We may like it or not, but since prehistory, alcohol helped groups, friendships and couples to spawn from nothing.
It is reasonable to ask if being sober and lonely at home is healthier than making social connections that alcohol helps to create and maintain.
You are fine and that’s nice. But my thinking was about people who struggles to socialize and suffer from it.
From a health perspective, are those people better alone at home or should they profit from the alcohol properties, even at moderate doses to create better connections ?
The question is important because socialization is important for your health. It greatly reduces stress and anxiety, it improves self confidence, and more generally, it gives you more luck in life. COVID lockdowns impacts on mental health are real, for example.
You seem to don’t drink alcohol (which, again, is perfect) so maybe you don’t know that its social lubricant effects (making shy people talk without anxiety, if you want) are effective at really low dose, way before being drunk.
Struggling with socializing is a matter of being inexperienced at it, like you would struggle to play guitar or to swim if you've never done it long enough to be at least proficient at them. Luckily socializing is one of the few things we've been doing since we were born so we got a degree of experience there.
If the struggle comes from having underlying issues that undermine your ability to socialize, say, lack of self esteem, depression or any other mental health issues, those need to be addressed as well and drinking is not going to solve them.
Actually those conditions will most likely improve by socializing without alcohol. Alcohol is just a false friend.
As a moderate outgoing and sober person, alcohol actually makes me shy, it numbs me down and takes away the edge I've been sharpening all my life. In other words it prevents me from actually be myself.
Looking back however, there were really zero added benefits to the relationships that were "lubricated" by alcohol that we couldn't have gotten had we put more effort into doing something creative or actively community building - rather than going out to drink and flirt. All of my best relationships were formed this way.
In fact if I think of times I was aware of or involved in when bad things happened (luckily I never had any problems personally) - alcohol was almost always involved.
At this point I will always prefer figuring out something interesting to do instead of contributing to "drinking culture."