Kill-Devil IV: Sober Curious

On the woman who decided moderation was a myth, and the $44 billion that agreed with her.

For if society is sometimes threatened by intoxicants, it is equally threatened by the lack of them. Without their aid we see each other as we are, and no human society can be built on so frail a foundation.

— Roger Scruton

I.

The woman who redefined America’s relationship with alcohol is not a doctor, nor a scientist, nor a public health official. She does not have a PhD. She does, however, have a gift for spotting cultural shifts slightly before they arrive and writing their manifestos, at least among a certain demographic of affluent coastal women who discuss their birth charts and their therapists at dinner parties.

Ruby Warrington has been, in rough order: a student of fashion promotion at the London College of Fashion, a style editor at various London magazines, the editor of a lifestyle magazine for an Ibiza nightclub, and features editor at the Sunday Times Style supplement (her colleagues there called her Mystic Ruby). She moved to New York and founded an online new age magazine called The Numinous, as well as a mentoring program for spiritual activists. She consulted with Lululemon and Buick and Unilever, helping them weave mysticism into their branding. She created an astro deck for divination. She wrote a book she describes as Sex and the City meets Eat Pray Love, and more recently published an apologetics for the voluntarily childless, Women Without Kids. Her publisher’s bio identifies her husband only as the Pisces. She currently calls herself a book doula.

But the outlier on this otherwise cosmically breezy resume came in 2018, when she published a book called Sober Curious, and in doing so gave the new temperance the one thing it had been missing: a name.

II.

Warrington had been living in New York for several years by then, married to the Pisces. They’d fallen in love in London when he was a DJ and party promoter launching Fabric, which would eventually become one of the world’s most famous nightclubs.

Her position as girlfriend in residence came with a card for unlimited free drinks in the VIP lounge. She took full advantage of the perk until one day she realized she felt terrible: gut-churning anxiety, brutal hangovers, trouble sleeping, persistent IBS, and the sense that something dreadful was lurking around every corner.

When she stopped drinking, she felt better. Eventually she wrote a book about it. Warrington describes her journey to writing it as diving Alice in Wonderland–style into a world of psychics, planetary transits, and cosmic quests to the deeper realms of consciousness. The book reads accordingly. She consistently says thank Goddess and describes getting like, MDMA high off breathing at a teepee circle in Brooklyn. She drops sciencey sounding nonsense tidbits about how a single glass of wine a day can shorten your life by five years, and says it now tastes sour and stinky to her sober palate anyway. She talks a lot about hangovers and doesn’t seem to realize that you can consume alcohol and not get one:

We don’t need studies and statistics to prove to us that alcohol has no place in our wellness regimes because... HANGOVERS, PEOPLE! ...being hungover—essentially nature’s way of informing us that what we just put into our system is poisoning us—is simply seen as the inevitable payoff for another night on the sauce.

In the book’s more candid passages she describes her path from relationship insecurity to anorexia to using alcohol as a coping mechanism. She has spoken in interviews about the heavy social drinking that was inseparable from her fashion career and her history of casual drug use. This is someone who, by her own account, has struggled with moderation across the board, and who quit drinking not from a position of casual enjoyment but from the wreckage of compulsive excess. And good for her! Not everyone should drink alcohol. But rather than write an honest, particular memoir about a woman whose specific psychology made alcohol one in a series of destructive coping mechanisms, she concluded that moderation itself is a myth. That anyone who enjoys a glass of wine more than once in a blue moon is probably, kind of, just a little bit addicted.

Maybe the occasional glass of wine is the problem. Or maybe the problem is binge-drinking on weeknights inside a subterranean meat warehouse where the bass shakes the walls and everyone is on molly.

II.

The people who actually read the book likely agreed with her already, and I wouldn’t be complaining about it if it hadn’t broken loose and squirmed its way into the wider culture. The book itself mattered less than what she called it — sober curious became a meme and a hashtag, and to some an identity. Before Warrington invented a third category you were either a normal drinker or you had a problem. The idea spread beyond the birth-chart demographic largely because it gave millions of people who were already uneasy about drinking a way to talk about it that sounded like self-improvement. Rather than recovering you were optimizing. It was an identity that fit neatly inside the framework of performative wellness. You could have a dabble with sobriety, brag about your improved HRV on Instagram, and slap a #sobercurious on it. Nearly a million people have done that now.

