The Sobriety-Industrial Complex

When "wellness" becomes a commodity

On January 3 2025, the New York Times ran a series of articles about the health risks associated with drinking alcohol. They reported that the US Surgeon General is pushing for new warning labels on alcoholic beverages akin to those on cigarettes, alerting consumers that alcohol is a leading cause of cancer. It has long been known that alcohol consumption is correlated with higher rates of certain cancers, and decades of scientific waffling seem to have rested, at least for now, on the message that “no amount of alcohol is safe”. The Times reporting was quickly picked up by every major media outlet in the US, and dominated headlines for the better part of a week.

The anti-booze media blitz was no doubt deployed to coincide with the start of the new year, which marks the beginning of one of our newest and buzziest (or maybe, least buzzy) invented holidays: dry January.

According to Time magazine, dry January (the ritual of abstaining from booze for a month following the hedonic indulgences of the holiday season) began with one person’s half-marathon training regimen and was officially launched as an organized campaign by Alcohol Change UK in 2013. The social and cultural roots of observing periods of abstinence, of course, date back to well before the social media era. Catholics have been abstaining from alcohol during the 40-day period of Lent for millennia, and Time reports that observing “Sober January” was part of the Finnish war effort against the Soviet Union in 1942.

But in recent years, at least in the US, the drive to abstain from alcohol isn’t about politics or religion—it’s about “wellness”. And it is catching on. According to the website Civic Science, a quarter of more than 1500 survey participants said that they observed dry January in 2023, and young folks are drinking less than ever, earning Gen Z the nickname “the sober-curious generation”.

All of this news is undoubtedly good for public (and individual) health. Ethanol is indeed a toxin in the human body, and while most of our bodies are equipped with enzymes that are able to de-fang it somewhat, no one who has ever had a hangover would argue with the fact that it’s not terribly good for us.

It’s also good for the burgeoning non-alcoholic beverage industry, pioneered by Athletic Brewing, the first brewery in the US to focus exclusively on non-alcoholic beer (and the first to make one that actually tastes like, well, good beer). Today, the NA beverage market is estimated to be worth around 150 billion dollars. According to a craft beer trade journal, while overall beer sales were down 3% in 2023, the “zero-proof” category saw growth of over 30%.

For those battling addiction or those who simply prefer not to drink, this is a positive move toward inclusion and normalizing the sober lifestyle. But watching my social media feeds fill up with ads for products, programs, and services that promise to help me change my relationship with alcohol—or, more often, replace alcohol with some other product, whether it’s THC gummies or lions mane mushrooms or kava root tea or expensive non-alcoholic adaptogen cocktails or some combination of all of these—I am struck by the Americanness of this “solution” to the “problem” of drinking.

Coming back to the US after a year of traveling the world talking to people about alcohol, I was expecting to experience some culture shock, but not necessarily so specifically about the ways we think and talk about drinking. One of the starkest realizations that I had upon returning home was the degree to which we in the US pathologize drinking alcohol. Maybe my algorithm is trying to tell me something, but I’m being fed a steady diet of influencers promising to help me change my relationship with alcohol, to become a take-it-or-leave it drinker rather than a habitual one, to break the grip of alcohol on my life, to be liberated from the enslavement of booze (yes, really), if I just subscribe to their program/buy their product/follow these three easy steps…

Now, I in no way want to denigrate or disparage programs/products/steps that have helped millions of people save their own lives by quitting drinking. It is a fact that alcohol is an addictive substance, which leads to real health crises. I have myself seen too many lives, homes, and communities damaged by alcohol to pretend it isn’t a problem. In fact, I’ve been nervous to write this because I certainly do not want to rain all over anyone’s sobriety. If someone can be present for their family, be productive at work, live a few years longer and be happier and healthier because of one of these programs or products, that’s the best outcome one could hope for.

But what’s curious is that I didn’t see this burgeoning “industry” anywhere else in the world. And I can’t help but think it is because there is something deeply American about it.

The promise of dry January is that it will re-set the habits that we have gotten into around alcohol and usher in a new era of “mindful drinking”. When we practice mindful drinking, which often looks like a set of rules designed to circumscribe our consumption—only drink on weekends, only after 5 pm, never alone, abstain for the month of January, or October, or etc.—we do it with the goal of keeping alcohol in a proper and manageable place in our lives. The Instagram ads that promise products and services that will “change your relationship with alcohol” say it all: in America, the relationship is between you, the individual, and the booze. And if that relationship is problematic, you’re the one who is responsible for fixing it. And then, as with everything else in American capitalist society, fixing this relationship becomes a profit opportunity for an enterprising wellness guru or health-hawker.

