The Nuance

I like to drink. Some nights I drink too much. Some months I drink too much. March of 2020 was one of those months.

Confronted by a new virus and unprecedented lockdowns, a lot of Americans leaned on alcohol for support, and I was one of them. Average per-person alcohol sales soared during the first months of the pandemic and continued rising for much of the following year. My own drinking swelled to a couple glasses of wine most nights of the week, with a cocktail thrown in now and then; nothing crazy, but enough that I worried about it and made a conscious (and successful) effort to drink less.

The story was different on the other side of the Atlantic (including in Germany, where I’ve lived for the past year). Data from Public Health England show that total per-person alcohol sales in the U.K. declined slightly during the first year of the pandemic. Mainland Europeans drank considerably less in 2020 than they had the year before.

These trends reveal some important cultural differences in the ways people drink in the U.S., as opposed to Europe, and they may help explain why so many Americans today are struggling with alcohol-use disorders.

Americans tend to moralize drinking more than people in other countries. Many of us regard alcohol as not just risky but wrong, or even sinful, and we freight the decision to drink or not drink with a lot of psychological baggage.

If you spend time reading the peer-reviewed research on alcohol, you learn quickly that how a person drinks is almost as important as how much a person drinks when it comes to the long-term health consequences.

Many Europeans drink predominantly in social settings. When the novel coronavirus made it impossible to mingle in bars or cafes, a lot of people over here drank less. Compare that to the U.S., where consumer surveys found that, even before the pandemic, a majority of people (and especially younger Americans) preferred to drink at home because going out was “too much effort.” When the pandemic arrived, many Americans were already accustomed to getting tipsy alone on their living room couches, and so alcohol use went up, rather than down.

Solitary drinking, when compared to social drinking, is consistently associated with higher rates of alcohol-use disorders. So is drinking to cope — another time-honored tradition in the U.S.

What could be called the American model of consumption—getting plastered alone as a way to manage stress—seems like the surest way to get into trouble with alcohol.

In a 2017 paper in the journal Addiction, Petra Meier and other public health professors in the U.K. argued that “not all drinking is equal.” Using what they termed a social practice theory lens, they made the case that the health effects of alcohol must be considered in the full context of a person’s life, not solely in decontextualized metrics like drinks-per-week.

For example, if your alcohol habit causes you to neglect work or family, then it’s clearly having a deleterious effect on your life. On the other hand, if giving up alcohol means you’ll spend less time socializing and more time alone, then abstinence could have negative consequences for your health and well-being.

Yes, nobody should have to rely on alcohol to feel comfortable in social settings. But alcohol has long served as a “social lubricant” — something to grease the gears of otherwise creaky interactions. Studies have found that when small groups of people drink modest amounts of alcohol together, as opposed to non-alcoholic drinks or placebo cocktails, they tend to get along better. Pro-social emotions and behaviors increase, and so does bonding, that work shows.

When I moved to Germany, I was struck by how prominently alcohol featured in people’s social lives, and also by how much more social people’s lives tended to be. The friends I’ve made over here— mostly parents of my kids’ schoolmates—seem to get together several times a week to share a meal, or to meet at a bar for drinks. Alcohol is almost always consumed, and almost always in moderation. People also seem more relaxed — not careless, just less neurotic — about drinking. They use alcohol more like a tool and less like an escape.

“Again and again, an era of overindulgence begets an era of renunciation . . . Americans tend to drink in more dysfunctional ways than people in other societies, only to become judgmental about nearly any drinking at all.”

Of course, the United States has a long and complicated relationship with alcohol.

As the writer Kate Julian points out in this Atlantic piece from 2021, Americans tend to moralize drinking more than people in other countries. Many of us regard alcohol as not just risky but wrong, or even sinful, and we freight the decision to drink or not drink with a lot of psychological baggage. This baggage has caused us to swing back and forth between periods of besotted excess and periods of sanctimonious abstinence.

“Again and again, an era of overindulgence begets an era of renunciation,” Julian writes. “Americans tend to drink in more dysfunctional ways than people in other societies, only to become judgmental about nearly any drinking at all.”

We don’t just do this with alcohol; cannabis is another substance that has ridden our reputational seesaw, though it now seems to be enjoying an upswing. I think it’s a little ironic that at a time when social anxiety is increasingly commonplace and public health officials are talking about a “loneliness epidemic,” it has become chic to vilify alcohol, a decidedly social drug, while praising a substance that makes many users feel antisocial and paranoid. (And I have nothing against weed.)

I know there’s evidence that any amount of alcohol is unsafe. However, that work is easily countered by the ample research linking moderate drinking to improved health outcomes. There’s also the fact that some of the world’s happiest and longest-living peoples (the Finns, the Sardinians) are pretty enthusiastic drinkers.

I’m not saying alcohol deserves the credit, but I think it’s hard to make a real-world case that alcohol, in modest quantities, has a uniformly negative effect on people’s lives.

Rather, I think America’s issues with alcohol are in large part due to our habit of drinking alone. I also think our problem is part of a larger philosophical glitch that steers us into trouble: our disdain for moderation. We don’t jog, we run marathons. We don’t eat more vegetables, we alternate-day fast on a keto diet. We gravitate toward the most intense, all-or-nothing approaches to health behaviors, which are invariably the least sustainable. And when those don’t work out, we feel bad about ourselves and fall hard off whatever wagon we were on.

As with most things in life, it seems like the middle way with alcohol is best — not for everyone, but for many. If more of us drank moderately and, more importantly, socially, I think we’d get into a lot less trouble with alcohol.

There’s the old adage “Never drink alone.” We seem to have forgotten it.