The Bender Generation

My theory as to why 80's babies struggle to stop drinking once they start.

Nov 08, 2023

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Last week, I had two friends in one day reach out to me to discuss their feelings about their drinking.

It had been a while since anyone had done so, so I thought having two people reach out on the same day was alarming. While it sucks that these two friends are going through some struggles, I felt good knowing that they felt comfortable coming to me for a chat. It served as a reminder that writing about my struggles is helping others.

However, what struck me the most about these guys was their similarities.

They’re both in their mid-30s. They both have good jobs, are married with young families, and are both homeowners. While I personally know that both like to have a drink here and there, neither of them, to my knowledge at least, have ever had significant issues with drugs or had a reputation for being party animals.

They both appear to be doing well. They both appear to have their shit together, and to a large degree, they do have their shit together and are doing well.

After speaking to each of them, I realised they had something else in common: they both had the same issue with their drinking. It’s the same issue that I had with mine.

Not drinking wasn’t the hard part. Stopping once they’d started was the hard part.

They spoke on the difficulty they faced coming to terms with their own discomfort around their drinking based on society’s interpretation of what an addict or substance abuser was. I remember struggling with the same thing.

How can you be an alcoholic or have alcoholism if you don’t drink every day? How can you have a problem with drinking if you’re paying the bills, saving a bit of money, doing well at work and, for the most part, having a happy family?

How can you have a drinking problem if you’re drinking isn’t as bad as some of your friends who also seem to have their shit together and are doing all the right things? How can it be a problem if no one other than yourself has noticed it?

It’s a really fucking difficult process to navigate. When you arrive at a place where you’re starting to question your own drinking habits, your thoughts are already potentially corrupted. It’s really fucking hard to accept that you’re not capable of, or not good at, doing something that most others seem to be able to do.

One spoke about the excitement they would feel a week out from a social event, which resonated strongly with me. I remember feeling there were certain events where writing yourself was more acceptable than others. Weddings, bucks parties, work Christmas parties, even a fucking funeral reception. Whether you’re celebrating or commiserating, writing yourself off seems more acceptable if there’s a worthy event or if others are there to do it with you.

I would get excited about things like this because I would convince myself I was allowed to do it. If ever there was an occasion where this behaviour was accepted, these were the ones. For some reason, 20 beers and a bag of coke are perfectly fine at a wedding reception, not so much alone in your backyard celebrating the phenomenon that was another Friday afternoon.

What I realised about both of these friends is that there was nothing unique about their drinking habits. For my generation, drinking this way is commonplace. From my experience, the traditional idea of an alcoholic is less prevalent in this generation. While the conventional view of an alcoholic still exists in this generation, This generation is The Bender Generation.

To (perhaps weakly) support this, I found this report by The Guardian, which suggests binge drinking is more common among young people while having a few drinks every day is more common among older generations.

What these two guys had in common that was unique, though, was they had an issue with their own behaviour. Thousands of people in similar positions do the exact same thing every weekend. The only difference is they don’t have a problem with it. That’s what they drink for. For now, they are at peace with the way they use alcohol.

When I was younger, the person who drank the most, stayed up for the most days straight, did the most amount of speed or coke was lauded as a hero. It was about getting fucked up and then staying fucked up for as long as possible. Whoever did that was the fucking man. If you were referred to as a “loose cunt” socially, you wore it as a badge of honour.

Eventually, though, most people started to grow up, meet a partner, buy a house, have kids and settle down. I remember thinking that this is what I’m doing now, and that is what I will do later. I thought that one day, I would “grow up”. Like I would wake up one day, and the desire to drink and take drugs would be gone. I thought I would grow out of it.

I think as we transitioned from young party-goers, trying to dull the anxieties presented by the transition from school kids to young adults who all of a sudden had some money and a plastic card with a photo on it that said we were now legally capable of drinking responsibly and then transitioning into our late 20’s and early 30’s where we met partners, bought houses, had children and started businesses; we unknowingly became more dependant on substances to help us cope then perhaps we cared to realise.

