Is Drinking Making a Comeback in 2026?

Happy dry January to all those who observe! Interestingly, a month that has become culturally associated with alcohol abstinence has become a month full of conversation about the future of drinking. This is timely: The Trump administration just dropped longtime health recommendations that adults should have no more than two drinks per day.

On my feeds, I see people opting out of dry January and similar challenges. They're vowing to drink more in 2026 — many are sharing a GQ article featuring the headline "Why My 2026 Resolution is to Start Drinking Again". In the article, a health journalist writes of going sober — not because he had a dependency on booze, but because he had too much information about the health impact of alcohol.

But he experienced what many others face when they drop the drinks: They socialize less, perhaps they even feel less at ease in social settings. I think a lot of people are having similar realizations: They ditched alcohol, then realized that what they needed wasn't complete sobriety, but a rest and reevaluation of their relationship with it. 

I have so many thoughts on this. On the one hand, I don't love how "all or nothing" we've become. As a person who turns down booze in favor of water (okay, FINE, Diet Coke), I used to feel like a little bit of an oddball when I was out and about and turned down a drink. People would look at me like I had five heads. Alcohol was such a vital piece of the social fabric, and that always felt a little problematic to me. At the same time, the swift "all alcohol is terrible always" ethos that caught hold in the past year or two also felt a little extreme.

I don't have all the answers about whether when it comes to alcohol, moderation is okay. But I do think we were well overdue for a cultural reset around drinking. When I see people say things like "I tried giving up alcohol but I love a good glass of wine with a nice dinner”, I think "you know what? That's great."

But when I see takes about how hard it is to have fun or socialize without a few drinks — well, I wonder if that's a red flag on a large-scale level. We've become so used to alcohol as a social lubricant, and when you combine that with an increasingly disconnected world, it feels a little alarming to think people are uncomfortable forming connections without alcohol.

I don't have all the answers here, but here's my take. We should be socializing more — we should even be partying more. But alcolhol can be a fun piece of that, I don't think it should be an essential one.