“Giving up drinking is like claiming your freedom.” – Holly Whitaker
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Is it cool to be sober? A lot of people drink to fit in, to be more like their peers, and to foster a sense of tribe and protect that tribe. But today’s episode questions all of that.
My guest today is Holly Whitaker of Hip Sobriety, and she is talking about the ways that the social norms are slowly moving from being completely accepting of drinking, to understanding the drawbacks of drinking, to the point where alcohol use my even be condemned by society in the future, as cigarettes have been in the current age.
Is society moving towards being less accepting of drinking? Has it started to become ‘hip’ to be sober? When we quit drinking, do we endanger the sense of tribe that was find so important? Does that even matter? There are some many questions here, and we dig into all of them to find answers for you around what it means to live a sober, better life. Learn all about it on this episode of the James Swanwick Show!
“Alcohol touches every bit of your life, and removing it is freedom.” – Holly Whitaker
(click to tweet)
Key Takeaways:
- Giving up drinking is like claiming your freedom
- Even when drinking isn’t like “hell” in your life, it can be holding you back in significant ways
- Alcohol touches every bit of your life, and removing it is freedom
- Quitting drinking can be difficult because of the tremendous societal pressure to drink
- Humans have an innate fear of anything that threatens their ‘tribe,’ and sometimes it feels like quitting drinking will threaten the tribe
- A big part of the reason that addictions are able to take hold is because people don’t assess where they are and what their relationship with alcohol is
- A lot of the fear people have around drinking is that they think they will be boring or unsociable, but it’s just not true