All wired up and nowhere to go

Alcohol was bad for your body. The drugs replacing it may be worse for your social life.

Stimulants like coffee suit a life focused on productivity and performance, not socializing. (Photo by MoMo Productions/Getty Images)

While strolling to the metro after “work drinks” last week (during which I had one beer because the activity was “work drinks”), my companion, who did not have a drink, took a rip from his vape midway through making a point about train infrastructure.

Such is the new happy hour. Per capita alcohol consumption among adults under 35 has fallen meaningfully over the past decade. Younger Americans drink less frequently, drink less per occasion, and are more likely to identify as non-drinkers than any cohort in the post-Prohibition era. This can be seen as good news, a triumph of health consciousness over vice. But writers like Derek Thompson link the decline in alcohol consumption to a broader decline in socializing and partying that seems less laudable.

Matt fears that ever-better streaming video has left us scrolling alone rather than hanging out. But another aspect of the trend is that the kind of drugs that allowed us to step out of ourselves and connect with others have been replaced by drugs that divert us into the productivity machine.

We’re seeing, at least in part, not so much sobriety as substitution — one class of psychoactive substances replacing another. Americans, and especially younger Americans, are still consuming stimulants and depressants. They are just consuming different ones. They are drinking 32-ounce coffees, buying Zyn nicotine pouches in bulk, and eating protein bars optimized for performance.

The shift is both psychological and physical, and it has contributed to the rise of a market buzzing with the chance to slide in where alcohol has slipped away. First, it was non-alcoholic beer. Now, there’s non-alcoholic protein beer.

The new pharmacopeia

Consider what the stimulant economy actually looks like at scale. Energy drink sales have grown dramatically over the past decade, with the global market now worth about $80 billion annually. Monster Beverage’s stock has outperformed almost every consumer staples company over a period when beer stocks have stagnated. Celsius, a relatively new entrant, became one of the fastest-growing beverages in American retail history. Starbucks, despite perennial predictions of saturation, keeps finding ways to sell more sugar and caffeine — including as protein.

The nicotine pouch market is perhaps the most striking case. Nicotine is commonly used among people who have stopped drinking alcohol, and nicotine products are increasingly replacing alcohol in our culture. Zyn, which is manufactured by Swedish Match and now owned by Philip Morris International, went from a niche Scandinavian product to a genuine U.S.-mass-market phenomenon in roughly five years. Nearly 800 million cans were shipped to retailers in 2025. These are not cigarettes — there is no combustion and, since you’re not inhaling smoke into your lungs, the health profile is meaningfully better. Instead, the pouches deliver nicotine that can be consumed at scale by people who have, in many cases, never smoked. The market is creating new addicts, not merely converting old ones.

None of this is coincidental. These products are filling a specific gap: the need for a legal, socially acceptable, easily dosed psychoactive experience that fits into a life organized around productivity and performance. Alcohol, by contrast, is poorly suited to this life. It impairs cognition for hours, disrupts sleep, and causes hangovers. The three martini lunch is alive and well in “Mad Men” and virtually unheard of today. In an economy where knowledge work is demanding and leisure time is scarce, alcohol has a terrible cost-benefit ratio for anyone who takes their work seriously.

Caffeine and nicotine, by contrast, are performance-enhancing in the short-run. They make you faster, more focused, and more alert. They do not require recovery time.

Performance as hedonism

This connects to a broader cultural shift toward an aesthetic of aspiration that has become unusually visible recently. The cultural markers that signal success and desirability now center on fitness, discipline, and biological optimization — sometimes referred to as “biohacking” — rather than leisure and consumption. The wealthy person in popular imagination no longer sits at a wood-paneled club drinking Scotch. He wakes up at 4:30 in the morning, does a cold plunge, takes peptides, and has his cortisol levels tested before his Silicon Valley 996. (Working 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week.)

There is something genuinely new in this, though it is easy to overstate. Elite fitness culture has existed for decades, and moral panics about stimulant use are older than the Republic. What does seem different is the degree to which performance enhancement has bled into ordinary middle-class life rather than remaining confined to either professional athletes or high-finance obsessives. Your brother might have a WHOOP band and a creatine shaker.

The whispers of an “American Psycho” aesthetic — investment banker cosplay, Gordon Gekko sunglasses, a certain retro-masculine worship of raw ambition — should be understood partly as an aesthetic reaction to the normalization of self-optimization.

