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Transcript: Grant Ennis, Alcohol Review 2025, 10-11am 20/3/2025
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The case for pure free time hedonism
Advertisers know full well humans are feeling-driven creatures. We could usefully resolve to harness this fact ourselves by systematically pursuing the feelings we want from our free time.
The New Year is when many of us try to change our habits, resolving to cut back on alcohol, save money and exercise more. But we might also usefully take a step back to ensure our free time satisfies our appetite for feelings and sensation.
Free time is a precious commodity, of course, but it also poses a very tricky problem: How do we best fill it? There is such a vast range of realistic options available to us–from transcendental meditation, to crochet, to kendo–but how can we choose or decide if the choice is a good one?
Having a good way to choose could mean we spend our free time better. I suggest the feelings and states of mind we want as a goal. This is a route to a form of Epicurean hedonism, where we make our own idea of happiness top priority. This is more likely a rich mixture of interwoven feelings and mental states rather than constant euphoria.
It avoids necessarily setting ourselves measurable criteria like, say, getting a better 100m backstroke time or mastering another 20 chords on the ukulele. Having too many concrete deliverables like these can make our free time feel too much like work time. Making a hobby feel like a job is to undermine the freedom of our free time.
Marketing and advertising is by its nature highly compelling and persuasive, but also an unreliable guide. Businesses’ main goal is to make money, not to help us make the choices which serve us best. Similarly, love us as they may, our friends and family can urge us to do things serving their interests or fulfill their preconceived ideas of what we want.
The alternative
Instead we could make our free time choices from scratch. We first try to define the outcome we want–in this case the feelings and states of mind–and then work back to what might deliver it.
Take a blank sheet of paper and pen and brainstorm, trying to focus on what we want to experience. We should try to be clear that they are what we want, not what other people want. We are all different.. Write them down haphazardly as you think of them. Some may be new or surprising. Or we might find we dig up feelings we had long in the past.
The second stage is to work on delivering this list. We can try to think of activities where you had the feelings or mental states on our list. Maybe they are things we have not done since we were children or teenagers. Be honest and put them down in a list. Check back to see which feelings and states are covered by your activities and try and fill in any gaps.
Perhaps you might have a state of mind “feeling fresh”. This could make positive activity out of not doing something, like avoiding alcohol, smoking or cream buns. You might also find an activity has given you feelings you do not want alongside the ones you do. In this case, perhaps there is a way to approach it differently, “Play guitar, purely for fun.”
Maybe there are some of the objectives we wrote down which are not covered by activities. In this case we might need to think of some activity experiments that we think might fill that gap. We also might need to thin out the activity list and prioritise.
Together our two lists are the beginning of a positive feeling-focussed mix of activity, using our own direct experience to achieve what we want. We can harness a fact advertisers widely use to serve business ends to serve our own. ■
Opinion: Alcohol-free beer hype is unhelpful
Heavy marketing has created a buzz around alcohol-free beer diverting vital public attention from surging rates of alcohol harm. The stakes are too high to let commercial hype eclipse evidence-based action.
Alcohol deaths were up 33% on pre-pandemic levels in 2022 in the UK, for example. This astonished a BBC Radio 4 news anchor in May, so it is fair to assume the general public is probably less aware still of this dire situation. The US post-pandemic alcohol death surge is similar, at 31%, yet media coverage is sparse and the political response faltering. The WHO warned in summer “there has been little or no progress” in reducing alcohol consumption and harms in Europe.
As the death toll mounts the public is reminded, almost daily, of the success of alcohol-free beer. An alcohol-free beer garden at Munich’s Oktoberfest, for example, gained worldwide coverage, as if it were a sign humanity was turning the page on alcohol. And everything from the Olympics to Formula 1 promotes alcohol brands in alcohol-free clothing. The unspoken implication is that this is a sign of spontaneous progress.
The rise of alcohol free beer story satisfies our fascination for novelties and craving for miraculous solutions. What’s not to like about a story about, say, a tiny island of non-drinkers in a giant sea of drinking at a Munich beer festival. Is this not a sure sign a quiet moderation revolution is afoot? “The problem is taking care of itself,” we can be tempted to think, “One less thing to worry about.”
But, then again, this positive impression is highly questionable. There is also the very real possibility that the alcohol-free Oktoberfest beer garden is a gimmick to pre-empt criticism and generate positive coverage. In this, it was a triumph, regardless of its popularity. And, more broadly, there is no firm evidence that alcohol-free beer makes any meaningful difference to alcohol consumption or alcohol harm. We can be thankful some research is due in the next six months or so to quantify the effect, if there is any.
