The positive social aspect of drinking is represented in this 19th century painting by Peder Severin Krøyer: Hip, Hip, Hurrah! Artists’ Party, Skagen.Gothenburg Museum of Art, Sweden
Benjamin Leszcz is a writer and the co-founder of Wilda, an alcoholic beverage company based in Prince Edward County, Ont.
On Ikaria, a small Greek island in the Aegean Sea, Dry January does not exist.
While millions across North America and Britain atone for their holiday sins with a month of alcoholic abstinence, Ikarians continue about life as usual, gathering nightly in homes and tavernas to play cards or gossip, and to share carafes of homemade wine. For some Ikarian communities, January also includes panagiria: traditional, all-night feasts featuring singing, dancing, boiled goat meat – and plenty of wine.
Dry January simply wouldn’t fit into the calendar here. Fortunately, moderate, year-round drinking seems to work for these island people. Alcoholism is rare; Ikarians are singularly vital. Ikaria – said to be the birthplace of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine – is a “Blue Zone,” a region famous for its people’s longevity. Proportionally, this rocky island has more centenarians than virtually anywhere on the planet.
Ikarian life seems optimized for longevity. Natural exercise abounds, with gardens to dig and steep stairs to climb. Meals are legume-heavy, sourced from the garden; family structures are strong; and virtually everyone – including 80 per cent of men aged 65 to 100 – has an active sex life. Communal life is robust; everyone knows everyone, and socializing, often with wine, is a daily affair. Nobody knows exactly why Ikarians live so long, but what they’re doing is clearly working. In this way, Ikarians demonstrate that alcohol cannot merely be part of a long, heathy life – it can cause it. It’s an essential truth that Dry January misses altogether.
The non-profit Alcohol Change UK formally launched Dry January in 2013, and the campaign’s star has risen steadily since. In Canada last year, 46 per cent of Gen Z and 20 per cent of millennials participated. Dry January’s rise has coincided with the explosive growth of wellness culture, the pandemic-fuelled surge in problem drinking, and a vibe shift toward what the British writer Ruby Warrington calls being “sober-curious.” A growing chorus of experts – such as the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction, which issued last year’s two-drink-a-week guideline – are advising that the safest amount of alcohol to consume is none. Last year, the second-most shared episode of any podcast, according to Apple, was the Huberman Lab’s “What Alcohol Does to Your Body, Brain & Health.” Per its host, Andrew Huberman, a nutritional supplement peddler and neuroscientist, “There’s essentially no use of alcohol that’s health-promoting, except maybe cleaning a wound if you are out in the woods.”
Many Dry Januarians treasure the custom, enjoying improved sleep, increased energy and diminished credit card bills. Some are enticed by the mythical allure of the cleanse, which blends metaphors from religious purification and plumbing. Dry January defies best practices vis-a-vis new habit formation – it’s not designed to be sustainable – though some participants nonetheless experience a durable reduction in consumption for six months or longer. In the best case, Dry January opens the door for problem drinkers to reconsider booze altogether.
Unquestionably, Dry January meets the moment. Like Movember and the Ice Bucket challenge, it’s a catchy brand making an achievable demand, and it plays well on social media. More deeply, Dry January fills a void, offering structure in a society that lacks robust drinking norms. Unlike in Ikaria, North American society fails to offer a healthy picture of when and how to drink. “The consequences of that failure are considerable,” writes Malcolm Gladwell, “because, in the end, culture is a more powerful tool in dealing with drinking than medicine, economics, or the law.”
Dry January sidesteps questions of culture. Instead, it channels the self-care ethos, premised on the notion that well-being is a strictly personal pursuit. Dry January reflects an atomized culture of self-optimization – of bespoke diets and Fitbits and basal metabolic rates. In a recent CTV feature on the rise of non-alcoholic beverages, one entrepreneur described the sobriety movement succinctly: “We care more about ourselves than ever before.”
It’s an essential truth: Throughout history, alcohol has always been a fundamentally social tool. According to UBC historian Edward Slingerland, the author of Drunk, alcohol’s social utility basically explains its continued existence. Given booze’s link to poor decision-making, violence, illness and catastrophic accidents, natural selection should have weeded out the drinkers by now. But, writes Dr. Slingerland, “Getting drunk … over evolutionary time, helped individuals to survive and flourish, and cultures to endure and expand.” By suppressing our prefrontal cortexes – the cautious, risk-averse part of our minds – alcohol enables us to build trust, relationships and vibrant civilizations.
For millennia, alcohol has been a consistent presence at parties of all sorts. Drawings at Göbekli Tepe – 12,000-year-old settlements in modern-day Turkey, believed to offer a key to understanding early human civilization – seem to depict booze-soaked feasts. In Mesopotamia, the icon for social gatherings was a beer vat. Alcohol’s value as a truth-telling agent (in vino veritas) was well-recognized, and copious consumption often either preceded or followed high-stakes negotiations. “They disclose their hidden thoughts in the freedom of the festivity. Thus the sentiments of all having been discovered and laid bare, the discussion is renewed on the following day,” writes the Roman historian Tacitus. (The theme persists: At a 1974 China-U.S. summit, Henry Kissinger told Deng Xiaoping, “If we drink enough maotai we can solve anything!”) History’s original lubricant has also long been associated with love and marriage: The word bridal references the wedding feast (bryd ealu; bride ale). Honeymoon derives from the honey wine enjoyed by newlyweds through their first moon cycle.
