Thing is- it’s the boomers that pushed things like the 21 to drink laws and the absurdly strict enforcement of them (like sending a parent to jail if their kid has a party).
You guys spent a few decades decrying teenage drinking, making it hard for teens to drink. And now you all are shocked when kids do something else.
Don’t forget- nicotine is 18+ not 21+. So chances are every high schooler has a friend or a sibling that can get them vapes.
Vapes are small. Many don’t look like anything in particular to someone who doesn’t know what they are. And they are easy to hide, easy to conceal, easy to transport, AND easy to use throughout the day.
So for a substance for kids to get into, it’s got a lot of advantages over alcohol.Plus which vaping is much more common to do alone. Kids are spending far less time on in-person social interactions now (probably because boomers flipped out over stranger danger).
Older Millennial here, they are right, too bad people my age didn’t get the memo. Never understood, even back in school, why getting plastered is celebrated.
Because… well… points around in multiple directions
That’s not going to make anything better though. You’ll just go down a path of addiction and self-destruction. Plus it’s expensive.
Sadly, found out my niece has been getting blacked out drunk in college repeatedly. In one of the videos she showed me, she probably consumed more alcohol in a 5-second clip than I have in 2 years. Just a bottle of Tito’s, and she just chugged it.
Vaping isn’t a great alternative. Pick your poison. Fapping on the other hand… don’t sleep on edible cannabis either
That’s something I applaud the younger generations for. I’m just hoping that it’s not due to not socializing in person.
From what I’ve seen in the UK, it’s not that the youth particularly see temperance as a virtue it’s more than unless you’re going to a Spoons pints are £6 if not more these days. Ket is big in Britain too, on account of it being cheap especially compared to pints. They don’t want to be filmed while hammered and immortalised on tiktok either.
I feel it’s a common problem that economic factors are often attributed to moral ones.
The main reason I’ve decided to abstain from alcohol is because I’ve seen first-hand what alcoholism does to a person. I’ve don’t want to end like my dad.
Same! I’m Gen-X and promised myself at age 4 when I witnessed my dad was always stumbling into the house drunk & ill & scary, I have no desire to put any poison into my body. Still never have and never will.
If alcohol guarantees death at 60 like my alcoholic narcissistic pos dad, I think I’ll just keep drinking. Other drugs too because I’m not a fucking square like he was :). If you have someone (even if it’s just you) to protect from yourself, I completely understand. edit: shit, if you have another good reason, that’s cool too. I’m drunk.
Yeah. I’m not a Boomer I’m GenX, but as I get older I come to realize - poisoning myself with alcohol is becoming more & more appealing. Life sucks.
Millennial here, been drinking heavy for 20+ years. Young generation missing out. But at the same time I respect the decision
We found better poisons.
Tide pods?
Too awful tasting.
Well… you would know
Sleep aids work but suck if you fail. That’s what I tried doing.
will do. starting… now
They will take pills in their 30s to fight depression anyway
we must know different people
This is all part of the puritanical shift that’s happening in some Gen Z circles, this post can’t be talking about millennials. I saw an article a few months ago that stated millennials were the drunkest generation and that while Gen Z as a whole drink less there has been a strong uptick in their consumption recently. Can’t imagine why they might have started drinking more, well besides you know the everything happening in the world
If weed is legal drinking goes down.
I wonder if it’s people living in weed “dry” states that are the current outliers.
Well here in the Netherlands it was Covid that did in the student drinking culture and apparently it just never bounced back.
Its most probably also inflation. Now i spend 2-3x more
This is exactly it. South Carolina is full of sloppy alcoholics and the alcohol lobby spends a lot of money to keep it that way. They’ll be the last in the country to legalize.
Texas is always in a race for last place too
That’s absolutely part of it. Here in Wisconsin the Tavern League has outsized influence and we still don’t have legal weed and we lead the country in drinking. Although I’ve been seeing more and more of those THC drinks. I’m not sure what kind of loophole those slip through, but they seem popular.
Weed drinks and gummies, largely. I can pick them up at woodmans in the liquor section, though come November I may need to stock up
The hemp loophole
Brought to you by a senate who didnt read their own bill in 2018
man do i miss woodmans
Damn y’all don’t even have medical, always thought you guys would follow us here in Michigan relatively quickly as our states have very similar politics but I didn’t think about big beer lobbying.
Is there a line of dispensaries on the border in illinois then like we have here for all the ohio and indiana people coming to buy weed?
We’re surrounded by legal states too. We buy their weed and they buy our fireworks.
Yeah, at least there’s one set up in South Beloit. It’s more expensive than Michigan though and has a much stricter limit on what you can buy as a non resident. We went that route before, but the grey area stuff I can get at the grocery store is much more convenient. I’d do Michigan but it’s a bit farther of a drive than Illinois. Maybe I’ll grab stuff next time I head to pictured rocks
Why don’t we have it? Wisconsin got gerrymandered to hell for a decade. The Supreme Court is now left leaning and is breaking the gerrymander, so hopefully we can get legalization of some sort soon
They’re derived from hemp, which became federally legal a few years back. It’s the same chemical (d9-THC) that’s found in cannabis indica and sativa, but it’s present in such low quantities in hemp that it takes wayyyyyy more plant matter to extract enough.
You’d think it would be the active ingredient that is regulated, not the actual plant.
It is! THC is the regulated chemical. delta-9 is a different molecule which was made federally legal as a result of allowing hemp farming
If delta-9 is a different molecule but still an active ingredient, then not all the active ingredients are regulated. And these “thc” drinks are lying.
It’s possible they’ve only recently started earning enough to be able to afford booze.
A chunk of them still aren’t old enough to buy alcohol. Of course the stats will go up as they become old enough to buy it.
In this economy?