In a lot of ways, we had grown up. Look at us! Doing all this fuckin’ adult shit, like our parents did. In terms of what society expected us to do, we grew up. But we never learned to cope with the stresses that come with being a grown-up.

I remember in my 20s, now and then, my friends and I would have what we would call a shut-in. A shut-in was essentially a small party of maybe three or four people in one of our houses or apartments.

We’d get plenty of alcohol, more cocaine than we thought we’d need, and usually end up getting even more later on, and sit around inside drinking, doing coke, watching music videos on youtube and chatting ultimate shit.

We used to joke about getting a whiteboard and writing down all our ideas because we were sure we were solving all the world's problems.

When I reflect on the old shut-in, I realise we were using it as a kind of therapy. Sound crazy? Hear me out.

By taking a small group of close friends, placing ourselves in an environment where we couldn’t be bothered by anyone else, listening to music we wanted to listen to and using substances to take away our stress and anxieties, we were creating the ultimate safe environment. Much like the feeling you get in the office of a good psychologist.

Some of the most deep and meaningful conversations I have ever had have been at a shut-in because we felt safe to have them. It’s just a shame we can’t remember them all.

Because that comfort was so foreign to us at any other time, we craved it. So, we would get more cocaine and alcohol because we wanted that secure feeling to last longer.

But before you know it, it’s Sunday, and the drugs have run out, the hangover kicks in, sleep deprivation is melting your brain and panic sets in as you start to wonder how the fuck you’re going to be able to work the next day.

I think it’s evident that this particular demographic, the generation that I am a part of, has become the bender generation because we either don’t know how to or don’t feel comfortable expressing how we feel or who we truly are. We’ve become reliant on substances to genuinely delve into those extreme depths, and it feels good.

But why? Why have we been raised so ill-equipped to talk about how we feel? Why is it so hard for young people to talk about their feelings? The obvious (and cliche) reasons like boys don’t cry, talking about your feelings is weak, harden up, etc, hold some weight, but given the amount of education and awareness around positive mental health these days, I don’t think they are as much to blame as they once were.

The other day, I had an appointment with my GP, and he asked how I was going with my psychologist. He mentioned something interesting as we discussed the things I was working through.

I’m paraphrasing here, but he said that before the 1980s, most Australian families could get by relatively comfortably on a single income. For most families, a second parent working was a nice thing to have but not a complete necessity. I can only speak from experience here, but while both my grandmothers did work at stages in their lives, they took large chunks of time away from work to raise their children, in both cases around a decade.

He said that in the early 1980s, house prices and utility costs started to rise, forcing more mothers to join or rejoin the workforce earlier than they would have liked, meaning they spent a shorter period at home with their children. With more people in the workforce and house prices increasing, it was only a matter of time before interest rates rose as well, meaning couples had gone out and borrowed money based on two incomes and now the amount they had to repay each week was increasing forcing parents to take on more hours or second jobs.

He also mentioned that employees and the government were less generous with paid maternity leave back then. I struggled to find exact numbers, but I did find this chart in Families Then & Now: How we worked, a research report by the Australian Institute of Family Studies which supports my GP’s claim that the percentage of women in the workforce aged between 20 and 44 has consistently increased each decade since 1979.

In no way am I suggesting women shouldn’t pursue their careers or that we should revert to a traditional setting where men win the bread, and women raise the kids. I’m simply pointing out that kids born in the 80s were the first of generations where more mothers started working more hours.

These days, it’s common for both parents of a child to have full-time jobs, but we also know so much more about parenting and, in particular, the significant impact our parenting has on our children through those all-important formative years. We’re better equipped to manage these formative years now that we have all of this knowledge coupled with increasingly flexible working arrangements that mean we can spend more time at home.

It’s as though we transitioned from single-income families to double-income families through necessity 40 years before we had the knowledge and information we needed to do so successfully.

I can’t help but wonder, is it a coincidence that the generation that uses an almighty bender every weekend as a coping mechanism coincides with the time when a family unit incrementally progressed from one parent working full time to both?

