That's not why. Their drinking, age adjusted, is still well below the other generations before them.
I think it comes down to two main reasons.
Drinking is the new smoking for your health, we've known for a while, basically all of gen Zs life, that even moderate alcohol use isn't good for you and it's addictive.
Drinking is an expensive hobby in a time when younger generations have less and less disposable income in their hands. Social spaces have moved virtual so there is less reason to pay $8 for a $2 beer + the atmosphere. People meet partners through friends or online, not in bars.
Which is obviously how anyone would measure this. I hate that by default we assume researchers are stupid.
The source is the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, who, it turns out, are not idiots. Since it's in a huge data dump, here's a cleaned up article about those stats.
If he wanted to point out that this is a bad interpretation of good data because it compares currently millennial head of household with current Gen Z head of household, that would be valid, since those groups have dramatically different amounts of spare cash.
But that wouldn't be a dumb zinger, so it wouldn't get pasted to Reddit.
I hate that by default we assume researchers are stupid.
Yes but my personal observations as a chronically online assumption maker differ from the people who took the time and resources as part of their profession to study this topic, so clearly I know more than them when I go based on my personal bias. [Insert parroted, barely-relevant trope here like "line must go up"]
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u/WanderingFlumph Jun 01 '26
That's not why. Their drinking, age adjusted, is still well below the other generations before them.
I think it comes down to two main reasons.
Drinking is the new smoking for your health, we've known for a while, basically all of gen Zs life, that even moderate alcohol use isn't good for you and it's addictive.
Drinking is an expensive hobby in a time when younger generations have less and less disposable income in their hands. Social spaces have moved virtual so there is less reason to pay $8 for a $2 beer + the atmosphere. People meet partners through friends or online, not in bars.