Why My 2026 Resolution Is to Start Drinking Again

This story is part of our ‘Habits to Embrace—and Ditch—in 2026’ series. Read the whole list here.

This past summer, I went all in on nonalcoholic drinks. I’m lucky enough to have never had a dependency on alcohol, but there are plenty of other reasons to ditch booze. As a health journalist of over a decade, I was well aware of the medical consensus that alcohol is bad for you. Meanwhile, the growing nonalcoholic movement—with its logical appeal and increasingly diverse and celebrity-backed options—had grown hard to ignore. (Also, hangovers in your mid-thirties are savage.) So I unpacked a couple cases of Athletic beer into my fridge and set about on a mid-year resolution of sobriety.

I lasted about three months. To be fair, it was a strong quarter. Cracking beers, knowing they’d have no bearing on me in the morning, was a cheat code. My bar tabs, which quickly became few and far between, were microscopic. Winning games of pool and Skee-Ball against friends who were a few beers in was almost too easy. And one weekend, while hiking up New York’s Breakneck Ridge, I discovered the joy of taking in the view with a Bero in hand, sans fear of tumbling down to the trailhead. If you had asked me then, I’d have told you this was the new me.

Despite all that, it wasn’t long before I realized that my new sober life hadn’t made me any happier. In fact, it seemed to be taking a subtle, indirect toll on my mental health. It wasn’t that I missed the alcohol, but I was beginning to realize all the opportunities it provided me.

For one, I wasn’t going out nearly as much as I used to. Not long after I stopped drinking, my enthusiasm for barhopping waned. And when I did sidle up, I wasn’t hanging around for long. Turns out, I don’t even really like playing pool that much if not through the haze of an IPA. It also turns out that a rowdy dive bar isn’t the best setting for trading earnest life updates with close friends. I just didn’t see the appeal of being in that kind of environment anymore if I wasn’t three PBRs deep, trying to convince my friends why we all needed to buy tickets to a music festival in Atlanta.

When I made the decision to stop drinking, I didn’t consider the deeper purpose that these sessions served. As it turns out, these were the moments in which my friends and I bonded, even if we didn’t see it that way. And the less frequently I showed up, the more disconnected I felt. It didn’t take long before things in the group chat started going over my head and a sense of FOMO began setting in. Yes, I was still able to maintain a sense of a social life through weekly run club and pickup soccer games, but I yearned for something less task oriented, and the lighthearted banter that could lead to a spontaneous heart-to-heart—the kind of thing that typically happened after one or two beer-shot combos.

I considered the possibility that I needed to build a new, healthier social circle—one that was less chained to the Two Beers at a Bar Industrial Complex. So I resolved to make up for lost connections elsewhere. Working in the wellness industry, it wasn’t long before I began finding myself in social settings—fitness studio openings, media dinners, a concert sponsored by an NA beer brand—with other people who also weren’t drinking (which I always knew, because they loved to tell me). When I met them, I wondered if they, too, struggled with the void that social drinking once occupied. Instead, my suggestions were often met with sanctimonious dismissal—a wholesale rejection of the idea that alcohol is good for anything but tanking your Whoop recovery score. Each encounter, whether at a friend’s birthday party or buzzy brand launch, came with a certain LinkedIn-coded coldness. The sober set’s guards were inexplicably up and my ability to form connections didn’t seem to come nearly as easily as before. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the cans of Best Day Brewing in our hands, gripped by Oura-ring-adorned fingers, had something to do with it.