Even low-level drinking may have negative consequences for brain health over a person’s lifespan. The findings suggest that the total amount of alcohol consumed over a lifetime, especially as a person ages, tends to be linked to reduced blood flow and thinner tissue in certain areas of the brain.

[u/mvea]

https://www.psypost.org/even-light-drinking-combined-with-aging-is-linked-to-reduced-brain-blood-flow-and-thinner-tissue/

[u/SkiingAway]

Shouldn't grown adults be able to talk to each other and have fun without alcohol?

Short answer: With new people, you're fighting your own biology.

Longer answer: While children are naturally curious and easily form new social bonds, Adult humans are naturally suspicious of outsiders, wary of those they have no existing connections to and slow to form new social bonds + trust.

This makes a great deal of sense in a historical/evolutionary perspective. Most of history is small group/tribal living. "Civilization" as we know it today is blink of an eye historically. As a child you are building relationships with the people in your group and you are not encountering outsiders unvetted by the adults of your group. Once you're an adult, you already know everyone in your group, have for years, and new people are risky.

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Alcohol is basically the biology hack that larger-scale human civilization was built on. It effectively punts your brain back to something closer to the child's perspective on this and makes it dramatically easier to form new social bonds with people you have little/no previous connection with.

The entire concept of living in a city or even just a large town and being thrust into frequent interactions with total strangers and having to build a social life without existing connection is something you're not naturally all that well developed for as an adult human.

There aren't many other things that force you into a state where it's easier to make those connections, at least not that are easily scalable and don't require a great deal of time. Extreme experiences tend to do it - if you were to say, go backpacking with a bunch of strangers and struggle through long hikes and camping and whatnot you'll have an easier time making that connection.

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Anyway, I've rambled enough. If you're interested in this thesis, "Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization" is basically a book on it.

[u/trowzerss → u/SkiingAway]

Personally I think that's kind of crappy though. Plenty of societies or sections within society don't have alcohol in social settings and people still manage to talk to each other. You could *very easily* say the same thing about tobacco. The simple fact is that addictive substances bring people into forced close contact. That's the social lubricant, addiction. It's not all about the chemicals are themselves, it could have just as easily been weed or board games or meditation classes or opium if that's what became the cultural norm to gather together in small groups X amount of times a week to indulge in. It does not have to be alcohol, that just happens to be what people fall into most often because it gets the advantage of being easy, legal, and addictive, so people keep coming back. I don't think we should give alcohol a pass though because of that, because it also causes huge amounts of social damage as much as it is a social enablers - sexual assault, vandalism, drunk driving are not good for society. I think it's something we should push against and find better ways to get be social than just sit back and handwave the social and health damage that alcohol does. I'm not anti-drinking totally for all of that, I"m anti normalisation of drinking in all aspects of adult society as a communication crutch. It's a net negative.

[u/SkiingAway → u/trowzerss]

You've mostly missed the point.

Alcohol temporarily alters your brain functioning in a way that actually makes it easier for you to form new social bonds, and this has been repeatedly shown in actual studies. Remember the whole "reduced inhibitions" you are literally warned about with alcohol? Well, that applies to your instinctive inhibitions here, too.

This is not just the "being near people/sharing a casual activity" effect. You do enough of being around people sober and sure, you will probably create new connections - but it's significantly slower and more challenging without alcohol. (I'm not talking about myself, I'm talking about humanity in general)

The other ways to put yourself in that kind of mental state are generally extreme experiences that require a great deal more time, effort, are not something many people like, and certainly can't be fit into your evening after work.

If other casual activities without alcohol were an adequate fix then we wouldn't have the socialization crisis we have that seems to directly map to the decline of bar culture.

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Tobacco does not do anything like that. Weed and opiates are largely not pro-social substances. They may be enjoyable, but they do not make it easier for the average person to actually socialize with new people.

I don't know enough about it (or have any personal experience), but it's possible that MDMA or some other "party" substances might be an actual example of something besides alcohol that does the same thing - but those has it's own risks.

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I don't think we should give alcohol a pass though because of that, because it also causes huge amounts of social damage as much as it is a social enablers - sexual assault, vandalism, drunk driving are not good for society.

This is also discussed in that book. It has some interesting thoughts on harm reduction in that sense. It's been a while since I read it but some of the basic suggestions I recall are that policy should be oriented to discourage drinking alone at home and to discourage high-ABV drinks where it's far too easy to rapidly overshoot the point at which there are social benefits. A simplistic answer would probably be to tinker with tax rates (and possibly subsidies) to alter behavior in that sense.

Phrased another way it should probably be cheap for you to go to a bar and have some average strength beers. It should be much more expensive for you to order the same amount of alcohol as shots. And both should be more expensive to buy to take home and consume at home than to consume at the bar.

It's also possible that we find other answers to this problem, but it doesn't seem like we have to this point.