To answer us, Anna Toumazoff slipped away from the bar where she was seated for a moment. That evening, she had not ordered a pint of beer, as she had been able to do in the past, often simply automatically. But a double espresso latte. Her new habit, alternating with Club-Mate (a sparkling and energizing tea-based drink), since the 27-year-old stopped drinking alcohol. In September, the feminist influencer and presenter at Mouv’de Radio France publicized this decision on his Instagram account : “I’m giving up alcohol completely for the next six months”, she wrote in the teaser. As if to set a goal from which she could no longer deviate. And then, for “give strength to those who question their consumption, without daring to take the plunge”she explains to us.
It had been several months since she herself began to question the impacts that her use of alcohol, of drunken afterwork parties, had on her ” Entire life “ : actions carried out drunk and regretted in the early morning, the propensity ” sad “ see you“intoxicate” to hope to benefit from each other, the frequent hangovers, like the acute anxiety of the aftermath of drinking, which she recounts without filter on the social network. His intervention sparked many comments of its subscribers under 30, also expressing their awareness of the invasive aspect that alcohol has taken on in their daily lives.
The first months of the school year usually rhyme, at this age of life, with the return of end-of-day drinks, dinners with friends, student parties and other integration weekends, where alcohol is omnipresent and trivialized. And it is precisely this moment that several twenty-somethings have chosen, like Anna Toumazoff, to publicly express their desire to take a step back from drinking. Salomé Lahoche, a 25-year-old illustrator, made some a little comic online, where she explains her entry into sobriety after having, during her studies, so much “romanticized the high and the rock image it conveys”.
A fundamental trend
These recent speeches are part of an underlying trend. Young people are drinking less and less, studies on the subject indicate. The proportion of those aged 17 who have never drunk alcohol in their life has thus increased significantly in twenty years (19.4% in 2022, compared to 4.4% in 2002), according to the latest report from the French Observatory on Drugs and Addictive Tendencies (OFDT), published in 2023. When they drink, young people always tend to do so in significant quantities, notes the survey, with the persistence of phenomena of binge drinking, these massive alcohol consumptions during the first festive experiences. But even these practices are decreasing among young adults and adolescents (only 36.6% of 17-year-olds surveyed had an episode of heavy drinking in the month, with more than six drinks close together, compared to 44% in 2017). .
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