Nobody Taught Us How to Feel, So We Learned How to PourGen Z, alcohol, and the slow damage we keep calling a vibe
Nobody Taught Us How to Feel, So We Learned How to Pour Gen Z, alcohol, and the slow damage we keep calling a vibe
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Nobody Taught Us How to Feel, So We Learned How to Pour
Gen Z, alcohol, and the slow damage we keep calling a vibe
Here's an uncomfortable question to open with... when was the last time you saw someone your age deal with a bad week without a plan that involved drinking? A breakup happens... drinks. Exams end... drinks. Job offer... drinks. Job rejection... also drinks. Somewhere along the way, alcohol stopped being a celebration and became the default response to having feelings at all. And we did this to ourselves quietly, one "bro one
plan banao" at a time.
We love calling ourselves the most self-aware generation. Therapy-literate. Emotionally fluent. We know our attachment styles, our love languages, our trauma responses. And then Friday arrives and all that vocabulary drowns in the third LIT at some overpriced Koregaon Park bar... because it turns out knowing the words for your feelings and actually sitting with them are two very different skills. We mastered one. We outsourced the other to alcohol.
Our parents' generation drank and at least called it what it was. A habit. A vice. Something the uncles did that the aunties complained about. There was shame attached, and whatever else shame does... it at least keeps a thing visible as a problem.
We removed the shame and forgot to remove the problem.
Drinking got rebranded. It became aesthetic. Wine nights are "self care." Cocktails are a personality. Breweries are "third places." Every celebration, every reunion, every Sunday brunch comes with a drinks menu before a food menu. Instagram made the glass a prop... golden hour, condensation on the bottle, caption about living your best life. Nobody posts the 4am version.
Nobody posts the Sunday that gets deleted from the week because you spent it horizontal, anxious, and apologising to your own body. And because the branding is soft, the entry is early. Sixteen, seventeen at someone's empty flat. By nineteen it's routine. By twenty-two, there are people in our generation who genuinely cannot name a social plan that doesn't orbit alcohol... and if you suggest one, you're the boring one. Read that again. The person NOT poisoning themselves is the boring one. That's not culture. That's a hostage situation with fairy lights.
Let's drop the vibes and talk mechanics, because our generation respects data more than lectures. The brain doesn't finish developing till around twenty-five... and the last part to mature is the prefrontal cortex, the exact region that handles judgment, impulse control, and emotional regulation. Drinking heavily through your late teens and early twenties is renovating a house while the foundation is still being poured.
The damage isn't dramatic. It's quiet. Slightly worse memory. Slightly worse focus. Slightly worse emotional control. Slight enough to deny... permanent enough to matter. Then there's the anxiety loop nobody warned us about. Alcohol is a depressant that feels like relief for two hours and collects payment for two days. The Sunday dread. The hangxiety... replaying everything you said, apologising to people who don't know what for. You drink to quiet the anxiety, the drinking amplifies the anxiety, so you drink again. It's a subscription model. Your peace, billed weekly. Add the rest of the invoice... sleep that looks like sleep but repairs nothing, skin your ten-step routine can't outrun, gym progress evaporating because alcohol and recovery are enemies, money bleeding out at ₹600 a cocktail in cities we already can't afford. We track our screen time, our steps, our macros... and then untrack everything two nights a week and call it balance.
But here's the real thesis, because the drinking is never actually about the drinking. We are the loneliest generation on record, drowning in connection apps and starving for connection. And alcohol offers a shortcut... instant vulnerability, instant bonding, conversations that feel deep at 1am. The catch is that shortcut muscles never strengthen. If every honest conversation you've ever had needed a bottle as a mediator, you haven't learned intimacy... you've learned dependency with extra steps. Sober you and your friends are strangers who share a group chat.
That's the actual cost. Not the liver, not the money, not even the brain fog. It's that an entire generation is quietly forgetting how to feel things at full volume... grief, joy, awkwardness, boredom... without diluting them first. We numb the lows and don't notice we've numbed the highs in the same pour.
This isn't a temperance lecture. Nobody's coming for your birthday toast. But ask yourself the honest questions, the ones we ask about everything else...
Can you sit through a bad emotion without planning a night around escaping it?
Can you enjoy your closest friends stone sober on a Friday? When did you last say no and not perform an excuse?
If those questions made you defensive... that defensiveness is information. We're the generation that questioned everything. Marriage, jobs, gender, religion, the entire script we were handed. Somehow the bottle got a free pass... the one inheritance we accepted without an audit. Maybe it's time. Not to quit, necessarily. Just to look at the glass the way we look at everything else our parents normalised... and ask who it's actually serving.
Because "I need a drink" was supposed to be a joke. For a lot of us... it stopped being one. And nobody noticed the exact night that happened. If drinking has stopped feeling like a choice... if it's the only way through a week... that's worth a real conversation with someone. A friend, family, a counsellor, a helpline. Asking isn't weakness. It's the audit.
-Maitrayee Repal