Moonshine is about to make a glorious comeback
Lol I remember that being a thing with millennials 10 years ago
I never understood why
But then I remembered millenials (and I am one who probably leaned toward a hipster when I was young) love old timey weird stuff
drives away on his penny farthing
I made it in college because I was broke as fuck.
Fair enough
Gen Z is lost to the manosphere and homesteading. Those are used to push right wing puritanical propaganda. I really hope they snap out of it.
…homesteading?
There’s a massive uptic in what is functionally decentralized religious cult homesteading
Homesteading on its own sounds good. But when you look into why it’s catching on right now. It’s basically just religious indoctrination, manospehere, paranoia, racism, sexism, and conspiracy theories.
The “crunchy life style” is a big source of this.
It’s basically living off grid, eating what you raise. It mainly draws in women by pushing traditional gender roles propaganda.
Acting a fool in public today means high chance someone records a video of you at your worst.
I would doubt that fact about millennials without a source to back it up. It just doesn’t track with experience, but I could definitely be wrong.
Agreed, the only people I know who drink regularly are boomers and I as a millennial only ever drink when I’m around those boomers.
used to drink alot when i had no future prospects.
I still do, but I used to too
Read an article a bit ago. Take away: Millennials drink the most but largely kicked the nicotine thing. Gen Z have brought back nicotine in a big way, even causing a resurgence in chewing tobacco. Its all just homosapiens coping, so I say pick your poison and keep doing your best.
Its all just homosapiens coping,
Exactly. Want to actually fight drugs? Give people something to hope for, and opportunities to do better things than constantly numb oneself with various substances to cope with a soulless nightmare society.
I notice it’s a good barometer for society’s health: Once all the jobs start laying off again and the costs go up and up and up and we get into some other war, everybody starts reaching for the stims to get through their jobs and the narcotics to find respite from everything else.
Just constant stress and pressure in the very air. It sucks…
Which is weird, cause I can drop drinking no problem, I’m on the nicotine train for life though, 35yo.
That’s interesting. I do not have any desire to start smoking, but I probably do drink more than I should. I don’t drink daily, but if I have one I’m probably having 2-4. I’m a hair holder than you are fwiw.
And those not doing nicotine are probably doing THC instead. There is a measurable negative impact of legalizing marijuana on alcohol sales
I would assume marketing is also the influence on that decision. Seemingly gen alpha seem focused on vaping instead, so times are changing - not necessarily for the better.
Yeah millennials are like the most alcoholic generation.
You know what else we also didn’t poison ourselves with at anywhere NEARLY as high a level as boomers did? Lead.
Now we just consume lead trough plant based protein supplements
https://www.npr.org/2025/10/16/nx-s1-5576294/protein-powder-lead-consumer-reports
But that’s mostly because the US supplements industry is an unregulated disaster.
“trough”? That’s a new one to add to this thing:
English is a tough language. It can be mastered through thorough thought though, while you sit next to a trough.
That is still a very worrying sentence when the only safe level is 0
Safe level is zero but there’s a gradient of severity
of course. I’m alluding to the fact that while theres been a significant improvement, we still in many places consume worrying amounts of lead.
originally i wanted to write that we didn’t have lead exposure, but …
Flint Michigan. and that’s actually not even the worst municipal water system by far. That’s merely the one that got a little more publicity than most.
It’s nice that we don’t have fumes from leaded gasoline, generally speaking–that it’s no longer the standard and most household sector products that use fuel don’t take leaded gasoline.
Yep. I don’t hear many folks talk about Jackson, Mississippi’s lead water problem. You’d think that being the capital of Mississippi that it would be talked about more.
The piper is coming. No I’m not defending alcohol, but the level of drug addiction among our young people is shocking. The amount of digital addiction is shocking. I work in youth crisis so I am not talking on my ass, most young people are addicts now. So it’s all fun to talk down about boomers who drank but holy fuck is this generation ever screwed.
While what you seen is definitely real, it may not be as bad as what you see as you work in the field of youth crisis. You see it so often as that is your job and it can skew your findings to be more to the negative side as people that are not having those issues likely aren’t going to a youth crisis center and therefore are not around you. Again, it is very much a thing, but you do have some unintended bias as that is what you do for a living.
You are assuming that my experience is limited to youth crisis.
I have 11 years of experience working in addiction,… My response to your cynicism is this… You can only truly understand the scope of the greater issues on all levels … And with all generations, once you’ve worked in the field. And it helps to have lived experience.
Edit: oh yeah I know, I’ll up vote the uninformed opinion, and I’ll downvote the person who works in the field and is an educated and trained and expert /s
If it helps, I gave you both updoots because the discussion was enlightening and mostly productive. :)
Go to your settings > scroll down to “Show Scores” > uncheck all that shit. You don’t need it. It’s a vestigial dark pattern from commercial social media design to keep you checking how well your comments are “scoring” as if that made any sense.
It should never have been surfaced to frontend of Lemmy.
Having a coping mechanism because we are not hopeful about the future is standard from my experience
Truth.
And that’s why it’s really not a contest, and we must forgive our parents’ generation and a few going back from there.
Right? At least I can drink and work.
Wait…
I don’t want to have an automatic yeah no yeah no back and forth with you but… I suspect I’m much older than you and I can attest here that most people, even in professional roles, were hammered all day. They were as “functional” as this current generation is on ridiculous amounts of weed, psychedelics, and uppers… That is to say, not as functional as they could be. There’s no “what’s worse” contest here; the choice of drug doesn’t change the underlying issue. I’m a recovered addict and I work in the field of addiction so I’m speaking from the heart.
I just injected another marijuana in your honor good sir /s
And yet it didn’t make you funny, weird 🤷
Nope, everything else was though
Not all of them are even old enough to buy it yet.
That never stopped me, when I was a teenager.