I’m not suggesting one is right, and one is wrong, but surely replacing five years of direct nurture from a primary caregiver with anywhere from six to 12 months of nurture and four years of alternate child care has to have some impact on society as a whole?

Could this join the likes of over-exposure to information, too much screen time, lack of outdoor play, less in-person community interaction, and being raised in that “she’ll be right, get on with it” era as one of the key reasons we are seeing the highest rates of mental health diagnosis and relevant medicating in history?

Sure, the advancement of medical science means it’s easier to identify, diagnose and treat more conditions that may have gone unnoticed in the past. Still, on the surface, materialistically, at least, we’ve never had more access to everything we need, yet we’re more anxious, stressed and depressed than ever. These are the exact things that can lead young people to drugs and alcohol as a coping mechanism.

One reason I think the two could be related is because one of the friends mentioned above said to me that he doesn’t understand why he struggles to stop drinking. He doesn’t get why he gets blackout drunk every time and can’t remember getting home.

He told me he didn’t have a traumatic childhood or grow up around alcohol abuse and that he couldn’t think of anything of note that would make him want to drink the way he did. Maybe it’s just that he didn’t get as much time with his primary caregivers as an infant and developed some insecure attachment he didn’t even realise he had.

It’s also the commonality of using alcohol this way. As I said earlier, at 35 years old, I still have friends who drink the exact way I did just 18 months ago. I had the mindset of, why would I drink alcohol if the intention wasn’t to get drunk? I’d honestly drink water instead. An old mate of mine used to say, “Ya wouldn’t drink the shit if it didn’t do anything to ya”.

I found this report by The Australian Bureau of Statistics that said people born in Australia were almost twice as likely as those born overseas to exceed the guideline, which makes me wonder, have we entrenched using alcohol as a coping mechanism into our culture? Do we grow up thinking that using alcohol to “unwind’ is perfectly normal and then, at times, let it get away from us and become something more sinister?

Even if everything mentioned above was proven true, what can we do about it now? Other than trying to break the cycle for our children, in what way would this knowledge be of value? Well, I believe we can’t effect true and lasting changes in our behaviours until we start to understand them.

That’s why when I got sober, the goal wasn’t ever to quit drinking for good. The goal was to quit drinking for long enough. Long enough to gain an understanding as to why I drank and used drugs the way I did. Why was I so reckless and, at times, would go to such extreme measures to get, or to stay, so fucked up.

It's easier to process when we can identify, understand and name the feeling that we are feeling. We panic less when we understand what we are feeling or why we are having these urges to suppress them. Once we do this, we can practice. We can do repetitions until it becomes second nature.

I think the more people who understand this, the better. I know that both my friends were in a situation where they were frustrated with their inability to understand why they felt the way they did and, in turn, behaved the way they did.

One of them reached out initially to tell me that they had finally accepted that they were uncomfortable with the way they used alcohol and were going to see a counsellor about it the following day. He mentioned he was feeling particularly vulnerable, which is understandable.

I spoke with him the day after his appointment, and he said it was an incredibly positive experience. So many of his questions were answered he felt heard, validated and as though he didn’t have to be so hard on himself for the way he had conducted himself in the past.

Most importantly, he was glad he did it and walked out of the room, feeling much better and more at peace with himself. Growth can’t happen in a mind constantly belittling and demonising itself. You have to make room for kindness.

I hope more friends reach out to me for this kind of help. I hope the friend mentioned above one day feels comfortable enough to tell some of his friends about his experience. Maybe one of those guys will seek out some help because we don’t need to spend thousands of dollars on a shut-in and ruin the first half of the following week to feel comfortable talking to someone else about how we feel. We need to normalise talking about these things without the help of substances.

These are just some thoughts I’ve had after having three eerily connected conversations with three very different people, all within a number of days. It’s pure theory, but it’s one that I hope will get others thinking and asking questions because the more questions we ask, the more answers we are likely to find.

Think of it as a conversation about possible and plausible theories. I’d love to hear what you think. Even if you think I’ve lost my fucking mind, I still want to know what you think.

The Bender Generation

My theory as to why 80's babies struggle to stop drinking once they start.

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