Well, you knew it was going to happen eventually. People have been profiting from addiction for quite a long time now, so it’s not exactly new that someone would take a look at America’s drinking problem and wonder, “How can I make money off that?” But there’s just something so grotesque about this particular marriage of “wellness” language, venture capital, and temperance. It feels like something Serena Van Der Woodsen would do.
Anecdotally, there does seem to be something happening with alcohol consumption amongst my cohort and the one below: I quit drinking last year. Several friends of mine quit either around the same time or a year or two before. I know two more people who’ve made resolutions to stop what little drinking they’ve been doing in this new year.
Only a couple of my friends label themselves alcoholics and have used a program like AA to get sober. I and some others were at some point probably “problem” drinkers, or at least had an unhealthy relationship with alcohol, but didn’t require a program—we stopped drinking because it made us feel bad.
Not just physically. Paranoia and anxiety began to follow me on nights where I’d merely had a single glass of beer. You can imagine on your own what the morning-after dread did for someone in the midst of a months-long suicidal episode.
You could maybe explain away Gen Y’s decreasing alcohol consumption with the fact that we’re Old and some of us are getting married and having children, though I saw enough binge-drinking among Marrieds and Child-Havers while doing the Centerville project to know that “life stage progression” isn’t necessarily the driver of what seems to be a genuine trend.
Not drinking is a good thing if drinking makes you feel bad. If you feel even somewhat dependent on alcohol, having a support system like a program to stop drinking is also a good thing. Unfortunately, programs like AA often come with religious baggage. Generations Y and Z tend to be less into religion, so AA is perhaps a less attractive option (though there are atheist chapters of AA). Starting a program that focuses on marginalized groups and frames sobriety as a self-care thing is not inherently bad, though I am naturally inclined to hate nearly every instance of “self-care” framing.
Here’s the problem: Putting up any kind of barrier to sobriety, especially if your program claims to be inclusive, is amoral.
You can wrap your mission statement in as much wellness language as you want. You can create terms like “sober-curious” and slogans like “Sober is the new black” to show the kids that you’re cool. But if you are charging people a sum like $647 to participate in your program, you are full of shit. You are a malignant outgrowth of late stage capitalism, and I hope you fail utterly in not just this endeavor, but all subsequent ones.
Anyway I hope everyone’s 2020 is off to at least an okay start.