My experience at a bigtechco where they have a weekly happy hour with free alcohol is that it's a pretty small minority that partakes (~20% out of the ~20% of in-office folks that attend these after work events). I've also never seen anyone have more than ~2-3 drinks total. The median number of drinks is 1 by far.

This is all post-covid though, perhaps it was different in the before times.

About ~8 years ago, in one of my previous jobs, we would start around 4PM almost every other Friday in the office and go till about midnight or after. It really depends on the company, environment, and people. We even had non-drinkers tag along as well. Probably not the healthiest environment to be in, but it was fun while it lasted.

I can't comment much about nowadays, as I haven't worked from an office since 2020. But from what I've heard, you're correct, those times are somewhat behind us in most of the companies.

In the before times, sometimes the drinking started on Thursday.

there are plenty of other beverages that aren't alcoholic/caffeinated than just plain water

Strange but true: I've been to a number of professional happy hours that offered free alcohol, but didn't provide other beverages. It got to the point that I started bringing my own water bottle to networking events, just in case.

I'm a big fan of providing other beverage types. Being able to sip a soda etc from the same kind of container as everyone else goes a long way towards blending in.

>Strange but true: I've been to a number of professional happy hours that offered free alcohol, but didn't provide other beverages.

Failing to provide non-alcoholic drinks would be a faux pas even in Germany. It is indeed strange. I'd go as far as calling it worse than college-party-level planning.

Is nobody expected to drive home after the event?

At networking mixers I've attended, often there are a limited number of drink tickets per person and a set event duration. But the drink tickets only covered alcohol, not other beverages. In some cases, other beverages just weren't an option at all. ("I guess you could find a water fountain? But why?")

Also, one of those recurring events was hosted at a startup that was, to be frank, known for "worse than college" level planning all around...

Eventually events started getting better at providing options. Probably a mix of several factors: the move to another city (local culture), career growth/level of people around me, and changing social patterns. (increasing interest in non alcoholic options/ more people willing to speak up)

Do you think they would have a better time if they were drinking a sprite or something? Being with drunk people when you're sober is not fun for either party regardless.

I think that depends on how ridiculous and uninhibited you can be when sober.

There’s a big range between sober and drunk. The key to work drinks/happy hour is go for a single drink and leave. You get the best parts of being social and avoid the vast majority of the issues that come from people drinking with colleagues.

Drinkers also don't like having teetotalers around them because of the bad conscience they induce.

Another part of it is that (imo) one of the biggest boons from group drinking is that it builds trust by giving people something to bond over — you’ve all imbibed to lower your inhibitions and get a little sloppy/loose, and the next day you see that you’re still accepted and part of the group.

Teetotalers might be there physically, but they’ve opted out of the shared experience of making themselves vulnerable.

I mean, I didn't really "opt out". I don't breath properly when I sleep, alcohol makes it worse, the doctor more or less made the decision for me.

But I suppose alcohol is bad for basically everyone, and the others opt in to that risk as well.

> you’ve all imbibed to lower your inhibitions and get a little sloppy/loose, and the next day you see that you’re still accepted and part of the group.

In west coast tech companies with young people of both sexes, I absolutely refuse to drink due to not wanting to be accused of harassment or inappropriate behavior. I'm not a creep, but am older and not really attractive and am treated to a different standard.

Sounds paranoid but have had coworkers accused, penalized, or fired after these events.

i don't know... if getting a bit of a buzz leads to you doing things that are interpreted as inappropriate, maybe there's some bigger underlying issues about understanding what's appropriate.

Well the OP mentioned "lower your inhibitions and get a little sloppy/loose", and I mention double standards depending on the person.

I've seen outings in Asia where there's lots of non-sexual touching, arm around shoulders etc, and yet that would be like insta-problem between sexes on the west coast. Getting buzzed means you aren't on high alert for this sort of thing, hence I'll nope out of putting myself in this situation.

Speak for yourself. I am a fervent enjoyer of booze, and I feel absolutely nothing in the presence of people who don't drink. Partake in whatever you want to have a good time, be it a drink, or a smoke, or absolutely nothing and as long as you're happy, we'll get along a-okay.

I don't really do sugary drinks, so Diet Coke/Diet Pepsi is out as well. I also just actively dislike tea and coffee, so I don't really want to go with any kind of decaf version of those either.

So yeah, if the bar has Diet 7-up or Diet Caffeine Free Coke, then I'm fine, but at least in the NYC area I've not really ever seen that at a bar. They're not even guaranteed to have them at grocery stores.

As it stands, the one thing that basically every bar is guaranteed to have that's sugar free and caffeine free is water, so that's what I end up defaulting to. It feels a bit lame but I really like being able to sleep.

Seltzer + lime is a fairly standard option.

Bonus, it looks like an alcoholic drink if you’re a woman and don’t want to give the idea that you might be pregnant, which is an issue which women trying to grow in corporate situations face at events, when in reality they simply don’t like drinking and/or don’t want to be around a bunch of men getting hammered who may potentially have sway over their careers.

That's actually a really good idea. I'm not a woman so there's not much risk of people thinking I'm pregnant, but I could see some kind of lime seltzer being good and people could assume it's a gin and tonic or something.

I might steal this.

There are quite a few decent alcohol free beers these days although they’re not sugar free.

I joke with bartenders and ask for fermented sky juice (good ol' water). They usually understand and smile.

