The Year is 2034. New Year’s Eve, December 31st rolls around.
You’re gearing up to go out for the night, but you haven’t pregamed. In fact, there’s no alcohol in your house.
After showering, instead of cracking a bottle of wine open to sip on while getting ready, you’re sipping a Poppi and grabbing a bathing suit.
You’re not going to a party with champagne and endless hors d'oeuvres.
You’re meeting up with some friends to go to a “Wellness bar” to watch the ball drop.
Instead of drinking until you can’t see, waking up to start the year feeling like shit, and literally wasting the first day of the year like so many of us used to, you’re going to sweat out toxins in a red light sauna, dance and mingle with some locals at a silent disco, and have dinner with some antioxidant mocktails.
This is the future I envision for us once we finally start taking our health more seriously.
Did the new format of newsletter catch you off guard?
Don’t worry, it’s purely experimental for today.
I recently had both clients and colleagues tell me late last week that they were dreading the end of January.
Not because it flew by.
Not because there was some huge deadline in February.
No, just about all of them told me they had anxiety about returning to regularly drinking.
To which I, laughingly, responded:
“Who says you have to?”
This phenomenon — the long-awaited awareness about social pressure that more people are [[[just now]]] somehow starting to feel — is part of a larger social trend I’m noticing:
That abstinence from alcohol is starting to fall in line as a social trend similar to losing weight post-pandemic.
Frequent alcohol consumption is no longer a badge of honor. If anything, some are feeling shame for it, even when they’re not speaking with their trainer.
The only difference between the 2022-and-beyond, pharmaceutical-fueled fat loss craze and the current mindset shift toward better drinking habits is that the latter has 0 drawbacks.
No indigestion and loss of muscle mass.
No prescription that costs thousands of dollars and no gossiping at brunch about “who’s on it” versus who’s not.
No, abstaining from alcohol derives nothing but better health, and the zeitgeist is beginning to recognize it as mainstream.
What else comes with the countrywide followthrough of abstinence, you ask?
More investment in health and wellness from the private sector, for one.
The make-believe scenario I painted in the first section of the newsletter is actually not-so-far-off from make believe. In fact, some of them already exist.
People are already flocking to hyperbaric chamber lounges and massage spas doubling as hangout spots, and even though you’re probably judging those friends now who’ve tried it, you’re also probably noticing they’re becoming more normalized.
This is because people are finally realizing that “balancing” healthy activity with reckless activity — like binge-drinking on weekends, gluttonous eating (looking at you this weekend, Super Bowl party hosts), and late-night movie outings full of candy and popcorn — is a zero sum game.
The argument for “balance” has been flipped on it’s head because coupling the above activities with strenuous gym sessions is not “balance.” That is, unless you are balancing the scale at a net-zero for health improvement.
The truth is we spend a lot of our youth on that balance beam instead of on the jungle gym. By that, I mean we spend most of our 20’s and 30’s at net zero, instead of thinking of health as a “climb,” an ambitious task for which each time we return to the park, we should aim higher.
Then, by the time we get to our late 30’s and 40’s, we are stuck in metabolism limbo.
Weight that we want to drop doesn’t come off as easily.
The changes in our body we would see in just days if we fasted or trained hard in our 20’s don’t happen as quickly any more (if at all).
This is not by accident.
The body can tolerate a lot of harm, inflammation, processed food, alcohol, and other poison. Think of the worst-case scenarios — those who are plagued by auto-immune issues like psoriasis, arthiritis, or ulcerative colitis, or more vicious ailments like alcoholism and type II diabetes — the body doesn’t just give way easily.
While these are the far-end of the spectrum in terms of bodily dysfunction, even the minor dysfunctions like not losing weight quickly, indigestion and acne are frustrating.
There is a correlation between these minor dysfunctions and a lack of care about how we treat out body.
That’s why by 2035, I think we’ll have flipped the switch on what caring for ourselves really mean.
Ozempic showed me that we can be scared straight very quickly about our health and we’ll do almost anything for a quick ticket to better biomarkers.
I think the recent research on alcohol and cancer correlation is turning the tide on how we view drinking, smoking, and other activities we once thought benign even just five years ago.
So it’s not a far cry to suggest some bars might go out of business in the next decade.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw more Golden Sol type spas (see above) open up across the country.
Like every new trend that takes place across the country, this will take time. Early adopters will be the big metropolitan areas, and then the influence will bleed out into the rural areas.
I give it 5-8 years before we start to see a lot of it.
So, if you’re second guessing your abstinence right now and thinking, “why would I go back to drinking after Dry January?”
Don’t worry.
You’re not alone.
One Quote About Abstinence to Start The Week
“Complete abstinence is easier than perfect moderation.”
Consider this:
It might be easier to drop something altogether than try to “not binge” every so often.
Ask someone who’s been sponsored and done a twelve-step program.
Something to think about.