I picked up a copy of The Times in London, and it’s so funny. The front-page article informs us that the number of young people who drink no alcohol has soared in the past decade. “It must be the internet!” clumsily explains the article’s author. “Young people are afraid of being negatively portrayed on social media if they aren’t completely sober!” chimes in an expert.
Yeah, there’s absolutely no other plausible explanation. It must be Facebook that’s doing it. Because it’s not like Facebook has a global presence or anything. Neither does the Internet exist anywhere but in the UK.
Poor idiots.
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I don’t know what driving while drunk laws are like in the UK or how expensive booze is.
But here, the police crack down quite heavily on drunk drivers and I’m not very interested in adding the equivalent of another entree to my going out bill for a piss beer. I am a bad millennial since I am not spending that money on avocado toast instead.
Did this article have quotes from the straight edge young people?
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Most young people in the UK(though probably not the ones who read the staid conservative Times)can’t simply afford alcohol… or a car!
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Never stopped the Russians from dying out of alcoholism in enormous numbers, if you know what I mean. 🙂
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I don’t know about the UK, but students in the US mostly have Facebook accounts they use only to communicate with people who are older – parents and grandparents. There is also a trend to use more marijuana use and drink less alcohol, I wonder if that’s what’s going on in the UK?
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There is a large group of young people who don’t consume alcohol because their religion doesn’t allow it.
I found it funny that The Times managed not to use the word Muslim in this context.
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For a moment I thought you might mean mormons! Many young muslims in the UK do drink alcohol, however muslims are only just over 5% of the population. I can’t comment on UK mormons as the only ones I’ve met were American, those do wander the streets in UK towns, knocking on peoples’ doors and generally being a bit of a nuisance without the benefit of alcohol.
This story is based on one study by University College, London. Of the 10,000 sixteen to twenty-four year olds surveyed, 29% claimed to not drink alcohol. I doubt that those were all Muslims. I also doubt that they were all truthful unless they were carefully selected, in which case it’s unrepresentative.
And the Times is owned by Rupert Murdoch, so not a reliable source of anything very much.
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