In virtually all cases, Dr. Slingerland notes, humans have mitigated alcohol’s risks through culture, translating collective wisdom into shared values, rituals and taboos. At traditional Chinese banquets, for example, guests drink only at the toastmaster’s direction. In ancient Greek feasts, a symposarch set the pace and monitored guests for drunkenness. Most cultures distinguished clearly between getting loose (encouraged) and getting wasted (stigmatized), though exceptions abound. Jews can get blotto annually, at Purim, when we’re commanded to drink until we can’t distinguish Haman from Mordecai. For Bolivia’s Camba people, heavy drinking has traditionally been a weekly affair, with parties centred around a bottle of 180-proof rum. The Camba, writes Mr. Gladwell, epitomize the power of culture in drinking. “Those weekly drinking parties were not chaotic revels; they were the heart of Camba community life. They had a function, and the elaborate rituals – one bottle at a time, the toasting, the sitting in a circle – served to give the Camba’s drinking a clear structure.” Despite essentially drinking rubbing alcohol, the Camba had virtually no incidents of problem drinking. Drinking facilitated cohesion, and culture kept the drinking in check.
Today, ritualized drinking continues to yield social dividends. In a study of British pub-goers, the Oxford evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar found that, compared with non- or heavy-drinkers, people who drank moderately and regularly at a local pub “had more close friends, felt happier, were more satisfied with their lives, more embedded into their local communities, and more trusting of those around them.” Dr. Dunbar’s findings echo those of Stanton Peele and Archie Brodsky, whose 1998 study of studies on drinking concluded, “Moderate drinkers have been found to experience a sense of psychological, physical and social well being; elevated mood; reduced stress (under some circumstances); reduced psychopathology, particularly depression; enhanced sociability and social participation; and higher incomes and less work absence or disability.”
The findings are hard to square with today’s headlines. Their paradoxical nature evokes Homer Simpson’s iconic toast: “To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems!” The answer, of course, is moderation. Excess drinking is problematic, but, as Dr. Dunbar notes, “that’s true of everything we eat. Salt, proteins, fats and sugars are all good for you, but have too much and you’ll be pitched unceremoniously into the diseases of civilization – diabetes, obesity, cancers, hypertension, you name it.”
Of course, nobody ever drove into a telephone pole because of a Skittles binge. Alcohol is a special case, and bereft of a toastmaster, or a local pub, or the Ikarian way of life, we have to define our own operating principles. History offers one strong suggestion: Like hunting woolly mammoths or raising children, drinking is not something we’ve evolved to do alone. Solo drinking deprives us of moderating cues from our peers, and more. Pleasurable as a solitary nightcap might be, it doesn’t come close to delivering the payload of social drinking.
Moderate social drinking contributes profoundly to our well-being. Reams of recent research affirm that social connectedness correlates positively with everything from postsurgery recovery times to heart attack survival rates to longevity. The defining public-health crisis of our time, after all, isn’t alcohol abuse; it’s loneliness, which entails a health risk equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and which increases the probability of premature death by 30 per cent. Today, roughly 8 per cent of Canadians are alcoholics. Nearly a quarter of Gen Z “always or often [feel] lonely.” According to a National Institute of Aging study published this month, 58 per cent of Canadians older than 50 experience loneliness.
Dry January is a fabulous excuse to stay home – to binge on Netflix and TikTok, and to hibernate through winter’s darkest month. But this retreat into our algorithmically optimized bubbles helped create the loneliness crisis in the first place. Hibernation is the opposite of what we need this month. We need more connection, not less. We need to see our friends and be with strangers, and to support bars and restaurants, those critical hubs of community and connection, for whom Dry January represents an existential threat (especially as CEBA loans come due). This month, rather than pause our drinking habits, let’s reset them. Call it Damp January. Let’s prioritize the occasions when alcohol facilitates connection – and, perhaps, cut the occasions when it doesn’t.
All this, of course, is entirely intuitive to the Ikarians. What they understand, and Andrew Huberman does not, is that life-optimization isn’t a science; it’s an art. We don’t just need nutrition; we need nourishment. Above all, we need one another. Ask an Ikarian for the secret to longevity, and they might tell you, earnestly, that it’s the wine. But the truth is much deeper than that. As one islander describes Ikaria, “It’s not a ‘me’ place. It’s an ‘us’ place.”
Therein lies the secret to moderation, health and longevity: We need a society that’s more “us,” and less “me.” I’m not quite sure how we get there, but I know exactly where to start.