While younger generations are drinking less, adults aged 50 to 64 are drinking more, causing a shift reshaping the US bar scene
Alcohol consumption has decreased across the United States in recent years, particularly among adults under age 40, but there is one older demographic in which more people are drinking than before the Covid-19 pandemic – and more are doing so heavily, according to a new study.
For the first time since before the pandemic, the percentage of US adults who drink any alcohol decreased between 2022 and 2024, according to the report in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine. People from 50 to 64, which roughly corresponds with gen X, were the only age group in which drinking continued to increase.
They are likely hurting their health by imbibing, according to the latest science, but they are also helping keep open bars. Such businesses have struggled as younger generations, the drivers of nightlife, move away from booze.
we’re old and dont give a duck
I quit drinking last year at 33 years old next month is one year. I didn’t do it because I had a drinking problem, I was drinking one pint of beer a week, if that and a six pack would last a month, if I even bought a six pack at that point.
It was just like all it did was make me angry, tired or an ass to be around and it was becoming a waste and I didn’t feel like it was doing anything for me and it was a fucking waste after a while.
I did have a few thoughts of I could take or leave it when I was depressed a few times and those were the worst because that means I was considering drinking more because I felt like shit and then I was like fuck this shit.
…
… Plus empty carbs and ngl, I like root beer more than alcoholic beer. I like coffee more than alcohol. I like weed more than alcohol. I Iike chocolate more than alcohol. I like biking more than alcohol. I like everything more than alcohol.
The only time a beer really hits the spot for me is after a hot day spent working outside. The first sip of a frothy cold beer is magic.
But even then that works just as well with non alcoholic beer
A can of Pepsi that’s in a cooler that’s been chilled for like two hours, those are crispyyyy.
It works better with non alcoholic beer, that’s why Athletic is out selling everything at Whole Foods.
Weed is the new alcohol.
Til a new word : imbibing - means drinking a liquid or, often informally, consuming alcoholic beverages.
Those are the people that were already drinking
Their body, their choice. Sure hope that’s okay with prohibitionists who want to rape their way of life on the rest of us.
Dont worry. When humanity wins the war on drugs, sober people will not be persecuted, incarcerated and forced to do drugs.
Drugs will become so much safer people might want to do drugs. For example there was this guy working on an alcohol replacement with (from what I remember) benzos analogs and he was working on increasing euphoria while decreasing physical dependence. Sounded like an interesting idea but he ran into a bunch of DEA/FDA hurdles. I have always wanted to try Coca tea, I have no desire to do cocaine mostly because it’s always cut nasty like and requires intranasal.
Not mentioned in the article: 20- and 30-somethings are broke, and a night out is crazy expensive now. Plus legal weed is waaaay cheaper than alcohol.
ehhh if you’re a PBR enjoyer $12 for a 12-pack is hard to beat. I like my weed, but it ain’t $12 cheap yet here
Bummer to hear. $20 a quarter oz here lasts me longer than two twelve packs, so a little more affordable. It’s definitely not topshelf weed, but PBR isn’t primo either. I’m in cali though where the weed market has collapsed due to oversaturation and over regulation.
This was my argument for a long time. For 25 I get 12 that’ll last me a night IF I don’t share. 25 of weed will get you 3 days if you just smoke j. Plus the whole not becoming a degen that makes bad choices is a plus.
Yeah, I only go out on occasions.
One of my Gen-X friends was telling me how he started drinking more during COVID.
He said one day the supermarket cashier remarked “oh hey, are you throwing a party?”
And he said “nope, this is just my personal weekly alcohol consumption.”
Awkward!
As a millennial I’m tired and I think many millennials and younger GenXers feel the same. We’ve had to live what seems like multiple generations within our lifetime. We went from like 3 channel tv to cable tv to satellite tv to streaming tv. we went from dial up phones to cell phones to smart phones. we went from having no computer, to a computer, to a laptop, tablet, and screens on everything. we went from no internet to dial up to cable to wifi. We went from being told that we need to learn this and that in school or we won’t get a job. that we needed to learn all this maths cause we’ll never have a calculator in our pocket to carry around. having to write cursive cause thats how we’ll always write in the future. that we MUST go to college in order to get a job to suddenly it no longer matters and we’re in debt up to our eyeballs.
We had to teach our parents all this crap and now we also have to teach the younger generations the same stuff too.
We went from everyone we know having a house by the time they were our age to now we have to keep paying rent or live with roommates.
We’re tired, let us have a drink.
100%
We are a long-traumatized generation in a perpetually-traumatizing world. Even when I’m lying down, I want to lie down.
