All Dried Up

Or, is Dry January a scam?

All Dried Up

I don’t do Dry January. The thought has never crossed my mind. Even the semantics revolt. The last thing I want is a drier January when I am compulsively refilling the highest capacity humidifier in the manufacturer’s product line.

And yet, to accommodate people in my life who have been cutting back, I have recently found myself experimenting with alternative adult beverages, mostly canned mocktails, a shocking number of them celebrity-conceived and venture-backed and at price points that reflect the provenance.

Why is 5 oz. can $7 at the bodega? Why does a full bottle of glorified juice cost $45? I can’t believe I’m spending more to enjoy something less. My new pet conspiracy theory is that the Surgeon General’s January announcement that alcohol is a carcinogen was strategically timed to boost sales after so much investment in the spicy and herbaceous celebrity juice category.

So when I read Tressie McMillan Cottom’s NYT article about hating Dry January, I was primed to agree that the phenomenon “takes a choice and compels people to talk about it, to proselytize it, and ultimately to perform it” and “draws on the culture of performative health consumption that includes fasting, juicing and purifying.” Also, that it’s annoying.

Plenty of people found Cottom’s Op-Ed annoying, too. And they’re not wrong. It is a little insane to feel put out by another person’s health related choices. I know it’s completely irrational to be irritated that I’m drinking alone, and yet, here we are.

A couple years ago, after vomiting up his round Tuscan red in a Florence gutter, my partner decided to stop drinking almost entirely. (I contend to this day that the event had more to do with the winding bus ride out to the vineyard than the wine itself, but I digress.) Suddenly I found myself looking up mocktail recipes for dinner parties and feeling a faint shame pouring myself a glass of wine for one at dinner on a weeknight. Then, more recently, a good friend had a health scare and was advised to stop drinking for a bit. But at least she wanted a glass of wine, like a normal person.

Fortunately, non-alcoholic spirits turned out to be surprisingly plentiful in Fort Greene Brooklyn. The nearest bodega doesn’t even sell yogurt on a reliable basis, but they do stock several shelves of NA liquors for $60 a bottle. Still, the NA gin didn’t hit in a cocktail, adding, at best, the faintest whiff of cucumber to a mock gin and tonic.

The other obvious alternative is weed, but gummies do nothing for me and THC drinks just make me want to bury my head under a pillow. There’s zero fun quotient for me. California sobriety isn’t for me. As someone online put it in a post I can’t find again: “I’m New York sober. I just drink alcohol.”

So when I read that the surgeon general wants to label alcohol just like cigarettes, my immediate reaction was, “I guess I can finally start smoking!” I mean, how many more joys can we give up before we give up on life? What is the point of all these wellness trends and health optimization intended to prolong our lives if those lives are no fun?

So I think the irrational festering of annoyance with sober living is more about the slow disappearance of pleasure from our lives—and the unintentional social pressure that builds when it seems like everyone else is making a choice you aren’t. And irrational festering annoyance plus social pressure can quickly turn into insane defensive positioning—the first they came for the smokers, and I did not speak out, for I was not a smoker defensiveness that makes one write an op-ed about mocktails.

But that doesn’t mean that a lack of pleasure isn’t affecting our quality of life. Gen Z is drinking less and having less sex than previous generations, while suffering from a loneliness crisis. Multitudes of wellness influencers push ever more bizarre and uncomfortable trends at us: Tape your mouth shut while you sleep so you can develop a sculpted jaw. Sleep on a headband the size of an inner tube so you can wake up with perfect bouncy waves. Micro-needle your face while you watch TV. Inject yourself with medication that makes you barf at the thought of eating a cupcake so you can lose weight.

So no, I don’t think it’s reasonable to be genuinely upset about the concept of Dry January, but maybe it is human. And when we seek out pleasure, whatever that means for us, we build in ourselves a will to fight back at the things that really do matter, like losing our rights, instead of beverage options. Let us find more pleasure in a time of little enjoyment. It will be a long four years, but a short 11 months until next January.

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Recommendations

This recipe for a Chile Lime Pineapple Soda—an actually good (and cheap) mocktail.

The most recent episode of Diabolical Lies on the algorithms behind TikTok and Facebook, and what made TikTok a special place Zuck can’t compete with. Best paired with Torey Aker’s Revolutionary Algorithms.

The Marrakech candle from Brooklyn Candle Studio, which I got from their shop in Industry City a couple weeks ago. Shop local and all that.