In the opening lines of her hit 2024 album, The Tortured Poets Department, Taylor Swift wastes no time in establishing her mental state: she is in love, it is ruining her life, she wants to kill everyone, she “was a functioning alcoholic” to boot. Swift is no stranger to dramatic projection, casually singing about driving off cliffs or jumping off buildings. But this wine-soaked overture is perhaps more shocking to her captive audience than her murderous inclination. For years now alcohol consumption has been declining across the West, driven primarily by the youth.
Recent data from the Drinks Industry Group of Ireland has found that drinking in the Republic is at its lowest level in more than 35 years. Now, in spite of its long-held (and hard-to-shake) reputation, Ireland is at around the European average when it comes to litres consumed per person. This isn’t a new revelation, rather a replication of continentwide trends. In 2019, for example, data by Drink Aware found a quarter of Gen Z in Britain were teetotal. This is a rather staggering figure given the attitudes of their parents – consumption peaked in 2004 and has waned since. In 2022 the National Drugs Library asserted that [in Ireland] “the number of teetotaller young people increased from 17 per cent in 2006–07 to 28 per cent in 2019–2021.”
We can rattle through some obvious explanations. Excessive drinking is bad for us and we know that more than ever. Public health messaging – an industry, by design, not particularly interested in capturing nuance – has gone through great lengths to convey all of its worst aspects (physical safety in the immediate sense, long-term health issues on a wider lens). In 2023 Ireland passed regulation that will require alcoholic beverages to display cancer warnings on their labels by 2026, indicative of a radical attitude shift. The country has also installed even more scrupulous conditions when it comes to advertising alcohol.
Surface-level improvements to public health are well and good. And this following argument comes with all the usual caveats: Ireland is right to reconfigure its national attitude to alcohol; unchecked and rampant marketing of spirits and beer and wine would be a stain on the public realm; in spite of Catholicism’s cultural dominance a dose of Protestant restraint can be no bad thing; the Mediterranean gets a lot right when it comes to its relationship with wine (higher frequency, lower level, binge drinking a foreign concept to many).
But we ought to be sceptical of any apparent seismic shifts in national behaviour, good and bad. There is reason to suspect that there is something troubling driving this decline in consumption. It seems that one societal vice has simply been replaced with another; that the youthful anxiety about the physical impacts of alcohol are covering an unhappy mental state we have so far failed to reckon with.
We should cast our minds back to the series of Covid lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. Not only were young people – many of whom will make up this large cohort of young teetotallers – sequestered away from their friends and education. But they were treated to a slew of patronising public health messaging too: stay home! Maintain distance! Wear a mask! No matter how useful (or not) it was at the time, this barrage of communication that lauded restraint over risk at all costs probably had an effect on young and developing minds.
At a time when teenagers should have been testing boundaries and forming an identity, circumstance painted the outside world as something to fear. It will take decades to understand all the long-term byproducts of lockdowns designed to solve the immediate viral threat, whether that is on children’s cognitive development, the economy or the fortitude of the social contract. But for now it seems reasonable to suggest that we have – in part – cultivated a hyper cautious generation who were forced to cede their personal capacity for risk management to the Government. It is no wonder a glass of wine seems a daunting prospect to those of such a coddled sensibility.
Meanwhile there is a greater existential worry – less speculative than the social impacts of lockdown on young minds. Dr Jean Twenge – psychology professor and author – correlates the decline in drinking with the emergence of the smartphone. Now this puritanical generation can talk to each other and maintain a semblance of a community from the comfort of their own bedroom. The social function of the pub has ebbed, replaced by the small screen and a slew of dopamine-mining apps. But of course the smartphone is no silver bullet: it is a folly for real socialisation and comes with its own host of damaging impacts on the malleable brains of adolescents.
[ Social media is 20 years old. How are we still getting so much wrong?Opens in new window ]
So young people are drinking less, good in an immediate and narrow sense. But life happens in the margins of public health messaging and the hegemony of social media. Transferable vices are very real and we may well have replaced the complicated convention of alcohol for something worse.