Thirteen Percent Still Get Properly Wrecked

Young people today are apparently ruining everything. First it was magazines, then radio, then television—smartphones made short work of all three. Then they started skipping school on Fridays to protest climate change. And now, according to a study from Germany’s Federal Centre for Health Education, they’ve quietly walked away from alcohol. Only 8.7% of 12-to-17-year-olds drink once a week. In 2004 that figure was 21.2%. That’s not a gradual drift—that’s a collapse.

I don’t know how to feel about this. Part of me thinks: good for them—the body that hasn’t been slowly pickled since sixteen is probably in better shape than the one that has. But another part of me thinks about being seventeen in a park somewhere with a bottle of something genuinely terrible, surrounded by people I’d lose contact with inside two years, and I don’t actually want that tradition erased. Some mistakes are supposed to happen early. You make them cheaply, before the stakes are real.

It gets more complicated with the 18-to-25 group: a third still drink regularly, and the binge-drinking rate has been creeping back up over the last several years. So it’s not that people are becoming sober by conviction—it’s that the starting line has moved. They still get there. Just later.

What keeps me from feeling entirely melancholy about this is a number buried in the data: 13.6% of teenagers still got drunk at least once a month in 2018. Down from 25.5% in 2007, yes. But that’s still more than one in eight of them out there making the right wrong decisions on a regular schedule. The tradition is alive. Just scaled back. I find this oddly reassuring in a way I’m not sure I should.