Sober curious is not sober

In America, the number of Gen Z adults who say they never drink has been rising for six years, according to the market research firm YPulse. Many of them seem to be choosing cannabis instead, though whether one is actually replacing the other is still argued over by researchers. I’m not going to settle that here.

I’m going to tell you what 25 years of addiction taught me, which is that swapping the substance is not the same as dealing with the itch.

First, a fair word. Drinking less is not a problem. For plenty of people, being sober curious is a sensible experiment. They notice that alcohol costs money, wrecks Sunday and doesn’t feel as good as it used to, so they try life with less of it. Good. That’s healthy, and I’m not sneering at it.

But sober curious is not sober. It’s a question, not an answer. It’s a trial with an exit clause, and the exit clause is the whole point. There’s nothing wrong with that, unless the drink was never the real problem.

For me it wasn’t. The drink was an exit. Bad day, bad feeling, bad memory, and there was a door right there. When I stopped, the itch didn’t go anywhere. It went looking for a new door. I swapped one for another and ended up running 500 miles a month around London, sometimes three or four runs a day. Healthier than the booze, I’ll give it that. Same itch, new address.

Plenty of people do the same thing. Booze for cannabis, cannabis for work, work for the gym, the gym for the next thing, and each swap gets called progress. From the outside it looks like growth. From the inside, nothing has been faced.

So here’s a test. Take away the thing you swapped in, whatever it is: cannabis, the vape, the run, the scroll, the work. Now sit through an ordinary evening with nothing in your hands. If that feels unbearable, it was never a choice. It was the exit.

Sober isn’t about what’s in your glass. It’s about what you can sit with when your hands are empty.

Curious is a fine place to start. It’s a terrible place to stop.