Nevertheless the media’s tireless trumpeting of alcohol-free beer, often from alcohol industry organisations. It is now “common sense” for non-specialists to see alcohol free beer as part of the solution to alcohol harm. In many cases we are falling for Potemkin villages constructed to show the market has the alcohol problem in hand. This is artful public relations triumphing over rational scientific and journalistic enquiry.
Alcohol-free beer has grown to quench a sizable share of the collective thirst in Europe. In France, Germany and Hungary alcohol-free beer is about 8% of the volume of beer in general. This is clearly progress, right? Well, again, maybe, maybe not. We do not know if alcohol-free beer replaces regular beer or if it is in reality chipping into soft drink sales. We might reasonably ask ourselves if alcohol producers would spend vast sums that cannibalise the sales of their core product?
On an individual level there are more questions. The taste, look and smell of alcohol free beer can prompt some people to crave an alcoholic drink. And alcohol-free beer ads expose audiences including children and people trying to avoid alcohol drinking triggers. Alcohol free spinoffs duck advertising rules which would prohibit advertising the main alcoholic brand. And the imagery of alcohol free beer drinking means sparkling stock photos of attractive people in alcohol drinking situations are still fine.
Alcohol free beer also keeps drinking at the centre of the story. But people who try to avoid alcohol often find alternative activities far easier than attending alcohol drinking occasions sober. Why do we not see more coverage of the benefits of activities which have nothing to do with imbibing liquids, alcoholic or otherwise?
Meanwhile alcohol interests enter alcohol free spaces, like schools, with self-serving “education” initiatives. And when there is an initiative like Men’s Sheds, mostly for middle-aged and older men to do some DIY, alcohol interests rocks up with some “education”. Tragically it is exactly this demographic who die most often from alcohol related causes.
Alcohol free beer is not all bad, of course. A lot of people like the taste of alcohol-free beer and it is not loaded with calories. And it can help us feel at ease avoiding alcohol at alcohol-dominated social occasions. Holding something that looks like a beer can flag we are ready to be sociable and placebo effects can be helpful to us. And there are some dedicated alcohol-free-only brands that might reduce triggering.
There is nothing inherently wrong with a new category of non-alcoholic drinks. But no alcohol-free beverage is automatically a remedy for large scale alcohol health problems. Our working assumption should be that the effect is minimal until proven otherwise. And the focus of media and policymakers should be on policies which are known to work, like those on price, availability and marketing.
We might also usefully look at promoting activities which do not revolve around drinking liquids of any type, like making things in sheds, for example. We can usefully facilitate these activities and protect them from alcohol marketing. This involves finding new ways to fund alcohol free spaces beyond selling drinks. Alcohol free drinks bars have struggled to survive, but alcohol free spaces offering games and other activities appear to have done rather better.
Hoping alcohol-free beer is reducing alcohol problems without evidence risks costing more lives. The stakes are too high to let uncertainty delay the implementation of evidence-based action to reduce record levels of harm. ■
Would-be commissioner noncommittal on alcohol labelling
Hungarian health Commissioner-designate Oliver Varhelyi faces further questions having last night offered MEPs no clear reassurance he would deliver long-overdue alcohol health labelling proposals.
“We have just introduced a couple of labelling conditions for wine: ingredients, alergen content, but also the energy content. Let’s see how they sink in on the use,” he said when Alessandra Moretti of Italy’s centre-left Democratic Party asked if he would commit to producing proposals on alcohol labelling.
“I believe that we need to reflect on how to change the narrative on risk factors, including alcohol, and the economic determinants of health. Social attitudes can be a key driver for change,” he earlier wrote in a written answer to the same question.
He will be asked another set of written questions by MEPs who were unhappy with his answers, including those on protecting abortion rights, lack of clear plan for health and ties to his country’s authoritarian leader Viktor Orban. He won applause for defending the effectiveness of vaccines.
The Commission was meant to produce a proposal on nutrition and ingredients labels by the end of 2022 and warning labels by the end of 2023, according to the Beating Cancer Plan. Delivering this plan is part of the mission set out by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in September.
Varhelyi is the first of the proposed commissioners to face such a redo. He will have to deliver his written answers by Monday. ■