Gallup reported last week that 54 per cent of American adults say they drink, the second year running at the lowest reading since it first asked the question in 1939. The rest of the survey is more interesting than the headline. Thirteen per cent say they sometimes drink too much, against thirty five per cent in 1989. The people who do drink average a little over three drinks a week. And fifty one per cent now say that moderate drinking is bad for your health, close to the record high set last year.
So this is not really a story about abstinence. It is a story about a large population repricing one input, quickly, and getting the arithmetic right. A lot of capable men have run the same calculation privately in the last few years and come to the same answer, and most of them would say the same thing about it. Dropping the drinks was pure gain.
The public reading splits two ways and both are reasonable. One treats it as an unambiguous public health win, the evidence having finally caught up with a habit that was never as harmless as it was assumed to be. The other calls it an overcorrection, points out that health guidance on alcohol has moved more than once, and says a population that is anxious about a glass of wine has traded one problem for a different one. Notice what both are doing. They are arguing about whether drinking is bad for you. It is a real argument, the health side is winning it, and neither side asks what else the drink was doing.
Because it was doing something else, and in most circles it was the more load bearing of the two jobs. The drink was rarely the point of the evening. It was the reason there was an evening. It supplied a standing, repeatable, low-stakes pretext for being in a room with the same people at intervals, and the pretext was the valuable part, because it meant nobody had to say out loud that he wanted the company. You said pub, and the wanting stayed inside the ritual where nobody had to look at it. Take the ritual out and the gathering does not become impossible. It becomes something that has to be proposed, by a named person, for a stated reason, which is a different transaction entirely and a more expensive one for the man least able to be seen wanting anything.
Now the part that matters, because it is not really about drink. That second function was not weighed against the first and found lighter. It was never on the scale. The health side of the exchange acquired instruments: standard drinks, risk ratios, guideline thresholds, an app that counts them for you. The other side never acquired any. Nobody can tell you how many occasions a year a circle needs to stay a circle, or what a gathering is worth, or what it costs when one stops being convened, because none of that has ever been measured and there is no obvious way to measure it. So the audit ran with a scale under one side and nothing at all under the other, and it returned the answer it was always going to return.
That is the durable shape, and it has nothing to do with alcohol. Wherever one side of a tradeoff has instruments and the other does not, the measured side wins, and it does not have to be the larger side to win. It only has to be the side that can make a case. The unmeasured side is not outweighed. It is dropped, silently, before the decision is consciously taken, and the man taking it experiences the whole thing as rigour. Your sleep score against the conversation you would have stayed up for. Revenue per hour against the hour you would have spent teaching somebody. The measurable thing is not more important. It is just the only thing in the room that is talking.
None of which is an argument for a drink, and it should not be read as one. The health reading is correct and it is not in dispute here. The point is narrower and harder: the function that ritual was performing does not reappear on its own, nobody sends any notice when it stops, and it will only ever be replaced by somebody deciding on purpose to replace it. Every individual exit was right. The thing that thinned was never anybody’s decision.
So the question this puts to you is not what you have given up. It is which of the things you cut this year were cut because you had weighed them, and which were cut because they were the only side of the exchange with a number on it.