There’s this website called Hello Sunday Morning, started by an Aussie named Chris Raine. The story goes, he was drinking hard every weekend and wondered how his life might be different if he didn’t wake up Sunday mornings disgustingly ill due to a hangover. After pondering this, he decided to do the unthinkable and say no to booze for an entire year.
The kicker is Raine didn’t think he had a drinking problem to begin with. He wasn’t waking up in handcuffs or coming down with STDs, forgetting what he did the night before or rousing from his sleep with a busted nose and lots of questions. Instead, he sat back and surveyed the drinking habits of his entire generation—Gen Y—and noted that it had become standard, accepted and even expected to drink his friends under the table with rounds of shots every Saturday night.
The Mad Pursuit of Intoxication
According to Robin Room, a professor of social alcohol research at the University of Melbourne (yeah, that’s a job), the goal of young working professionals who drink in wealthy Western countries like the US and the UK is to get really drunk. You don’t have to spend hours in a London pub to know hard drinking is pretty common in the UK; as for the US, it appears to be a growing trend in the 21st century, specifically among middle-class young professionals. The consensus? Dangerous binge drinking isn’t just for bona fide alcoholics.
Ironically, the number of folks per capita who drink regularly has fallen in recent years in Australia, the UK and the US, but the ones who do drink regularly are making up for their abstinent counterparts with their mad pursuit of intoxication. They’re not satisfied with a light buzz, subtle relaxation or a tinge of euphoria—they need to become so blasted they obliterate both motor and critical thinking skills, which, of course, can cause serious problems.
Researchers who studied the drinking patterns in women between 1981 and 2001 found a large increase in the number of women, especially younger women, drinking to get very drunk, very quickly. Women engaged in “a pattern of drinking—fasting before drinking, rapid consumption of shots of strong liquor—designed to achieve rapid intoxication,” says Sharon Wilsnack of the University of North Dakota, a co-director of the study.
Other studies, including one published in 2014 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, reveal that the vast majority of hard drinkers are not clinical alcoholics. “U.S. research has shown for years that there are many more heavy drinkers in the general population…than there are clinically diagnosable alcoholics,” says Wilsnack.
Microbreweries to Blame?
Why well-to-do young professionals have been drinking themselves silly is a great question that recent research doesn’t seem to either ask or answer. The changing expectations and norms could have to do with everything from the shitty economy to the popularity of microbreweries, which allow young kids to pose as sophisticated beer connoisseurs rather than inebriates. But this is all speculation.
Chris Raine’s Hello Sunday Morning campaign has been quite successful—over 30,500 people have signed up to ditch booze for three months since the site’s inception in 2010, and, in turn, blog about their alcohol-free journeys on the site. What started as Raine sharing about his own abstinence turned into a movement that could change the hard drinking culture of millennials.
What’s great about Hello Sunday Morning is it gives heavy drinkers a chance to get back on track and do something interesting with their free time rather than imbibe it away. There’s a whole wide world out there outside of the bar culture, the club culture and the drinking-in-a-dingy-hipster-apartment culture. As many recovering alcoholics will tell you, their lives got “smaller and smaller” as they drank more and more. In fact, just sitting in a lawn chair on the porch, guzzling cheap wine and chain smoking used to be, for many of us, the perfect evening.
Not to say that us sober peeps don’t sit alone in front of the computer gorging ourselves on Netflix on Saturday night, but at least that doesn’t expose us to the risk of blacking out and winding up in handcuffs.
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