It’s bad news for the drinks industry, but it’s mainly bad news for people who think each generation is more feckless than the last: the number of drinkers among 16- to 24-year-olds has dropped sharply. All kinds of drinkers are dying out: the steady drinkers, the binge drinkers, the drinkers-in-training, the social drinkers the bus stop drinkers – the lot.
In a study by the Office for National Statistics, less than half of young people reported drinking anything in the previous week, compared with two-thirds of 45- to 64-year-olds – many of whom are in all likelihood under medical advice to please cut it out, or at least do the nation the favour of lying about it in surveys.
Various theories are floated: changes in religion and ethnicity, changes wrought by social media, student loans – which we’ll return to. But a report compiled by the Demos thinktank last year found health to be the most common reason given for this abstemiousness.
Health has got to them all, like a cult: they are also less likely to smoke, and the evidence of our own five senses gives us young people in hordes jogging, climbing, journeying eternally from one institution of wellness to another, serious-faced in Lycra, taking responsibility, counting footsteps, living the dream. They must look at previous generations, the lad and ladette (read “beer”) culture of the 90s, and wonder who on earth we thought we were.
There’s plenty to apologise for about the fin de siècle, and it can’t all be blamed on Tony Blair, whatever his biographers tell you. It was the end of ideology, the decade sincerity died. Feminists went underground, too postmodern (also, in fairness, too drunk) to explain that just because Margaret Thatcher was a woman it didn’t mean she was a passionate advocate of gender equality; and “girl power” was a poor substitute for female emancipation.
The legions of the “post-ironic” never had to account for their vapid agenda or explain the meaning of the term, since it would have been deeply passe to expect one. I say “their”; I mean “our”: there must have been postmodernism refuseniks, but I wasn’t one of them. It was a creed of puckish underachievement, personal debt, slacking and loafing, with authenticity rejected in favour of acerbic cynicism. The epic hangovers of its breakfast show DJs made national news.
It was, paradoxically, both trivial and destructive. But we never went jogging. Measuring your own recovery time, having a personal best: these were the niche concerns of the elite athlete, as irrelevant to the general youth population as blood doping. It would have been considered vain to the point of alienation to prioritise your workout over your social life. That may be a modern question for new media to answer: that as everyone is ever more on display standards of physical perfection are driven inexorably, needlessly, upwards.
But, crucially, we were without this mantra of personal responsibility, in which everyone must constantly strive towards self-sufficiency and self-improvement. It wasn’t because we hadn’t heard of it or didn’t understand it, or because Nike didn’t exist or British Military Fitness hadn’t been invented.
We all remembered Thatcher’s fascination with the “vigorous values” (energy, adventurousness, independence) over the “softer virtues” (humility, gentleness, sympathy). We had lived through the 80s, the decade in which self-sufficiency reached such an ugly apex of valorisation that it had its own, completely erroneous, catchphrase: greed is good.
We understood the fault line between those two visions of society: the one in which you parade your morals with rigorous self-discipline and concrete, measurable ambitions versus the one in which both morals and ambitions were for losers – and chose the second. It wasn’t perfect, but it was better than the first.
Underpinning this new seriousness, this new competitiveness, is a very grave set of circumstances: student debt will change for ever the way 16- to 24-year-olds live, and will continue to do so until we find another way to finance education.
I don’t think debt has a particular bearing on alcohol budget but it drives behaviour in more profound ways: people can still afford a pint, but they can’t afford to fall behind. To embrace risk, to have a sense of freedom and possibility, a faith in failure as a learning curve, an interest in activities – drinking, say, or chatting – whose productivity can’t be measured, perhaps because they aren’t productive at all, is plain illogical when you’re living in the economic conditions of this generation.
Under the guise of saving them from the burden of the national debt, we have as a society saddled each one, individually, with impossible personal finances, from life-altering debts to career-changing rents and scant or, at the start, nonexistent wages.
The solution is possibly not, at this stage, to get them all drinking more. But we should recognise in trends like these the fact that conditions for this generation are worse. The reasons are systemic, have nothing to do with personal responsibility and cannot be answered by fitness, however extreme.
The drinks industry seeks to solve the conundrum of the monastic twentysomething by “premiumisation” (getting them to spend more on the few drinks they will buy). We have to understand it as a challenge broader than the market, recognise that all of our welfare is all of our business and, out of penance for the decade that made fellowship a joke, show some solidarity now.