In stark contrast to the deeply individualist American approach to drinking, the relationship between people and alcohol in the other places that I visited during my global moonshine tour wasn’t an individual one. It was social. The rules that people follow for when, where, how, and how much it was or wasn’t ok to drink don’t come from a monthly subscription to a mindful drinking app. They come from social norms that are very widely shared, and historically embedded in local cultures.

These shared social norms do not necessarily lead to what one might consider “healthy” drinking behavior. In fact, Central and Eastern European countries, where drinking alcohol is deeply socially embedded and even ritualized, comprise 7 of the top 10 countries for alcohol-related deaths. Scholars have even argued that alcoholism is responsible for Russia’s defeat in the Russo-Japanese war of 1905. When traveling in Eastern Europe in the early 2000s, my husband Jack noticed that vodka tended to come with a pop top like a soda bottle rather than a resealable screw top. It was expected that the entire bottle would be consumed in one sitting. (Yikes!)

Whether mediated by custom or mediated by the market, one cultural context of drinking behavior does not necessarily yield objectively “healthier” outcomes than another (unless the culture calls for complete abstention). What nags at me about the American way of drinking is that, rather than being able to rely on a commonly accepted set of expectations to check our behavior, we are left alone and vulnerable as targets of marketing campaigns that are designed to make us anxious and full of self-doubt. We are told that we can “hack our wellness” by purchasing the perfect pre-packaged meal delivery service, the perfect skincare routine, the perfect supplement regimen, when intuitively we know that true wellness is a holistic, complex combination of mental, emotional, social, intellectual, and physical health that is stubbornly resistant to silver bullets. This is what I mean by wellness as a fictitious commodity. Wellness is nothing more or less than our individual and collective equilibrium on this planet. The shortcuts to getting there have become a 6 trillion dollar industry.

There has been some pushback against the recent spate of anti-booze journalism, including the Times re-publication of an October 2024 op-ed titled, provocatively, “You’ll Have to Take My Glass From My Cold, Wine-Stained Hand”. In May 2024, Slate published an article by Jeff Siegel about the dismal world of non-alcoholic wine, and in September, the podcast Food with Mark Bittman hosted Tim Requarth, a journalist who has done extensive research on the evolution of the science around alcohol and health. Requarth’s most memorable quip from that episode: “I don’t drink because it’s healthy. I drink in spite of it not being healthy”.

This, I think, captures the essence of what’s missing from the wellness-as-commodity movement and how it frames alcohol. When we think of a glass of wine or a sip of brandy as something functional, as only in terms of what it does to our individual health, we willfully dismiss all of the other symbolic, cultural, and social significance that the production and consumption of alcohol carries in nearly every country in the world. If a Romanian shepherd takes a shot of tuica in the morning before taking his flock to the fields, is that pathological? Who decides, and on what grounds? In America, we are alone, staring at our phones, wringing our hands with self-doubt over the results of a online quiz, looking to an influencer to tell us whether we “have a problem”.

In American culture, we tend to see alcohol as a means to an end (getting drunk as a way to cope with social anxiety, for example) instead of one thread in the larger cultural fabric. When we view alcohol through the narrow lens of individual wellness, we are simply looking through the wrong end of the telescope at the opposite functionality of booze in America—as an intoxicant, free of any larger meaning or context. The college students that I teach at the University of Puget Sound often talk about the time-honored American university tradition of buying the highest-proof, highest-quantity, lowest-priced alcohol they can find to get as drunk as possible as quickly as possible. After taking a class I teach on the subject of global alcohol traditions, they often say that they end up drinking less, because they think a lot more about where their booze comes from and the cultural traditions in which it is embedded, leading them to drink with more consideration, even reverence.

This essay is not a call to encourage drinking, or discourage the sober-curious movement, but rather to interrogate the commodification of wellness in American culture and to widen our perspective on drinking beyond its narrow health (or intoxicating) impacts. The fact is, we do a lot of things that aren’t good for us, not because of a misguided view that they are healthy, but, as Tim Requarth says, in spite of the fact that they are not. We do these things because they bring us pleasure, they connect us with others, they invite us to experience ourselves and our world in multidimensional ways.