What School Didn’t Teach Us: You Need to Lose Control

Welcome back to our summer series, “What School Didn’t Teach Us,” where six writers—one for each day this week (except Sunday, that’s Douglas’s day)—tell us the lessons they've learned outside of higher education. Yesterday, Julia Steinberg revealed how toiling on a farm taught her what hard work feels like. Today, Kat Rosenfield describes the joys of alcohol—and how it brings its own special wisdom.

There’s a scene I love, toward the end of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, after the adventure is over and ordinary life has begun anew: Our heroes, Frodo and Sam and Pippin and Merry, are drinking at the local pub, when Sam spots a girl across the room who he’s admired from afar all his life. Something flickers across his face, equal parts desire and determination; this is his moment, his destiny. 

But before Sam makes his move, he does one more thing: He throws back his pint.

This moment is good because so many of us recognize it. Many of our best and bravest moments start with a shot or two of liquid courage. And yet, contemporary narratives about young people and drinking are all markedly and overwhelmingly negative. Optimizers warn that alcohol is an addictive poison, activists cite the link between drinking and sexual assault, and young celebrities who might have once made headlines for partying can instead be found touting the benefits of sobriety.

All of which might explain why, in comparison to millennials and Gen Xers at the same age, Gen Z is legendarily sober. One recent study found that more than 60 percent of them hadn’t had a drink in six months, a trend borne out in the sales data. 

This fact may be held up as evidence that the species is evolving: Behold the Zoomers in their glorious sobriety, so much smarter, healthier, and more sensible than the sloppy, barfing generations that preceded them! But scratch the surface of Gen Z’s sobriety, and what you find isn’t wisdom so much as fear—of vulnerability, of failure, of being out of control.

This is a generation that is both highly conflict-averse and virtually allergic to risk, particularly when it comes to markers of autonomous adulthood like driving, working, or sex. The bosses of Gen Z employees report that they can’t make eye contact, take criticism, or even ask questions when they don’t know how to do something. The post-work drink is dead, apparently, thanks to young workers who prefer boundaries to bonding. 

This inability to tolerate the friction of ordinary interaction, at work or elsewhere, is an obstacle when it comes to connecting with others. But perhaps more importantly, it stands in the way of fun—a thing with which the Zoomers are not well-acquainted. After a highly regimented childhood, and an overscheduled adolescence, packed with résumé-building activities, this generation isn’t just more anxious and depressed than their predecessors; they’re so tightly wound and mistrustful of others that they would rather die than let their guard down.

Which rules alcohol right out. After all, what could be worse to a cohort of anxious perfectionists than the thought of a substance that first and foremost lowers your inhibitions?

And yet, it’s this quality that has always made alcohol such a fundamental part of social life. Drinking makes it easier to be with people, and to be yourself; to talk and dance, tell jokes and stories, flirt, even fall in love. The thing that people call “beer goggles” is actually more like the opposite: The loosening effects of alcohol can allow us to see clearly past our surface differences and disagreements to the common humanity beneath. As the Latin saying goes, there is truth in wine.

With its powers to facilitate human connection, alcohol has been revered for millennia. Throughout history, wherever we have built societies, we have built distilleries, or brewed beer, or made wine. The Sumerians of ancient Mesopotamia believed beer was a gift from the gods and called it “the divine drink”; ancient Greco-Roman civilization had its own god of wine—who was also, not coincidentally, in charge of fertility, theater, and fun.

And, stripped of sober self-consciousness, people have been brave, bold, generous, sentimental. We make friends, or make amends, or stay up late trading stories and making ambitious plans. The U.S. Constitution, notably, is a document as soaked in booze as the accompanying revolution was in blood. In a single evening, two days before the paper was finally signed, America’s founding fathers ran up a legendary bar tab that included 54 bottles of Madeira, 60 bottles of claret, and eight bottles of cider—plus seven large bowls of punch. 

In John Steinbeck’s 1935 novel, Tortilla Flat, he describes the spiritual path of inebriation:

Just below the shoulder of the first bottle, serious and concentrated conversation. Two inches farther down, sweetly sad memory. Three inches more, thoughts of old and satisfactory loves. An inch, thoughts of bitter loves. Bottom of the first jug, general and undirected sadness. Shoulder of the second jug, black, unholy despondency. Two fingers down, a song of death or longing. A thumb, every other song each one knows.

Wine is everything to his characters, a group of drunken paisanos in post–World War I California: the Proustian madeleine that opens the locked door of memory, the currency for transaction, the catalyst for their dreams. Most of all, it is the stuff camaraderie is made of. And though the wino culture described in Tortilla Flat has long since vanished, this tale of collective inebriation—a snapshot of a social milieu as much as a story of adventure—might be instructive to today’s 18-year-olds. 

Granted, alcohol is not a 100 percent return on investment. Sometimes, you wake up after a night out drinking having sparked something exciting: a new idea, a new prospect, a new relationship. Other times, you just wake up with a hangover, and the lessons contained therein as to the limits of your tolerance. But these are valuable, too: It’s impossible to know where your boundaries lie—how much is too much, or how far is too far—unless you occasionally tread beyond them.

As Steinbeck notes, there is a drunkenness beyond the telling of jokes, the singing of songs, the reminiscences sweet and bitter—a moment marinated in wine and ripe with unknown potential. “The graduations stop here, for the trail splits and there is no certainty,” he writes. “From this point anything can happen.”

And while not all the decisions we make after this point are wise, even the unwise ones have a way of revealing a truth we might otherwise have been too afraid to acknowledge: “I’m lonely,” or “I love you,” or “I want more from my life than it currently holds.” The things you are afraid to admit out loud in the cold light of day have a way of becoming sayable when you’re sitting around a table at a dimly lit dive, shouting to be heard over the music and sharing a lukewarm pitcher of cheap domestic beer.

It’s not that young people should drink to excess—or at least, not more than the requisite number of times it takes to learn where the lines of “excess” lie. But if we acknowledge the dangers of alcohol, we should at least acknowledge how glorious it can be. Gen Z could learn to appreciate the disinhibiting effects of alcohol—physical and otherwise—and perhaps also learn to willingly relinquish some control. Because at its best, drinking isn’t really about drunkenness. It’s about togetherness.

Kat Rosenfield is a columnist at The Free Press. Read her piece, “What the Childless Among Us Leave Behind,” and follow her on X @katrosenfield.

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