Not drinking is no big deal
Laura Gaynor, 25, a film-maker in Dublin, decided aged 10 that she wanted to be teetotal. “I was almost a bit friendless when I was 15 because alcohol was such a big thing. Some of my friends thought I was boring. Now I find people my age are very accepting.”
She notes that her generation accepts a wide range of behaviour, from veganism to different sexual identities. It’s usually only older people who ask her, “Why don’t you drink?”
In pubs, she orders tea, which almost always prompts a joke from the barman. Her nights out tend to end around midnight, when her friends are too drunk for proper conversation. But she has rarely witnessed drunken misbehaviour among her peers, perhaps because they are disciplined by #MeToo and social media. When she was 19 or
20, “a night out would be almost performative, with the whole thing going up on Facebook or something”. Photographing social life is rarer at 25, she adds.
She points to a big advantage of teetotalism: “I get so much out of the weekend. I’ll go out for a few hours, get home by midnight, and I can be up at 7am and do something really good.”
Ben Cooper, 21, a student at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, was one of the few people put off alcohol as a teenager by the famously unsuccessful Drug Abuse Resistance Education programme. “I didn’t like the idea of changing my personality just to make friends,” he says.
Arriving at Vanderbilt, he found that the social scene for freshmen largely revolved around bars. That alienated him, but drinking declined in upper years, and eventually, he found a more coffee shop-based social life. He didn’t drink till he was
21 and now has one drink a week. In
his circles, he says, drinking is “not a spontaneous thing”. It’s confined to the end of the week or celebrations such as when a friend gets into law school.
When he interned, the custom of collective drinking at happy hours shocked his peers. “It was a bit weird to be drinking with your bosses, we all felt.”
Many younger people complain that alcohol is still considered obligatory when socialising. Quazi Islam, 34, recently moved to Amsterdam from Bangkok. “Literally every social event I have been invited to has been centred around drinking,” he says, “be it whisky Wednesday or tequila Thursday or Friday night beers or weekend wine tastings . . . you reach the dreaded moment when someone says, ‘Why aren’t you drinking?’ Because, hey, not drinking is abnormal.” Having to justify not drinking, he says, “only serves one purpose — to make you, the teetotaller, feel completely alienated and uncool. I wish we didn’t live in a world so focused around the consumption of alcohol to foster human connections.”