Alcohol as Social

This is not without plausibility.

Teen drinking fell because the old physical world of adolescence got dismantled. Alcohol belonged to a social ecosystem: unsupervised time, cars, parties, local jobs, malls, basements, boredom, flirting, older siblings, house gatherings, and the chaotic peer world where teenagers learned who they were by colliding with other people in real space.

That ecosystem was replaced by phones, surveillance, parental tracking, algorithmic entertainment, social anxiety, online status games, and a much thinner physical commons.... The young are less reckless because they are less socially embodied. Less initiation. Less unsupervised friction. Less courage-building. Less embarrassment and recovery. Less real dating. Less independence. Less contact with the physical world before adulthood demands it....

The new world suppresses visible risk while increasing invisible fragility.

Most things are tradeoffs. Alcohol too: it has a lot of downsides, and would be wisely replaced with a better technology that doesn't have so many tradeoffs. Here, though, we're replacing it with risk aversion, and that is expensive too. Maybe it is more expensive.