When Carly Novoselsky first stopped drinking, she used to flag servers down privately to ask for a non-alcoholic drink, fighting the embarrassment that came with avoiding alcohol on a night out. That was eight years ago.
Now she sees young people put down the booze at an earlier age and without as much shame.
“I think the younger generations are looking at older millennials and older generations, looking at their drinking habits and being kind of scarred by that. They’re not romanticizing that college experience,” said Novoselsky, 32.
That’s thanks, in part, to a growing trend toward sobriety among Gen Z adults that has transformed the social landscape in Chicago and across the country. People in that age group are veering toward prioritizing mental and physical health and trying to avoid the harmful effects of alcohol they may have witnessed in older generations, experts and sober young adults told the Chicago Sun-Times.
Across the country, drinking alcohol started to decline for young adults around the year 2000, national data shows.
That’s true in Illinois, too. In 2002-03, 64.2% of Illinois adults ages 18-25 drank alcohol in the past month, according to data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health Substance Abuse. That dropped to 61.5% in 2013-14. A decade later, the number is 51.6%.
Younger members of Gen Z are also drinking less than similar age groups were previously — 18.6% of 12-17 years olds drank in the past month 20 years ago, compared to 8.6% now.
Members of Gen Z are generally defined as being born between 1997 and 2012, the Pew Research Center says.
Gen Z’s priorities have shifted — and their drinking habits have followed
Amber Anise Flowers, 25, said she saw “families torn apart” by alcohol and wanted to avoid that. Before going sober, she spent too much money on nights out and felt groggy and disoriented the day after drinking in college and in her early 20s. So she put down the booze permanently in 2022.
“If I want to be more serious about myself, not just mentally and physically but spiritually, this is something I should consider going forward,” said Flowers, who lives in the Austin neighborhood.
Dr. Andrea King, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at the University of Chicago who runs the school’s Chicago Social Drinking Project, said around 25% of college-aged students still report binge drinking on a regular basis versus the 35-40% of past generations.
The steady decline is heartening, she said.
“We can now offer people other drinks to have and not make the pressure so much on drinking alcohol because there’s nothing else to do,” she said.
As an undergraduate at the University of Illinois, Novoselsky embraced the college’s party school reputation. But she didn’t stop that lifestyle after graduation, describing herself as “that one friend everyone had to worry about.” She stopped drinking and eventually decided to pursue a career in addiction treatment.
“I knew inside of me that there was this person that was reaching their goals and could do the things I said I was going to do,” she said.
Novoselsky, who lives in Logan Square, went back to school at Adler University , becoming an addiction therapist and clinical director at Grace Therapy and Wellness Center. In her clinical work, she’s noticed the trend of Gen Z stopping drinking earlier than other generations and attributes it partly to their observations of the effects alcohol has had on family or friends.
“They think, ‘I’ve watched people in my life set their life on fire every weekend, and when you’re doing that you can’t actively work toward your goals,'” Novoselsky said.
Leanne Hays, 24, who has gone through a 12-step recovery program, said her interactions with older sober people have reflected an isolation in sobriety that she hasn’t felt as much among her generation. On the contrary, even her peers who do drink do so in moderation or reflect on the substance’s role in their lives.
“Even if you are engaging in that behavior, there’s an openness to reflecting on what that behavior means,” she said.
Gen Z also grew up online, and Hays says social media contributed to her reckoning with alcohol. She suspects other Gen Zers feel the same.
“Everything being recorded all the time I think has a lot to do with it,” she said, adding that seeing videos of herself she didn’t remember was a reality check. “Because of social media there’s this opposite desire of grounding and reconnecting with your humanity, and I think that’s just hard to do when you’re intoxicated.”
Non-alcoholic options are now the rule, not the exception
Through the last several years being sober, West Town resident and registered nurse Hannah Luebbe has watched Chicago transform into a more welcoming place for sober people. She remembers planning events in parks and coffee shops because bars felt off-limits.
“We’ve gone from feeling like we didn’t belong to just being girls in our 30s who want to go out and have cute drinks and taste each other’s drinks,” said Luebbe, 34.
Luebbe hopes millennials and older generations who have stopped drinking perhaps against the social norm have paved the path for Gen Z-ers to make the same decision without the judgment Luebbe and other millennials say they faced. Instead of coming to sobriety from “rock bottom,” Gen Z-ers seem to get there sooner, she said.
“Gen Z, they’re starting to realize maybe alcohol isn’t your cup of tea,” she said. “They’re not coming into sobriety from this really dark place, they’re coming into it more excited to better themselves.”
A growing number of bars and restaurants in Chicago offer zero-proof options and emphasize putting the same level of care into a nonalcoholic option as a traditional cocktail. Spirit-free alternatives have also proven to be successful, including Chicago-based Ritual, which has zero-proof tequila, gin, rum, whiskey and aperitif alternatives.
From ‘Drinking City’ to a place where sober groups thrive
But Chicago has a reputation for being a drinking city, earning the title of the “Greatest Drinking City in America” by GQ magazine in 2014. Some like Hays say that imbibing alcohol — like taking a shot of the love-it-or-hate-it Malört — is central aspect of being a Chicagoan.
That doesn’t mean it’s necessary to enjoy the city, said Hays, who went sober nearly two years ago while living in Lincoln Square and working as a server and day care provider.
“Malört, Chicago Handshake, St. Patrick’s Day, that was the Chicago that I really discovered when I moved there for college — this city likes to party,” she said. “But something interesting I’ve found in sobriety, the places where it’s really great to drink is also where it’s really great to be sober.”
For Flowers and Novoselsky, finding other sober people has been important for sustaining sobriety. Flowers said finding a group called Sober and Black was key to her committing to the decision. Novoselsky founded a group called Queer Sober Social to meet other queer people in a setting other than a bar.
“For a long time in our history, because of some of the things that our generations went through, they used drinking for coping,” Flowers said. “I didn’t want to become codependent on alcohol because I’ve seen that.”