I feel you man. Shit has been crazy fast and it’s still accelerating. What a fucking life we have.
Yeah, I would not have damaged my body irreparably by sitting and studying through 3 STEM degrees had I known that job security would never come. I should have just worked at gas stations so at least I know jobs were always there, even if the cash was shit. My job pays well, but not worth being told it will be over soon every 5 minutes. I’m over it. So tired.
you forgot to mention, that the constant nagging for not having your career, or sitll living at home, sitll doing min wage, still not achieve this or that and pretty much ignoring why the HCOL so high. even from other more succesful millennials(they act like boomer sometimes)
Advances in personal technology and having had to learn cursive are not high on the list of things making me tired. You need to raise your exhaustion game.
My thoughts exactly. Life is always changing, and always will be.
you completely missed the point. it was an example of how quickly things have changed for us and the fact we have to teach the older generations these things and we also have to teach the younger one the same things too. Most previous generations had to simply teach the younger. We on the other hand had to teach multiple generations. Thus, we’re tired.
Nope I got it. And trust me, I have worked as the help desk guy and am tech support for every person I know. This is annoying, not driving me to drink. Anyone who says they drink more because they’re tired from BOO HOO having to explain phones to their mom and little brother both BOO HOO is weak af and can piss off with that whining.
They are likely hurting their health by imbibing, according to the latest science,
This must be emphasized more. The WHO has made a statement that for usual alcoholic beverages no level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health. This happened after carefully analysing a large body of research. Much earlier, alcohol has already been assigned to the highest class of carcinogenic substances, class 1. It sits in the same class as radiation, tobacco and asbestos.
As an older GenX I will say that my drinking hasn’t really increased, but it never really decreased from my college level in the first place.
But I don’t want to live to 80, 90 years old anyways.
Kids are grown, lost my wife to cancer 5 years ago. All of our nest egg went into her end of life care so retirement’s not an option. Everything hurts and I have to work until the day I die.
I got maybe 5-10 years left in me. Tops.
As a fellow gen x’er, I’m sorry for your loss. Take care of yourself, bro.
Just for your information, sitting in the same “class” as tobacco and asbestos doesn’t mean what you insinuated here.
Asbestos is orders of magnitudes more carcinogenic than alcohol, don’t be alarmist
I have never once in my life lifted an alcoholic drink without that information.
Look, have a drink every now and then. It’s fine. Moderation is key, we’re not meant to live forever and a life lived for 150 years in a fuckin bubble is silly.
I get it, it’s a carcinogen we all know. So is smoke, should I stop enjoying a lovely campfire?
Should I stop leaving my home because someone could kill me?
Yes they know that they dont care they’re not looking forward to a long healthy life.
I mean, with all respect, have you seen the state of this fucking world?
No i totally agree
Party pooper
And yet a lot of centenarians have their cocktails before bed. I think it must be the binge drinking that really hurts you. Or maybe the not going to bars and getting diseases from other drinkers part?
Stress is the number one killer and the core of so many health problems. Alcohol causes physical health problems too, but it is also so good for relieving stress. With any drug just know what and why you’re using and do it intentionally; medical vs. recreational use, and use vs. abuse. Drinking alone out of habit when you’re sad is bad drinking. Having a bottle of wine between friends or a tipple as part of a getting ready for bed relaxation ritual can be good drinking.
Its funny how in spite of all the advances in technology and research a healthy life always comes down to stress, diet, physical activity, sleep and social life. The factors we’ve known about since forever.
Agree on stress being a killer but frankly, this is cope. Alcohol as part of a going to bed ritual is pretty much alcoholism.
I think we’re imagining very different scenes. If you knock back a shot of vodka when you brush your teeth at night that’s probably alcoholism, a little glass of something mixed with a book and a robe in your library after supper isn’t usually.
“A little glass mixed with something” usually contains roughly a shot of liquor too…
I see what youre getting at, the psychological effect is less severe, but functionally and physiologically the addiction is the same.
Im not judging, I smoke a jay most evenings and admit its an addiction. I dont need to shift the goalposts and claim its not an addiction because its not as severe as a bong…
Your liver doesn’t know that you’re enjoying a good book, sorry. 😔
Y’all have lost the thread.
Nuance and reading comprehension people.
Eh I’m going to take a turn on this. My Garmin watch measures my heart rhythm through the night and can absolutely report super poor sleep for the first few hours if I have 2 glasses of wine with supper, with even 1 glass I can see poorer sleep stats.
