Young Brits are no longer drinking – so what will a Saturday night look like for future generations? | Emma Brockes

IIt’s November 2024 and my American Puritan children are attending their first fall fair at their new English primary school. There’s a laser show, hot dogs and a raffle. There is also a bar for parents, which makes my two stop by. Newcomers to this country experience many cultural differences, but perhaps none as stark as this: “Is that alcohol?” said my child, looking at me like a little member of the Taliban. “At something at school?” I’m at this point with two Baileys hot chocolates and giving him a smile 10% wider than necessary. Yes, my darlings; welcome to Britain.

Or at least welcome, perhaps, to the last vestiges of what Britain once was. For some time now, we’ve known anecdotally that people in this country are drinking less than they used to. My own Generation Where the anomalies fall most clearly is in the generations below us, among young people whose behavior differs from ours at their age. This week, official confirmation came in the form of a survey of 10,000 people commissioned by the NHS, which found that almost a quarter (24%) of adults in England did not drink alcohol in 2024, compared to just under a fifth (19%) in 2022.

The bottom line, of course, is that it’s a good thing. Not for the drinks industry, obviously, but for the NHS, and also for people trying to maximize their life expectancy, which is all of us. Today we spend our free time with rigorous self-optimization through the application of data. That’s why, after reading an article this morning about foods that reduce cancer, I bought a “wheat, lentil, and green vegetable salad” that I definitely won’t eat. What is a wheat berry? Nobody knows. The fact is that we are trying.

If I sound sarcastic, it’s not intentional. I like not drinking. And it’s important not to join the ranks of those people from a generation above mine who, in the 1990s, when the smoking ban took hold in the United States, wrote long articles arguing that cigarettes represented the country’s buccaneer spirit and that, therefore, smokers were more interesting than people who drank “green juice.” They were, objectively, the worst people in the world, and while no one likes teetotalers, it’s important not to turn into them.

I’m more interested in what youth culture will look like without alcohol. The results of the new survey, commissioned as part of the England Health Survey, found that women are slightly less likely to drink than men and that, across all age groups, young people are the most sober. In the 2022 NHS survey, Generation Z was reported to contain the lowest proportion of frequent drinkers (10%), compared to 34% of 55 to 64 year olds and 37% of 65 to 74 year olds. Some of this has to do with the cost of living, but most of it is probably cultural. It’s just not cool to be wasted.

In my own case, the calculation of discounts had less to do with cultural trends and more to do with the sudden, sad collapse of my metabolism, as well as the fact that I had changed primary care doctors. During the intake interview a few years ago, my new doctor noted what everyone in my family for three generations had died from, before giving me a very stern look. “If I were you, I wouldn’t drink,” she said. “No way.” It was hard, but she was right.

And yet my imagination continues to falter. I look at my two and wonder what a Saturday night out will be like when they’re 25 if it doesn’t end with them lying half on the couch crying as Elaine Paige does the big ballad from Chess. Where will their war stories come from? (A real war, probably, but let’s not think about that.) What will they remember when they’re my age?

There’s nothing funny about my friend who vomited into a heating vent and, for the remainder of her tenancy, couldn’t get the sick smell out of her apartment. Standing, gently rocking, in the middle of a busy state road, trying to strategize how to get to the other side that doesn’t involve putting one foot in front of the other isn’t fun either. I told this story to my children and they were horrified. “You could have DIE,” they said, which was precisely the teaching moment I was looking for.

In the meantime, the new findings are no reason to rest on our laurels, since, even with these reduced figures, we are still enough of a nation of alcoholics to cost England’s NHS £4.9 billion a year in alcohol-related illness. In the spirit of that: I’m really looking forward to eating my salad. I’m going to put an egg in there because, although not drinking is extremely good for your health, as everyone knows, it’s actually protein that will save us.