If you’ve been on social media in the past five years, there’s a good chance you’ve come across the “sober curious movement.” On TikTok alone, the hashtag has hundreds of millions of views; on Instagram, almost 800,000 videos have the same tag.
As a recovering alcoholic, I’m a little ashamed to admit that — until recently, — I found the hype around the “sober curious movement” a bit annoying. I had no qualms with the concept — which encourages low or no alcohol consumption as a lifestyle choice and has been adopted largely by Gen Z and millennials — but the trendiness of the term grated on me. It joined a slew of similar phrases that have grown in popularity over the last decade: “Dry January,” “Sober October,” “soft sober” and “sober adjacent.”
The reason these semi-new buzzwords gnawed at me is that they made quitting drinking seem, at best, easy, casual and even fun.
At the core of these concepts is a fundamentally good idea: re-evaluating one’s relationship with alcohol. Research shows that even small to moderate amounts of alcohol can have harmful health effects. Societally, we’ve normalized a lot more than moderate alcohol use. It’s no accident that, in picking months to attempt sobriety, people have chosen the months that bookended the winter holidays: October and January. The Distilled Spirits Council of the United States says a quarter of the $49 billion-a-year distilled spirits industry’s profits come from the month between Thanksgiving and the New Year.
So, what could have been my problem with an objectively good, healthy phenomenon? I never would have said as much aloud, but the reason these semi-new buzzwords gnawed at me is that they made quitting drinking seem, at best, easy, casual and even fun. At worst, it appeared performative, and when the predictable fusion of influencers and sponsored mocktail marketing deals hit, it was too Goop-y for my taste.
Because, for me, getting sober was about as far from easy, casual or fun as a thing can be.
I got sober on Jan. 24, 2008 — not because of a last-ditch attempt at Dry January, but because I had no other option. The previous evening, I had been admitted to the emergency room with a potentially fatal blood alcohol content, and less than 24 hours later, I was on my way to the hospital’s psychiatric ward. There, a doctor explained that I had most likely survived such a high BAC because — despite being only 23 years old — I had a long history of chronic alcohol use that allowed my body to adjust to what amounted to daily poisoning.
Sobriety was a long, arduous process — one that involved a near-death experience, a stay in the psych ward and a month in an inpatient treatment center — all just to keep me away from alcohol for a month. After that, there were 12-step groups, therapy and the hard work of figuring out who I was and how to live as a sober person.
Through my limited perspective, I unconsciously put people into two separate buckets: The first was filled with people like me, who couldn’t control their alcohol use and for whom staying sober required talking about sobriety and recovery, and the second was “normal people,” who could use alcohol whenever and however they wanted to and it all worked out mostly fine.
Over the 16-plus years that followed, my beliefs about substance use, alcohol use disorder and recovery evolved. They became more expansive, inclusive and flexible. Those two disparate buckets became a Venn diagram: two significantly overlapping circles. I stopped seeing alcohol addiction as something one either had or didn’t have and started seeing it as one end of a very broad spectrum. It was the end to which I belonged, sure, but millions of people occupied every other space on that line, all the way to the polar opposite end: the people who’ve never picked up a drink.
It wasn’t a new or original way to think about substance use, but it was one that I didn’t see discussed as much as I would have liked. So I started writing about it, including in an advice column — first for a recovery website and later for Paste Magazine. I brought the column back as a Substack newsletter a few months ago. I alternate between answering questions about substance use and addiction and writing short essays about recovery-related topics.
The newsletter’s themes boil down to these: There’s no one right way to get sober, there are many paths to recovery, it’s personal and nonlinear, and we all have to find our way — ideally with a supportive community around us. An inclusive recovery landscape is vital because people aren’t getting much-needed help. In the United States, deaths tied to excessive alcohol use rose 29% in just five years. Doctors say younger people, in particular, are experiencing a huge spike in alcohol-related liver disease. In the United States, deaths tied to excessive alcohol use rose 29% in just five years. Doctors say younger people, in particular, are experiencing a huge spike in alcohol-related liver disease. What could be more necessary than a broad, nonprescriptive movement discussing the benefit of cutting back or quitting drinking? I was a month or so into writing the newsletter when someone asked me what I thought of “the whole sober curious thing.” I was halfway into a Pavlovian eye roll when I realized how ridiculous I was being. The sober curious movement was generally talking to a different demographic than I was: I was writing for people who felt like they were struggling with alcohol; the sober curious seemed to be focusing on people who weren’t compulsively using alcohol but wanted lifestyle or health changes. But we were saying the same thing. Give it a shot. See what works for you. Talk to others about how it feels. Don’t beat yourself up if you slip; just evaluate how you got there and try again if you want to. Watching a handful of “sober curious” videos, I realized I’d made yet another misjudgment. While there were plenty of people who appeared to take to the alcohol-free lifestyle pretty easily, others documented the challenges they faced — many of which depicted the kind of struggles I was used to talking to people about: craving, relapse and social avoidance. The sober curious tent was much bigger than I initially understood. As for the trendiness of the terminology? I now see that as a blessing, especially during the holidays. The fact that it’s a ubiquitous term has normalized people’s being mindful about their alcohol use. People walking into holiday parties and other heavy drinking occasions now have a handy phrase at the ready should family members and friends start questioning why someone isn’t engaging more fully in holiday spirits. In some circles, there has always been an unspoken assumption that if you can drink (i.e., you aren’t an alcoholic or pregnant or you otherwise have a condition that renders you unable to do so), you will drink. I wish people didn’t feel the need to have an excuse to abstain from alcohol, but until that happens, I’m immensely grateful that the sober curious movement — and the 50 zillion TikToks about it — exist.
Katie MacBride
Katie MacBride is a health and medical writer whose work has appeared in New York Magazine, Slate, The Daily Beast, Vice News, Buzzfeed News, Rolling Stone, and Longreads, among other publications. Her newsletter, Ask A Sober Lady, answers questions and explores essays about substance use and recovery. 
