i’m talking about the mundane stuff, like how we still carry around a bunch of plastic cards or wait for water to boil in a kettle instead of instantly. or maybe just our collective obsession with short form video? keen to hear what makes you shake your head thinking about the future.
I think comparing it to tobacco might be a bit limited. Tobacco has had some stints of popularity, but the history of tobacco doesn’t even compare to the history of alcohol. There are theories that we’ve been drinking alcohol longer than we’ve been human coming from some interesting adaptations one of our pre-human ancestors developed with the ability to metabolize ethanol. It’s not a perfect theory, but it’s an interesting one.
Plenty of historical cycles too where society has pushed away alcohol and it always seems to come back. It’s interesting that prohibition was around 100 years ago and the temperance movement started about 100 years before that. Kinda feel like we’re just in one of those downturns and the next generation is going to have some serious ragers.
Maybe. I think the difference is that prohibition and the temperance movements were based on top-down authoritative control (at least as I understand it). Folks in charge forbade it, and people found ways to circumvent it–because they still wanted it. The younger generations today simply aren’t interested. It’s not being outlawed, it’s being left behind.
Add current research on top of that (and the messages young people receive based on that), and it might be in a serious decline for good. Or it could go the way of vinyl–a niche interest preserved by a dedicated community, but not mainstream. Or any number of things, who knows?
Temperance was led mostly by the protofeminists who wanted fewer drunk husbands beating their wives and then taken over by xenophobes and antipapists who realized that alcohol use was correlated with immigrant and catholic communities. At least at the start, it was very grassroots.