Freedom’s just another word for lonely and drunk
Timothy P. Carney
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Chelsea Handler in a recent social media video popped open her morning bottle of champagne while sitting in a hyperbaric chamber to celebrate being child-free and tries to argue that “women who are single with no children are happiest.”
Anywhere you look these days, including social media and major op-ed pages, you hear celebrations of the attachment-free life of the unmarried and childless. And while Handler’s data on happiness were a bit off, her morning champagne appears to be pretty on-trend.
MORTGAGE RATES AT TWO-DECADE HIGH COULD RISE FURTHER AND STAY THERE FOR MONTHS
Binge drinking and some drug use reached record levels among Americans aged 35 to 50, a new study found. This is part of “a long-term upward trajectory,” the authors reported. Back in 2012, 23% of Americans between 35 and 50 years old reported having five drinks in a row at some point in the prior two weeks. In 2022, the number was up to 29%. This is connected, no doubt, to the rise in “deaths of despair” that Anne Case and Angus Deaton identified last decade.
What could be behind this bender boom? A prime suspect has to be our baby bust and the retreat from marriage.
“A record-high share of 40-year-olds in the U.S. have never been married,” Pew Research reported in June. This, too, is part of a long-term upward trend, from 6% of 40-year-olds having never been married up to 25% in 2023. Meanwhile, the birth rate has fallen to record lows, and the number of births has fallen almost every year since 2008. More and more adults are childless every year, and a growing share expect never to have children.
The retreat from marriage is most prevalent among the working class, which is also where binge drinking is highest.
The one group where binge drinking is actually on the decline: men under age 30 who have children, according to a 2019 study by researchers at Columbia University’s public-health school.
Influencers and newspaper columnists will tell you that life without a husband, wife, or children is a life of autonomy. That’s probably true. But the evidence, in these early decades of this increasingly connection-free world, is that a life of autonomy maximization is not a happy or healthy life.