Between Blocked and a Hard Place

Who’s to blame in the inebriation game?

It’s becoming increasingly apparent that Ireland and the UK has a destructive drinking culture. In an all but amicable fashion, I placed a lot of my friends and I in this category, if only for a brief spell.

University; What a time to be alive. What a time to be a liver. The pangs of ‘more’ that tickle the roof of your mouth with every beverage consumed. Speed over form, value over quality; the precocious drinking habits of our future world leaders.

As I sit and critique our drinking culture, I don’t want to come across as a hypocrite. Countless times I’ve met a housemate on their way to class, him strolling into Monday morning as I stumble my way out of Sunday night. Him shouting Pancake Tuesday at me and me hearing Sheffield Wednesday; most of us have been there or thereabouts. But this isn’t quite the problem. Long gone are the days of Guinness is Good for You, but in a culture where FOMO is normalised as an excuse to binge when we have bigger fish to fry, who’s to blame for our nonchalant attitude toward a significant societal issue? What causes us to act and think in this way? Is it innate? Or could it be a by-product of culture, influencers, family and media?

Going for One

It’s often satirized that “sure we’ll go for one” is the biggest lie you and your mates will ever tell yourselves #SureWhatAmILike. While this may be true, the truth just might not be so funny. We as a culture, particularly student culture, make light of our inability to limit ourselves to one pint at the pub, a solitary glass of wine or single measure for a change. Within popular culture and assisted by various social media platforms, this standpoint on how we drink is almost desirable. Interestingly, and something that students know all about, this has undergone a bit of a syntactical change in recent years. For some, going for one refers to the act of one single drink and returning home, often in an act of self-preservation for the following day. That’s the gist at least- personal experiences may vary. But for many, going for one is a financial decision as the gradual ascent of the price of pints means many can’t participate for more than a round or two in their local.

Limited pint funds sound like a logical step toward more civilised drinking, but it may not be so simple. More on that later. Returning to our initial musings; Who or what shapes are cultural relationship with binge drinking? Is anyone talking about how problematic it is? Could it be the same people?

“Your age can go nowhere without having a drink. You even drink before going drinking. I remember when we used to batter each other with sticks ’til some gave up. We lost the same amount of brain cells, but at least we were getting some fresh air!”

My Father- Freelance Philosopher & King of the Lightweights

Lost brain cells might explain a bit, but I feel there’s a bit of substance to my Dad’s Sunday afternoon hangover-inflating rant. Many of us feel lost for inspiration for things to do in the evenings or the weekends that doesn’t involve a drink. Albeit it’s not the case for all, but I know many of you will have experienced the struggle at times. Returning to my earlier gripe of not being financially stable enough to visit a pub, I think my Dad has hit the nail on the head. Youth today drink to go drinking, and less affordable pubs means the notion of sitting and drinking at home, often consuming much more at a quicker rate and occasionally enraging some neighbours, has a genuine, unfaltering appeal. That’s without even the silver lining of generating something for the economy (say the way they might at, a pub) and more generally feeling part of a community. Pub communities vary, but their communal aspect cannot be denied. The cost-efficient, welcoming embrace of your sofa combined with the romanticised notion of pure inebriation in our culture can result in a downward spiral that many feel the effects of on an existential level.

From an outside perspective, fingers are often pointed in the same directions. The infamous parody merchants Humans of the Sesh are often criticized for promoting ideologies that are nothing more than fuel to fire of our mass consumption of alcohol. After all, the boys behind the notorious Big Bag of Cans craic are surely responsible for many livers looking like a slapped jambon. This over-the-top machismo and love for mangling one’s self, unfortunately, seems to be taken a bit literally for some. Yet, I feel it’s a tad naïve to pin such a societal issue on the satirical content of a few young lads caught up in the counterculture.

A Bag for Life

Another common target is Blindboyfrom the notorious comedy duo The Rubber Bandits. He found out the hard way that singing songs about fighting your father and popping yokes on live TV doesn’t necessarily provide job security as a lecturer in University of Limerick, nor does wearing a bag on your face conceal your identity, apparently. Don’t worry about Blindboy though, he’s raking in 150,000 listeners a week with The Blindboy Podcast where he seems to articulate the ramblings of the common people time and time again, often touching on issues like mental health and his own struggles. Yet interestingly, no Irish brands seem to show much of an interest in promoting his insights.

So where do we stand in all of this finger pointing? Are we so emotionally inaccessible that arguably our most significant public voice on mental health comes from a satire artist with a bag for a face? Concerning, when you consider that our generation is thought to be significantly more in tune with our emotions than previous generations. Even more so when you ponder that the average teenager today reports more anxiety than the average child in a psychiatric unit in the 1950’s. Jesus Christ. When 56% of teenagers in the country believe that anyone their age diagnosed with a mental illness would be treated differently, is it really so unusual to identify with the social outcast with the bag on his head? Long may his off-kilter delivery of the truth continue. Yes, I’ll take a bag for life, please.

Save The Turtles

Save Ferris

Save the Local

My interest in this peaked along the time of the Save the Local campaign. I felt elated watching the adverts that aired around Christmas of last year. Emotionally persuasive phrases like “Our culture, our identity, the life of the village” that really galvanised the idea of the pub. Good on the media- an effort to facilitate less excessive pre-drinking. Entice the men and women of this country out of their arm-chairs and into the pub-stools. The pubs need it, the community needs it, and God knows there’s a few heads who could use an ear to lend.

Yet, the invigorated idea of The Local has its aforementioned pitfalls, too. The £9m campaign over three years to help save The Local was a response to the stat that three pubs a day close permanently across the UK. Unfortunately, asking for money that people don’t have doesn’t necessarily mean that people won’t hand it over, either. The campaign mentions that pubs are under “increasing tax pressures”. Sorry to tell you pubs, you’re not alone on that one.

So, we’ve mulled over our culture, we’ve considered our influencers and we’ve heard what the media has to say. Where else can we turn in search of an answer? How about the support that those in trouble really receive? To be frank, it’s nothing short of ridiculous to consider that increasing the price of cheap alcohol by a few cents is really going to help to irradiate a drinking problem. Here we have thousands of cases of people who have let go of their careers, their family, their lives all relinquished due to their issues with alcohol. Any notion that a pound more per tin might be the point of no return for a troubled soul is genuinely ludicrous. We are taking a drinking problem and adding on a financial problem too.  Lambasted by our previous influencers, Humans of the Sesh, they summarize:

 “Unfortunately, the real reason people go on mad drinking sessions is that they probably feel unfulfilled in a society where it’s harder and harder to even get on the first rung of the ladder of what we culturally consider to be a success“.

Humans of the Sesh (Probably full of the fear)

My argument is beginning to resonate with Homer Simpson’s “Alcohol; the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems” and to be honest, that’s fine with me. I think a lot of us, students in particular, are stuck somewhere between eat drink and be merry and wondering if the drink takes more out of us than we take from it. Between blocked and a hard place. Both are natural, healthy states of mind to have. The truth is, alcohol has the power to be a wonderful central convention. Be that a pint with the boys, wine night with the girls, or a hot whiskey with your significant other when they’re under the weather. It can evoke moments of unadulterated truth, accompany some of the finer times in life, and even open floodgates that were probably bursting at the seams for a bit too long. Giving my two cents; Remember to have fun, remember to be responsible and if it seems like somebody at the table isn’t managing either of them, remember to check how they’re really doing. And for all you might be going through; This Bud’s For You.

To good health; Slainte

Eamon