Optimization Culture Has a Hangover

The wellness movement convinced Americans that alcohol was the enemy. Then they kept drinking.

In late December, a GQ writer named Dean Stattmann reached out. He’d spent the better part of 2025 trying to go sober, lasted about three months, and was working through why the experiment had made him feel worse. His social life had contracted. His marriage had gone a little flat. He’d found himself leaving bars earlier, skipping nights out, watching his friendships conduct themselves at a slight remove. He had a better sleep score and an emptier calendar.

He wasn’t looking for permission to drink again. He was looking for an explanation. So he called me - obviously.

The framework I gave him was costly signaling: the evolutionary mechanism by which humans build trust through shared vulnerability. The logic runs roughly like this. Trust is a fundamental problem for social animals. How do you know, genuinely, who’s on your side?

One answer is shared risk. When you drink with someone, you lower your guard in public, in front of them, in a way that’s at least mildly consequential. You’re saying, implicitly, that you trust them enough to be that version of yourself. Drinking with someone is a low-stakes version of the same logic that drives initiation rituals and synchronized physical risk. The group coheres. It's not a metaphor. It's observable across cultures and contexts.

The other piece was simpler. Alcohol is called a social lubricant like it’s a polite figure of speech, but the description is more functional. It creates the conditions for conversations that wouldn’t otherwise occur. The spontaneous overshare. The two-hour tangent. The thing you say to someone at 11pm that you’d never say over coffee.

Alcohol itself isn’t the only way to create these dynamics. Cultures that don’t drink have other rituals that serve the same function. Think shared meals, tea ceremonies, communal prayer, music and dance. Non-alcoholic options have made real progress on the ritual front. But they’re a workaround, not a replacement. Part of what makes drinking a trust-building mechanism is the small cost involved: you’re lowering your inhibitions, making yourself slightly vulnerable in front of another person. That’s the cost that makes the signal honest.

The piece ran in GQ in January. His individual experience maps almost exactly onto a growing, and unexpected, trend.

A report from The New Consumer found that wearable users drink more on average than non-users. Based on everything we know about the cult of wellness and optimization, that doesn’t compute. Wearables are supposed to raise health consciousness and reduce bad behaviors, right? Instead, it seems the people most fluent in the language of optimization are also the people most willing to make deliberate exceptions to it.

More broadly, according to Gallup, 53% of Americans now believe moderate drinking is bad for their health. That number has roughly doubled since 2016. The moral consensus shifted faster in a decade than it had in the previous generation. Yet fewer than half of the people who told the New Consumer survey that drinking was unhealthy said they planned to cut back.

The generation most often cited as alcohol’s existential threat deserves a closer look. More than 40% of Gen Z hasn’t reached legal drinking age. A significant share had the social formation years, the college bar, the house party, the post-work drink that teaches you how to be a colleague, interrupted by COVID. A record number of 25-to-34-year-olds still live at home, an environment that structurally suppresses drinking occasions regardless of what anyone thinks about WHO guidelines. Pull those variables out of the trend line and the generational signal gets appreciably quieter.

What did shift is the story people tell themselves about what they’re doing when they drink. That’s not nothing. Cultural permission structures matter. But there’s a meaningful difference between a population that stopped drinking and a population that started feeling guilty about it.

The wellness movement that produced this guilt operated on a particular set of assumptions: that health is primarily a biological project, that the body is an optimization problem, and that alcohol is an obvious variable to minimize. What that framework excluded was anything that doesn’t show up on a recovery score. Connection. Trust. The spontaneous conversation that doesn’t happen on a schedule. The GQ writer called these “the best parts of life.” Some anthropologists would take it a step further, calling them something closer to the foundation of social cohesion.

The alcohol industry defended itself on biological terms for two decades and consistently lost. The Surgeon General linked alcohol to cancer. The WHO declared no amount safe. Those arguments are not going away. The defense that was always available, and mostly unused, was sociological: that the ritual of drinking together produces something real, that the social utility of alcohol is observable and documented, and that the decision to drink is also, always, a decision about the kind of life you want to be living.

Whether the industry is capable of making that argument credibly is a separate question. What the data suggests is that consumers are already making it for themselves. The wearable users who drink more than average aren’t confused. They’re running a different equation. A life fully optimized against risk turns out to be a risk itself.