The Lindy Guide to Drinking

It’s February.

Dry January has come to an end. Did you partake in it?

I heard about Dry January this year more than any previous year, my friends casually mentioning to me they are not drinking. There’s a fundamental change in how younger generations (and plenty of older folks, too) are relating to alcohol recently. This isn’t just a coincidence, it’s part of a broader cultural shift away from drinking.

We're watching drinking culture transform in real time. It’s subtle. If you go out, you’ll notice bars are still buzzing and busy on Saturday nights.

But the numbers are telling another story: young people are drinking dramatically less.

Alcohol companies are still making great profits. But if you look underneath the surface you’ll see why, a fifth of adults account for an estimated 90% of alcohol sales volumes in the U.S. Alcohol companies make their profits off addicts. But what’s going to happen in the future when more people opt out of drinking?

What we’ve all noticed anecdotally, now with data, non-alcoholic drinks are surging in popularity. Almost every brand has started their own non-alcoholic beer in the last two years. It’s a concentrated marketing effort.

The numbers are startling. Wine sales have plummeted from their historic highs.

Spirits, long considered recession-proof, saw their first decline in nearly 30 years in 2023. But the most dramatic shifts are happening in traditional drinking cultures.

It’s not just a United States trend. Young people are drinking less around the globe.

In France, the birthplace of wine culture, red wine consumption has fallen 90% since the 1970s.

Germany, a country where beer is quite literally part of the cultural identity, is seeing historic declines in consumption. Even their famous beer halls are serving more non-alcoholic options than ever before.

Why are young people drinking less?

The reasons behind the decline are complex, but it’s clear as to why this is happening:

1) The rise of Marijuana. The drug is legal in nearly half of all U.S. states for recreational use. Daily or near-daily ("DND") use of marijuana increased from less than 1 million Americans in 1992 to about 18 million in 2022, surpassing daily or near daily drinkers for the first time ever

2) Alcohol tends to be a social drug, even for young people, so part of the decline in underage drinking could be related to less in-person socializing. The sudden and dramatic rise of alone time in America.

3) The Health Angle. There’s been a recent onslaught with the media and big influencers telling you that alcohol is going to kill you of cancer if you drink it. I’m always skeptical of these claims, as moderate drinking as been around for thousands and thousands of years and we have survived all that time.

But we live in a more health conscious era now, and there is a concerted effort to treat alcohol like cigarettes in the past. It does have an effect.

4) The end of work being social. Long lunches, happy hours, drinks with clients, half the job happened over a cocktail. Now, people sit at their desks, eyes locked on screens, barely talking. Remote work killed the post-work drink. So did the rise of deep focus.

Besides, no one wants to wake up groggy when their job demands total attention. Drinking used to signal success, a way to show you belonged. Now, success means self-discipline, a sharp mind, optimizing every hour. Slack replaced small talk. The rituals that made drinking part of work disappeared, and no one really noticed.

Changes Are Visible

You can already start to see the changes in drinking culture. Did you notice how Young people pay for tabs at bars? They close out after each drink.

Drinking alcohol is changing. Maybe that isn’t a terrible thing. but it shouldn’t go away. For one thing, what are we going to replace it with? I doubt everyone will just go “sober”. Alcohol will be replaced with some non-lindy drug. Although alcohol does come with risk, it also is time-tested to be part of society for thousands of years and not destroy it or alter it in some strange way.

But maybe from the destruction of contemporary drinking we can build up a Lindy drinking culture. Start over. Get rid of some of the negative aspects of drinking. We already have a lot of literature on how we are supposed to drink. Like Plato’s thoughts on how wine can make life better. 

In This Newsletter

We can incorporate a better version of drinking for future generations, by keeping the benefits of alcohol and disregarding the negatives.

1) The Hidden Intelligence of Alcohol

2) Cut out Spirits

3) In Praise of Day Drinking

4) Moderation Is Always the Goal

5) Drinking Helps Courtship

6) Hangovers Only Happen If Your Life is Not Good

7) Use Drunkenness Strategically

Alcohol and Creativity

While modern culture emphasizes sobriety for performance, traditional wisdom understood alcohol's subtle benefits when used properly.

At low doses, alcohol has unique effects that can enhance certain kinds of performance and creativity. The science is fascinating: moderate alcohol consumption relaxes muscles and reduces overthinking, what some people call "paralysis by analysis."

Where coffee sharpens our analytical mind, a small amount of alcohol can quiet our inner critic, allowing us to access flow states more easily. It's why artists have long used alcohol to break through creative blocks, and why some traditions incorporate it into activities requiring intuitive understanding rather than analytical precision.

This creates an interesting divide: for tasks requiring pure computation or analysis, like accounting, standardized tests, or chess, caffeine is your ally. But for activities demanding creativity, social intelligence, or fluid movement, a modest amount of alcohol might actually improve performance by bypassing our tendency to overthink.

Sometimes, peak performance isn't about heightened awareness, it's about getting out of our own way. Traditional cultures understood this distinction between tasks that benefit from intense focus and those that flourish under gentle relaxation.

Avoid Spirits

Not all alcohol is created equal. Traditional drinking cultures primarily relied on fermented beverages, wine, beer, cider, rather than distilled spirits.

Distilled spirits is rather new to the scene. Fermented drinks come with natural limits. At 4-14% alcohol content, beer and wine work with your body's natural pacing mechanisms. You feel full before you get too drunk. Your body processes the alcohol gradually. The experience is self-regulating.

Spirits fundamentally bypass these natural safeguards. At 40% or higher alcohol content, hard liquor shortcuts thousands of years of evolved human-alcohol interaction. It's like the difference between eating an orange and mainlining vitamin C, the delivery mechanism matters.

Many ancient civilizations, from the Greeks and Romans to medieval Europeans, emphasized wine and beer as their primary alcoholic beverages. Spirits, by contrast, were often reserved for medicinal or ritualistic purposes rather than daily consumption. The shift toward high-proof liquors in modern times correlates with more problematic drinking patterns, including alcoholism and social instability.

In Praise of Day Drinking

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