Patrick Bateman was invented as a satirical figure. But satire has a way of becoming aspiration when the satirized qualities are ones that actually confer status. A person who is visibly disciplined, visibly high-performing, and visibly unconcerned with the social conventions around moderation has a kind of legibility in the contemporary economy that the louche, well-lubricated raconteur does not.

The “third place” problem

Booze and stimulants are not functionally equivalent as social technologies. They produce very different behavioral and neurological effects, and those differences map onto very different kinds of social life.

Alcohol is a GABA-A receptor agonist. In plain English, it inhibits the nervous system, reduces anxiety, and lowers the barriers to social disclosure. A drink or two makes you more likely to tell someone how you actually feel, to find strangers interesting, to sustain a two-hour conversation with people you barely know. These are not trivial functions. The entire architecture of the traditional bar — a classic “third place,” in Ray Oldenburg’s influential formulation — is built around this pharmacology. The bar is a space that exists outside of work and home, where social hierarchies are temporarily suspended, where strangers can become friends, and where the lubricant that makes this possible is a mild central-nervous-system depressant.

Caffeine and nicotine do not do this. They are stimulants that activate rather than inhibit. They make you more focused, more efficient, and more alert — but not more open, not more socially warm, and certainly not more interested in talking to strangers for no productive reason. You go to a coffee shop to work on your laptop with your headphones on and parallel play with strangers you likely won’t speak to.

This matters because the decline of bars and alcohol-centered socializing goes beyond a change in venue. As Thompson writes, it represents a potential contraction in the kind of low-stakes, high-contact interpersonal life that social scientists have linked to wellbeing, community formation, and the maintenance of weak ties — the acquaintances and near-strangers who turn out to be crucial for things like finding jobs, developing new ideas, and maintaining a basic sense of embeddedness in a community. Robert Putnam’s work on social capital is now several decades old, but the trends he identified have only continued. “Bowling Alone” was written before smartphones, and the situation has not improved.

Stimulants are stunting us socially

Of course it’s still the case that alcohol causes enormous harm. Drunk driving kills thousands of Americans every year. Alcoholism destroys people. Heavy drinking is correlated with violence, particularly domestic violence. Any honest accounting of the social costs of the old drinking culture has to include these. If fewer people are drinking to excess because they have genuinely found healthier ways to socialize, that is an unambiguous good.

But the social fabric matters, too.

You don’t gather with friends for a protein shake. Energy drinks are consumed at desks. Nicotine pouches are used covertly at work. The stimulant economy is, above all, a solitary economy. It is organized around individual performance rather than collective enjoyment. The pleasures it enables are instrumental — you take the pre-workout so that you can lift more, so that you can be more productive, so that you can succeed, and the Zyn tucked under your lip gives you the buzz you need for the rest of your workday — rather than terminal, enjoyed for their own sake in the company of others.

There is a real question about the direction of causation. Perhaps people are adapting to a social environment that has already become more atomized by choosing substances that fit that environment rather than ones that might change it. Either way, the result is a stimulant economy that may be considerably worse for the specific kinds of social connection that matter most.

There is a version of the sobriety movement that is healthy: People drink less because they have better relationships with their own bodies and have found more nourishing ways to connect with others. There is another version that is essentially workaholism: People who have substituted one set of dependency-forming substances for another and who have traded the messy, unproductive intimacy of the bar for the clean, measurable solitude of the gym or cubicle.

Alcohol use might be trickling away, but the hedonic impulse has, rather than disappeared, simply been rerouted. Along the way, our social time has transformed into work time.

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Weekend letter of recommendation:

• If you’re in D.C. and want to rebel against the phenomenon I mentioned above, Mr. Henry’s is celebrating 60 years in business with monthly decades-themed parties. Saturday night is 1970s and sounds fabulous.

• My partner (take that, people who say Gen Z doesn’t date) won’t stop talking about “The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” The book, which is apparently fantastic, is about a Lake Superior shipwreck that took place in the mid-20th century, when the Great Lakes were instrumental to the United States’ economic boom.

• I know I’ve recommended “The Pitt” before, but now that season two is more than halfway through, I will mention it again. Some say it is too heavy-handed in its social commentary. I say go with it.

• Get your March Madness brackets in order before the tournament begins next Sunday, March 15.

• Mitski released a new album, “Nothing’s About to Happen to Me,” last week. Give it a listen and let me know what you think.