Opinion Life & ArtsA drinker’s case against drinkingI won’t join in, but the global trend towards sobriety is a wise oneJanan GaneshAdd to myFTGet instant alerts for this topic

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Janan Ganesh

PublishedMay 31 2025

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I was mostly dry until the age of 30, when someone poured me a 2005 Châteauneuf-du-Pape, at which point the vintners of London gained a reliable new revenue stream. Owing to this late start, I can enter into the mind of a non-drinking adult to an extent that most evangelists for alcohol can’t. I was well placed to write a column that would win over this growing mass of refuseniks. In the end, almost none of the arguments stood up.

How, in good conscience, could I advise a dry 21-year-old to start drinking? The medical case against it — as far as a layman can judge these things — has strengthened with time. “Risks start from the first drop” is how the World Health Organization now frames its advice. Let me anticipate one response: the public health crowd are zealots. They are. But even if their stress on zero-risk is weird, the advisable maximum of alcohol intake is far, far lower than folk wisdom was touting a while ago. Let me anticipate another: there is no safe amount of walking, talking to a stranger, crossing the road or living in a home with a gas source either. But we have to do those things to live a functional life. Drinking is avoidable, which is how much of humankind avoids it. 

Incidentally, there in itself is an advantage of abstemiousness in the 21st century. In a world where the Gulf, India, China and Indonesia count ever more, being able to socialise without alcohol — or just to fathom a culture where it is present but not central — is an edge. (Tantamount to a language skill.) The biggest drinkers in the world are western and Russian. The middle tier includes China and India, whose annual intake of four-ish litres of pure alcohol per person aged over 15 is about half of America’s. The number falls to near zero in many Muslim countries, with exceptions such as the UAE, where the strenuous work of the British diaspora brings it up to two litres.  

If we exclude artists and such historical freaks as Churchill, there is just no way that a drinker outperforms an abstainer

In fact, the career case trumps even the health case. Whatever you end up achieving, you would have achieved more without alcohol. If we exclude artists, who get to keep strange hours, and such historical freaks as Churchill, there is just no way — equalising for talent — that a drinker outperforms an abstainer. This mattered less when outright abstention was rare in the west. Now? You are up against at least a few clear heads in every Zoom call and graduating class. In other words, the trend towards dryness is self-reinforcing. The more it spreads, the higher the costs of holding out.  

And so we are left with what? “Alcohol enhances a moment.” It does. But most of the value of an experience is in the subsequent remembering of it. (From Marcel Proust to Julian Barnes, it is a great theme of literature.) And alcohol makes that harder.  

I could have strung together a plausible argument for drink. The margins on booze subsidise much of the night-time economy. And longevity isn’t everything. Health economists talk of Quality-Adjusted Life Years. A drug is worth funding if it extends a life and that life is bearable. I could propose something called Utility-Adjusted Life Years. That is, a pleasure-filled year beats an austere two. Someone who drank with joy and died at 60 lived longer than that number suggests. 

But this would all be dressing up a basically chemical fact. I drink because I have the taste for alcohol now. Had that never happened, the practical or strategic arguments for drinking wouldn’t stand up. Quite the reverse, in truth. I suspect that I will be 30 per cent less successful than if I had remained dry. Alcohol can inspire ideas, but not enough to offset all the mornings that are lost to cognitive fug. (And I am “just” a three-glasses-over-dinner man.) Except in the case of geniuses, high performance boils down to a kind of diligence. 

The finest (disclosable) sensory experience I have known in recent years was a bottle of Jacques Selosse Substance. But was it better than seeing whatever talent you have being taken to its outer limits through focus and application? I doubt it. I almost, but not quite, wish it had been a dire Sancerre I was poured all those years ago.

Email Janan at [email protected]

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