I can, however, mitigate a lot of that with 2 Aleve taken beforehand, and of course adequate hydration. So my suspicion is that alcohol is inflammatory, and the inflammation causes all sorts of problems that inflammation typically does. Maybe taking the anti inflammatory is enough to mitigate it all, maybe not. But certainly something bad is happening.
As another example, I occasionally suffer from insomnia tendencies and would absolutely choose poor sleep over no sleep. Some studies have shown you shouldn’t consume alcohol within four hours of bedtime. Everyone should be making sure they are using responsibly and approach subjects with nuance
So the thing is, most centenarians happen to be from places that are either terrible at book keeping or at some point had a lot of their written records destroyed. There’s a strong chance that most centenarians aren’t actually over 100 years old, that their birth certificates were either faked or mismanaged along the way.
There is alcohol in lots of food including bread. Your liver is quite capable of handling alcohol.
Baking evaporates all but trace amounts of alcohol…
Our livers can handle most poisons but they all, alcohol included, take their toll.
Bread, yogurt, soy sauce, vinegar, fruit juice
All have alcohol and they are nowhere near the risk of asbestos lol
Wait until you learn about dosages, going to blow your mind
You’ll find relative and absolute risk a crazy concept
It seems you have neither read my comment properly, nor the WHO statement. This is about alcoholic beverages as usually sold and consumed. No statement was made about alcohol content in apples, bread, and alike.
No level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health
It is
Yeah now you are starting to troll. Click on the link. Read what I have written before the link.
I’m not. Just debating it.
Much earlier, alcohol has already been assigned to the highest class of carcinogenic substances, class 1. It sits in the same class as radiation, tobacco and asbestos.
Tobacco contains about 250 carcinogens when combusted, that’s way more harmful than alcohol.
They may be in the same class, but the risk profile is much lower for alcohol. The most common is colorectal cancer, and the risks are minimal
For every 1,000 heavy drinkers over a lifetime, roughly 11 additional cases of colorectal cancer would be expected compared to 1,000 non-drinkers
I think this is a good example of risk through the lens of policy versus risk through the lens of personal choices.
There is no safe amount of alcohol when it comes to a government recommending the use of a substance. The decision to say “one glass a day” by the government has been shown to lead to adverse health outcomes in the population.
You are speaking to the chance that a single individual will experience adverse health outcomes from choosing for themselves to have a glass a day. You are probably right that on an individual basis it is a reasonable risk to take (though I don’t know what the exact numbers suggest).
People often confuse policy level risk assessments with individual risk assessments, without considering the law of large numbers, and how a policy maker must make decisions for the population, not an individual.
I think it’s also relevant to your genes. My family has made whisky since the 1600s, they seem well accustomed to it.
Nobody is lining up for the $14 six pack at the grocery store. I’m not exaggerating, I’ve even cut back simply because I can’t justify the cost. I’m not paying a %50 increase for the same beer I bought six years ago.
I switched to hard liquor, much cheaper
I partially did. A bottle of cheap swill costs as much as a beer at a restaurant or pub.
Yep, I fully agree
Rhere is a multitude of reasons we’re drinking more. none of them are pleasant.
Well, let their liver receive the penance of their vote for Orange Palpatine.
Pssh. I’m drinking because others voted FOR Orange Palpatine!
That makes 2 of us. I’ve got a bottle of Laphroaig waiting for when it happens.
I thought Trump, like Hitler, was teetotal?
My wife and I (Gen-X), stopped drinking altogether about two or three years ago. She identified that it was becoming a problem for her since the huge increase during COVID lockdown. I quit for moral support.
My cousin definitely ramped up since COVID, but even he has now cut down to one celebratory “survived the week” Friday night cocktail.
With all that said, my white gen-x friends are drinking like it’s sophomore year greek week, every week. Except they can hold their liquor now. The amount of bottle in the recycling bin is absurd.
I’m 62 and mostly completely stopped drinking. I used to keep a well stocked bar, but now it just sits there empty except for glassware.
Friends who are in their early 50s and used to drink much heavier than me also mostly quit. She gets migraines and I think that’s a big reason (he probably also quit in support).
The only people I see drinking regularly are younger people on the golf course.
It’s funny you say they can hold their liquor better now. I’m in my early 40s and I used to drink excessively in my 20s. Now, I feel like just looking at a glass of wine gives me a hangover 😅
I cut back a lot in my early 30s and now I’m down to a couple of cocktails in the summer months. There are really excellent mocktails in grocery stores nowadays, it makes it so much easier to still enjoy the flavors.
