to tip-toe around or selectively invite to places. I feel like a human being that discovered something wasn’t working for me, and so I gave it up. This is a notion that I was allowed to truly understand through one of the many books on sobriety that are currently available, How to Quit Like a Woman by Holly Whitaker. Reading her work made my affliction crystal clear. 

It isn’t an affliction. It’s just that my body does not respond well to something that no one should be able to respond well to, and so I decided to stop drinking it. This has to be what really separates millennials and boomers in the sober arena. I don’t feel like I can’t drink, in fact, I feel like I have been given a second chance at living a happy life and I would recommend it to anyone, ‘alcoholic’ or not. In the nine months since I stopped drinking, I have: learnt to roller skate, lost a stone without trying, had genuinely lovely afternoons with friends that I won’t forget overnight, begun my writing career, and I have indulged… in therapy. And I still get to crack open a cold one.

Is this the future? Widespread sobriety and the slow death of the binge-drinking epidemic that has killed so many? Or will we, as a nation and as the wider world, segregate into drinking and non-drinking communities where everyone is in a beer garden just drinking variations of beer? From my personal experience so far, it seems like when you stop drinking, the people who liked drinking (and only drunk drinking) will disappear; the people you would be ecstatic to see in the smoking area at 2 am you may never speak to again. But your good friends will adapt and support you. Not being pushed away into the dark corner of an AA meeting will actually force you to learn to exist around alcohol without consuming it, and you will meet some of the most beautiful souls that you could ever have imagined. The best part of it is that they are just as excited as you are to experience, together, a crystal clear way of life.