The Drinking Stopped

You see the studies every couple years now. Young people aren’t drinking. The numbers just keep dropping—eight percent of twelve-to-seventeen year olds drinking weekly, down from over twenty percent in the early 2000s. Which means this whole thing we grew up thinking was inevitable—sneaking alcohol, first beers, getting fucked up as a rite of passage—just isn’t the default story anymore for kids coming up now.

I don’t know if that’s good or bad. It’s just strange to watch something you assumed was universal about youth culture stop being universal. We grew up thinking certain things were just how it happened. You drank. Everyone drank. It was part of the whole script. The statistics break it down: thirteen percent of teenagers binge drink monthly now, versus twenty-five percent back in 2007. The trend’s been moving one direction for a while. For people in their twenties it’s different though—about a third drink regularly, and binge drinking in that age group has ticked back up over the last seven years. So it’s not that young adults quit entirely. It’s specifically teenagers who’ve backed off.

Which leaves me thinking about everything that hangs on that ritual. The stories people tell about becoming themselves. The nights that feel dangerous or necessary. Basements, cars, whatever else is supposed to happen. The scripts we all got handed about what adolescence is. Maybe it all just gets rewritten. Maybe there’s a different kind of risk now, or maybe refusing the old templates is the rebellion.

What’s strange is how fast the generational edge moves. A few years back I was writing like the way I drank was universal—how people drank, period. Now I’m reading statistics about teenagers doing something completely different, and it lands like observing some alien future. That’s just how it happens. Every generation shows up convinced the next one will follow the same playbook. Then they don’t. You’re at that point where you’re too old to get pulled in but old enough to notice it shifting.