Is it time you stopped drinking and joined the 'soberocracy'?

Do you “Go Sober for October”, the annual Macmillan Cancer Support campaign in which hundreds of thousands of Brits give up the bottle? Don’t worry if not: it won’t be long before Alcohol Concern’s “Dry January” is upon us, when 5 million of us collapse onto the wagon.

If you doubt you can last an entire month without drinking, how about drinking just a bit less? To target midweek drinkers keen on cutting back – the sober-curious – Waitrose is launching half-bottles; sales of its single-glass bottles are already up 15 per cent, while its food hall beneath John Lewis’s Oxford Street flagship is doing a roaring trade in Seedlip, the world’s first non-alcoholic spirit. 

We know that the young eschew booze, with 27 per cent of those under 24 deeming themselves abstinent. However, more and more it feels as if it isn’t only millennials who are stepping away from the sauvignon.  Recent figures from the Office for National Statistics showed the proportion of adults drinking alcohol is at the lowest level on record, with almost half the population now shunning a regular drink.

And just last week, spotting a growing niche in the market, Professor David Nutt, the psychiatrist and former drugs tsar, announced plans to sell “alcosynths”, a range of drinks that deliver all the inhibition-unleashing effects of spirits without the morning-after malaise.

However you shake or stir it, it seems we are witnessing the rise of a “soberocracy”. 

On Thursday, a hot new happening will hit the nation’s capital, called The Shine. Fresh from LA, the cultish-sounding “volunteer-produced inspirational variety show” will feature music, bands, film, meditation, “magical connections” and sundry other forms of “enlightertainment”. What distinguishes this pop-up event from other La-La Land emissions is that its participants – sorry, “mindful tastemakers”… – will create an “alcohol-free vibe”: drunk on consciousness, while being stone cold sober.

Its founder, Light Waktins, tells me: “Sober socialising has long been a part of life in New York and Los Angeles. But people in Britain are now starting to ask questions about their alcohol consumption, and we want to contribute to that evolution. If we can inspire Londoners to have fun in this way, and it spreads to other places in the UK, then The Shine is living up to its intent.”

Certainly, it feels timely: the seemingly ingrained British belief that nights out and nights in both require alcohol is looking increasingly anachronistic.

copy of A history of advice on alcohol

Dr Richard Piper, CEO of Alcohol Concern, identifies several causes: “There are a range of factors, all of which probably play a role: economics, different ways of socialising, demographics, law enforcement, more ‘authoritative’ parenting styles, fashion, and a trend towards healthier lifestyles. In general, there is fresh thinking about what we put in our bodies. In some ways, this has the hallmarks of a movement.”

At this point, I can reveal that I am smugly ahead of the curve. At my 35th birthday, there were no soft drinks, and I couldn’t understand why any adult would want one. Ten years on, I am three years’ dry, with an addiction merely to spicy virgin marys. People assure me that I “never had a problem”, as though I would renounce my principal – indeed, only – hobby if I hadn’t. I’m not evangelical: I loved alcohol. I miss it. I’ll always miss it. And if I could drink like a sane person, I would. However, as an all-or-nothing type, nothing is unquestionably the better option.

Like many who are part of this New Sobriety, mine is a secular and solo lifestyle choice. Although I benefit from much of its wisdom, I do not do AA because I cannot subscribe to a “higher power”. My affiliations are virtual – to the brilliant Recovered podcast (recoveredcast.com), for instance – rather than meeting room-based.

Lucy Rocca, founder of Soberistas (soberistas.com), a teetotal support website that boasts 43,500 registered members, confirms this trend: “The common factor in the explosion of online resources is that they are reaching out to ‘normal’ people, not medical programmes aimed at ‘addicts’. That kind of language seems so old-fashioned now. There has been a real shift in recognising that lots of totally normal people, holding down good jobs and getting on with life, might want help in reducing, or quitting. You don’t need to call yourself an alcoholic and go shuffling off with head bowed, filled with shame.”

Women are leading the way in this zeitgeist change, not least in deconstructing our cultural enshrinement of wine as “mother’s little helper”. Soberistas’ members are 90 per cent female, with a core aged between 40 and 60. Club Soda (joinclubsoda.co.uk), a “mindful drinking” organisation, is two-thirds female.

According to its co-creator, Laura Willoughby, “women are worried about their mental health and know alcohol affects it. They can spend a fortune in the gym, and know that alcohol undoes all that. After all, if you could buy a pill that helped you lose weight, sleep better, increase energy, improve productivity and make you look younger, you would pay a lot. Cutting down drinking does all of that – and saves you money.”

We never had to think about that when we were busy getting trashed on cheap cider and throwing up at parties

When I went dry, I lost a mortifying stone and a half during the first seven weeks, having to eat more to put the pounds back on. The sleep benefits have been incredible. My depression has undoubtedly benefited from no longer self-medicating. Without suggesting that coupledom is the be all or end all, I know I wouldn’t be in a happy relationship were I still a dipsomaniac loon.

For all the talk of red wine being good for you – in which the caveats invariably outweigh the benefits – abstinence remains an obvious path to health. Accordingly, among many of us who find ourselves deep in middle-class middle age, there has come a dawning disbelief that alcophilia should be a religion among individuals for whom drugs, smoking, junk food and mere lack of movement would be viewed as unacceptable.

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Up until recently, my life’s goal was hedonism. Today, having watched both parents die young and horribly, instant gratification feels a good deal less fun. My father’s declared ambition was to drink himself to death, as it is the undeclared ambition of so many senior citizens, among whom consumption has rocketed. If it sounds like a good way to go then, believe me, it isn’t: pleasure being less in evidence than constant danger and indignity. It was a lonely and lacerating demise that I would have done anything to spare him.

There may also be more metaphysical aspects to the embrace of abstemiousness than its myriad practical advantages. “The world feels serious right now,” says Rocca. “People are more anxious and careful than the more hedonistic generations that came before them.

"Has social media got something to do with it, too? The worry that you’re always under threat of being filmed? We never had to think about that when we were busy getting trashed on cheap cider and throwing up at parties.”

Yet what the soberocracy most certainly aren’t about is puritanism. Britain’s growing band of sober socialites are learning that that life can be even better without the mother’s ruin. I have a far better time socially that I did when I was carousing, not least as I get to remember it, as per the Soberistas’s maxim “Love life in control”. 

We’re tired of drunkenness, not tired of life – booze being the only area in which we, the soberacracy, have reached our limit.