00:00
04:03

Michael Simmons has narrated this article for you to listen to.

Absolutely nobody feels better at the end of Dry January. Mornings are still a struggle, you’re as tired as ever, and if anything the neurotic voice in your head is even louder. Yes, you may have gone to the gym every Sunday, but how has your life improved? It hasn’t.

My own Dry January was forced on me by antibiotics. Though the NHS guidelines said the pills are alcohol compatible, my doctor (who has a record of my alcohol intake) took the liberty of writing ‘NO alcohol’ followed by five exclamation marks. This has allowed me to experience sobriety firsthand.

The main findings from my time on the wagon were pretty depressing: the low level of simmering anxiety that starts when you take your first tentative steps into the pub and subsides approximately a quarter of the way into your first pint just persists for the entirety of a sober night. You don’t need booze to have fun, but it certainly helps.

Sobriety is an unhappy and anxiety-inducing state, but even so the puritans are winning. This month more people seem to be going sober than ever: 200,000 is Alcohol Change UK’s target. Most of my friends have swapped the bottle for some over-sugared elderflower cordial. A mate’s tech company opted for a spinning class instead of a Christmas party. And worryingly for those of us not joining in, none of them seems to be cracking under peer pressure.

One alcohol charity offers a ‘toolkit’ for how to succeed as someone newly sober in the corporate world. The tips include ‘before a work event or party, let the organisers know you don’t drink’. So can we soon expect ‘alcohol-free’ to appear in our colleagues’ email signatures right next to ‘he/him’? Later the toolkit recommends sharing non-alcoholic drink recommendations with colleagues to ‘help boost your self assurance’.

These non-alcoholic drinks are getting weirder too if my local supermarket is anything to go by. If it isn’t elderflower-based, then there’s a whole range of CBD (cannabis) drinks. The latter seem particularly popular with the newly teetotal brigade, which is odd given that most people don’t associate cannabis with sobriety.

Drinking has become a battleground in the culture wars. Over Christmas, the organisers of a community bonfire night were criticised for encouraging firework-watchers to gather in a pub after the event. This ‘excluded’ people, according to the complainant. Other members of the booze police joined in and called for community groups not to use venues that serve alcohol at all. Goodbye pub Britain. 

I wouldn’t argue that problem drinking should go unaddressed. Alcohol deaths in the UK hit a record high in 2021 – the last year we have complete figures for. So recognising when one has a genuine problem and cutting back is to be lauded. Quietly. 

It’s the people whose personality becomes defined by not drinking who get my goat. These reverse pub bores can be split into three types: the ‘healthy’ drug addict who seems to engage in every vice but considers themselves a fitness freak because they would never touch a pale ale; the sober chronicler who, presumably because being sober is so bloody boring, takes great joy in recording every embarrassing thing said or done on a night out so that the next day they can regale their friends in their most hangxious state. And then there are the creeps: the ones who have never drunk because they ‘don’t like being out of control’. It’s as if they know a psychopathic monster lurks beneath their sober self just waiting to be unleashed by Bacardi and coke.

Being alcohol-free is just the latest in an increasingly long list of possible identities. It now seems compulsory for those of us in our twenties and thirties to identify our problems – and then announce to the world we’ll be addressing them. But abstinence could be doing more harm than good. Countless studies warn of the mental afflictions facing the youth of today. Poor resilience and impossible to meet lifestyle goals equal a whole load of stress. Might we all be a bit happier if we restricted ourselves less, and just had a drink?/>