What I mean by that is that it seems less like the sprint till you blackout drinkingof their youth, and more the “I’m always tipsy” ultramarathon.
My boomer dad died of dementia a few years ago. I strongly believe that alcohol was a factor in rapidly advancing his disease. Dementia scares the shit out of me, so I have basically quit drinking. I’m okay having a drink with friends a few times a year, but effectively only on special occasions.
I’m going through this very thing right now. My dad is 67. In the late stage of dementia. Married an alcoholic and was with her for 10 years. I’d say for a good 6 or 7 of those he drank heavily. Dementia has kicked his ass. It’s so horrific and just last week we got news he’s showing rapid decline. Like overnight he just couldn’t stand or talk, medical tests ruled out a stroke, UTI etc etc. He’s bounced back a little but not much. I’m so mad. And sad.
I’ve been there. I’m so sorry for what you are going through. It is extremely difficult. I developed a set of rules for myself with my dad. I don’t know if any of them will help you, but as I figured them out they helped me.
- Never argue with him about something he forgot. It really doesn’t matter that he may be wrong. His brain is failing him, so it is unfair to challenge him.
- Small lies are OK. “Yes Dad, I’ll see you tomorrow.” when you won’t see him for weeks. It comforted him in the moment and that’s where he lives now. Tomorrow he will not remember what you had said.
- No hospitals if at all possible. Especially no ER. They don’t do well with dementia patients. Dad was strapped to a bed at night during Covid. They aren’t equipped to deal with them and Dad was very confused. I stayed with him to try to help. It was the worst night of my life. He should have been home since his injuries were minor.
- No cops. Should be obvious, but he tried to drag Mom ‘home to keep her safe’ and ended up hurting her. She had no option but to call them and me. The cops beat me there, had tackled him, put him in cuffs, and sent him to the hospital.
- talk with him normally. He probably remembers a lot of your childhood. Just not what you said 3 minutes ago. It’s ok.
It’s all hard on everyone.
Thank you for the reply. These rules are ones I learned to follow as well. I had to tell my siblings it’s okay if he’s saying he has to go to work tomorrow, that he’s caught a huge fish yesterday etc … whatever it may be don’t correct him. They finally got the memo and things are smoother.
His primary doctor said he needed a colonoscopy and I said absolutely the hell not. I’ve had a few and they’re rough as fuck even when you’re fully capable of taking care of yourself. I told my siblings that was a non negotiable. No way is my dad being put through that, all the prep, leaving his safe space and being sedated? Insane.
I have a lot more common sense I guess you could say. Things come naturally to me on how to handle him with dignity. My brothers are kinda brash. They’ve learned to ask me how to handle things and it seems dad is happier and smiles more.
Sorry for the rambling. It’s just hard to deal with when it happens so early and you’re still young.
You aren’t rambling. And good on you for saying no to the colonoscopy. You are absolutely correct. My mom never really learned the rules I figured out. She’d challenge him on asking who she was. Because sometimes he’d forget. It really upset her, which I get. The challenge upset him and that would lead to things going downhill. I don’t think he necessarily knew who she was or I was specifically, but he knew that we were important to him. And honestly that’s all that mattered. Stay strong, take breaks, take turns with family. It will be difficult. Don’t wear yourself out.
My friend’s dad has wet brain from drinking. Seems similar to dementia.
alcohol does caused a version of dementia so im not surprised.
alcohol does cause dementia, how often did he drink?
From my reading ‘cause’ is too strong a word. My mother in law drank a lot until she died in her 90’s. She was sharp until her last week. Dad regularly drank a beer or three after work, but never more than that on a weekday. On the weekends they’d occasionally have parties and he’d get moderately drunk. He was never fall down drunk. I think the long term alcohol use was that contributing factor. My grandfather, his father, died at 96. The last 2 or so years of his life he had dementia. He drank when he was younger, but I think he quit by the time he was 50. I’m hoping to be like him as far as dementia goes.
I am one of those bridging the generation gap. I have siblings whom are older and part of Gen-X but I am technically a millennial born in 84. Well they are still drinkers but I quit 2 years ago and switched to weed. I have the peer pressure to still drink but I decline.
Your generation is as much about your cohort and where you were born as it is when you are born. Growing up with GenX siblings, especially if you grew up not on the coasts, would put you in the running for being GenX rather than a millennial.
For instance somebody born in 1995 who grew up in San Francisco would be closer to GenZ than somebody who was born in 1998 and grew up in rural Texas. There is always a transition gradient.
Gen-X is drinking more? When did we drink less? :)