Andrew Huberman fanned the flames when he dropped a three-hour episode in 2022, insisting in his soothing monotone that even a little alcohol is poison. He rattled his citations like rosary beads, drawing on a handful of recent studies while neglecting to even pay lip service to the decades-long trail of research suggesting moderate drinking is good for you. But it had the sound of authority and felt like a revelation to many of the nearly eight million people who listened, and it lent academic polish to conclusions the wellness world had already reached.

Nobody was plotting any of this, at least not consciously. But once you see the formula it’s hard to unsee: anxiety creates a market, the market attracts investors, investors fund products and the influencers who promote them, and the influencers amplify the anxiety. After Warrington gave the thing a name and Huberman gave it legitimacy, all that was left was for someone to work out how to monetize it. Turns out a lot of people were already working on that.

III.

Ben Branson had spent a decade working with companies like Nike and Absolut Vodka before launching Seedlip in 2015. His product was essentially water with some herbs infused in it, but what he was really selling was less tangible: the possibility of sophistication without alcohol. He priced it like gin and dressed it in the visual language of European luxury. It took off, and boozeless drink companies began to spawn like rabbits.

Athletic Brewing grew so fast that by 2024 they ranked among the top twenty American breweries overall. Not only in non-alcoholic beer category, but competing with the big dogs like Heineken and Pabst. They’re valued at $800 million now. But Athletic at least makes actual beer, or close to it. Most of the brands that rode in on the wellness wave (more than 1000 of them since 2020) were entirely marketing. Spike some herby water with adaptogens and get a celebrity endorsement, wrap it all up in packaging that signals trendy enlightenment, and you’ve got yourself a company.

Ghia hired the designers behind Rihanna’s Super Bowl halftime show to create their classily textured bottles. One of these will run you $38.

The NA drinks sector is big business now. And much of it is owned by the same companies that still sell you liquor. Diageo, the biggest spirits company in the world, bought Seedlip in 2018, and then Ritual Zero Proof. Then they launched non-alcoholic versions of Tanqueray, Gordon’s, and Captain Morgan. Their NA portfolio is growing like crazy while the rest of it stagnates. AB InBev (the group that owns Budweiser, Corona, Stella Artois, and a ton of others) has bumped its NA lineup by 60% since 2019 and sunk €31 million into de-alcoholization tech.

The same branding apparatus that spent a century making drinking look sophisticated now makes not-drinking look sophisticated, at the same price point and even better margins. The industry is projected to hit $44 billion by 2032. That’s a lot of money with a vested interest in the premise that alcohol is poison. At a certain scale it stops mattering if the premise is true.

IV.

What does the new temperance look like in practice? You download Reframe, the number one neuroscience-based alcohol reduction app, and spend six months rewiring your neural pathways through guided meditations and streak counters and conversations with an AI chatbot named Melody. When the cravings hit you buy their non-alcoholic elixir called Liquid Luck, which has ashwagandha and bacopa to help take the edge off. You do all of this alone, on your phone.

Warrington assures us, in her characteristic eloquence, that the only thing you miss out on by not drinking is... getting drunk. Mic drop!

I don’t doubt that some people’s lives improve when they stop drinking, and I don’t begrudge them using an app or a chatbot to do it. But the optimization framework that produced all of this has no way to account for what it’s optimizing away.

The best evenings of my life have involved sharing a bottle of something I made with people I love, poured outside when the light runs gold and there’s a story that goes along with it, about the drunk yellow jackets or the meth-heads in the hills or bribing Eloise with french fries to pick grapes in the rain that we got for free because someone pruned wrong and half the clusters got sunburned. I can say things easier after a couple glasses of the stuff. Strangers feel more like brothers. And believe it or not, it doesn’t even require a hangover.

Mic drop!