Offline Curious
Drunk on devices, sobering up?
One trend I’m most curious about right now is the rise of no or low alcohol drinks. I noticed this in Europe years ago — that nearly everywhere you went they not only offered, but touted non-alcoholic beverages in bars — highlighting the opposite approach the US was taking: pushing more extreme alcoholic drinks like Four Loko and the like, with non-alcoholic drinks being almost a taboo here. That is changing, quite quickly, it seems.
And what I find most interesting about this shift is how it’s happening: which is, organically. Unlike the move away from smoking cigarettes in this country, which was clearly propelled by death and taxes (and a very strong anti-smoking push following nefarious revelations about Big Tobacco),¹ this move, despite alcohol also having a very real death and taxes issue, feels different. It’s seemingly being propelled by younger generations just choosing on their own that they prefer to drink less alcohol (or none at all) for various reasons.
In a way, it reminds me of another thought I’ve long had: for all the fears that we’re becoming more and more addicted to the screens in our hands, what if younger generations just sort of naturally buck this trend?
On one hand, it seems obvious: kids often “rebel” against the norms of their parents (before eventually becoming their parents as they become parents). On the other: there is seemingly no way we’re putting this genie back in the bottle. While there are unquestionable downsides of everyone increasingly being buried in their smartphones like zombies, there are unquestionably upsides as well: like, say, having access to all the world’s information at your fingertips at any time. Who wouldn’t want that?²
I think about it less in the full-on abstaining from devices, and more on the moderation side: the “low alcohol” version, if you will. What if kids are naturally better at moderating their own usage because they’ve grown up with these devices around their whole lives? To continue the parallel, perhaps it’s like kids in some European countries where drinking wine is more ingrained in the culture, that they’re less likely to binge drink when they grow up.³
Relatedly, perhaps we, as parents, are getting smarter about creating (or at least thinking about) healthy relationships with these devices from the get-go.⁴ And, on the flip side, perhaps the children are seeing their parents’ addictions to the screens and taking in — even if subconsciously — just how crazy this situation is, and they want to be better than we are.
My part of my generation (I’m one of the world’s oldest millennials), was the last to remember growing up when computers weren’t everywhere, let alone in our pockets, and the entire world wasn’t connected yet.⁵ As landline phones became cell phones became smartphones, and as desktop PCs became laptops became smartphones, and as dial-up internet to connect to BBS became high speed internet to connect to the web became being connected to everyone in the world in your pocket at all times, it’s easy to see why we all got addicted to these devices and services. Ask yourself what it would look like if the leap was made from an abacus to the calculator in a single generation. To us, this is more than alchemy, it’s wizardry. It’s fucking magic.
To younger generations, it just is what it is. It’s life. When you’ve grown up in a world of wizards, even magic can seem mundane. And, one presumes, you learn how to use spells in moderation.
¹ Of course, now we have vaping, so… one could argue that vice is neither created nor destroyed, it simply changes form over time.
² Smartphones are also now just as much cameras — connected cameras, no less — as they are anything else, of course.
³ I have no idea if this is actually true, but it always sounded true, and conceptually made some sense.
⁴ One struggle here may be the continuing ubiquity of devices in our lives. It’s increasingly not just about smartphones, but all the related, connected peripherals too. Apple Watch. AirPods. Alexa. Etc.
⁵ We had one of the first PCs of anyone I knew: an IBM that cost something closer to $10k versus what an entry-level PC would cost today. And we certainly had one of the first connections to the internet I knew of in my peer group: a Prodigy account running on DOS.