And yes, perrier or just soda with lime is also perfectly acceptable too.

I avoid both coffee and refined sugar and then the list of alternatives really shrinks. Herbal tea is a good one of course, and in a bar one can often get pure apple juice.

Wait, why is sugar bad but apple juice okay?

It’s not, it’s the same bad. Pediatricians try to drill this into parents.

Agreed. (And for some of us, whole apples also have too much sugar--as do most other fruits with whole raspberries and passionfruit being exceptions, and pureeing the raspberries or incorporating them into a smoothie is just as bad as juicing them.)

Unless you're diabetic I really don't understand how an apple could have too much sugar in it.

Most advice says to avoid sugar, but the sugar in fruit is OK (the advices goes) because the fiber in the fruit slows down the absorption of the sugar. Well, my experience has been that the sugar in fruit is not OK (even if the fruit has not been juiced or pureed or processed in any way). It is quite harmful to me, the largest harm being cognitive decline (Alzheimer's or such, I have yet to get a diagnosis). I have managed to stop and partially reverse my cognitive decline by only ever eating small quantities of carbs. A whole apple in one sittings is too much! (Some apples, such as the Granny Smith variety, have less than half the carbs of an average variety, but even a Granny Smith probably has too much for me to eat a whole apple in one sitting unless I'm doing a lot of physical labor that day, which is rare. It would be OK for me to cut up a Granny Smith and freeze the pieces and eat one fifth of an apple per meal, but I haven't bothered.)

Fructose seems to be the worst carb for me, but I also limit the other carbs (glucose and starch) and one of my guesses as to why I need to do that is that if I eat more than about 12 to 20 g of carbs in any meal, a decent amount gets converted into fructose (e.g., by my liver). I believe that if I had more muscle mass, I could get away with eating more carbs (because my muscles would convert much of the glucose in my bloodstream to glycogen before my body could convert it to fructose) but it is hard for people my age to increase their muscle mass much.

Note that I assiduously avoided refined sugar (e.g., molasses or monk fruit extract or any other refined sugar, by itself or added to processed foods) during the decades during which my cognitive decline was progessing, and that is was only after I started also avoiding fruits and honey (except for a few low-sugar fruits, which in my case are frozen raspberries and frozen passionfruit) and vegetables high in carbs (like winter squash, carrot juice and more than one or two carrots per meal) that I stopped and partially reversed my cognitive decline.

I suspect that I'm far from the only one whose cognitive decline was caused by excessive consumption of carbs because of things I've read, e.g., https://news.cuanschutz.edu/news-stories/study-suggests-fruc...

(People who advise avoiding carbs often extol the benefits of ketosis. I tried ketosis, but do not like it. I've seen things that say spending too much time in the ketotic state can damage the heart, and my heart starts doing funny things when I spend too much time in ketosis, so I eat enough carbs every day to avoid ketosis, which is not much carbs.)

> Most advice says to avoid sugar

Weird advice considering your body literally turns food into sugar anyway. I suspect folks saying that sort of thing are quacks or using sugar as a scapegoat for excess calories.

placebos work

It's the familiar "natural = good, not natural = bad" fallacy. Where "natural" is defined according to the whims of each person.

I'll answer for me and not try to answer for people in general. People's metabolisms are different, different food works for them.

Empirical answer: different sensation basically the minute it enters my body, from refined sugar. I don't enjoy that feeling it and I could feel it in a blind test. My body and brain do not feel good on such sugars, and avoiding them entirely is a good way to remove the craving for them.

Scientific answer: fruit sugars are slower to take up than refined sugars, when delivered in as juice or in fruit.

Are there really?

If we ignore alcohol. We have few groups:

1) Coffee / tea (caffeinated so many cant sleep after them)

2) Yerba mate (isnt it the same group as caffeinated drinks? Also availability is low)

3) sugary drinks (cola, fanta, soda..) - basically liquid diabetes

4) juices (they are sugary again even if other type of sugar)

5) milk (nobody sells / buys milk?)

6) water with lemon

So if you want to sleep, dont want sugary drinks you are left with water with lemon.

If you can tolerate a very tiny amount of alcohol, bitters with soda is a great cocktail substitute. There's also "hop water" beverages that I really like that have no calories.

Non-alcoholic beers have also gotten quite good.

Second this. I love beer and hate alcohol and lately non-alcoholic beers (specially of blonde types) have become very high quality.

Just avoid the over-industrialized ones, like you'd do with normal beers.

Partake and athletic are amazing but my favorite is still asahi dry zero, just hard to find

Also laguinitas hopwater is the bomb and I like it better than actual IPAs

Try mixing some zero sugar lemonade w/ Hopwater. It's fantastic.

Herbal tea is good (but good luck ordering that in a bar!). And personally, pure fruit juices are fine for me.

Yerba Mate is very caffeinated, and I wouldn't say very different from tea, aside from the social norms around it.

What is wrong with citron pressé?

kombucha

Kombucha is my drink of choice, but it is fermented tea so if tea is out so is kombucha.

The other options I can think of are are flavored seltzers/flavored water, Mocktails/virgin cocktails/Shirley Temples, agua fresca, non-alcoholic beer, and herbal tea. Availability varies, of course.

Another option: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kvass

Nutritionally, kwas is just an eccentric kind of pop marketed to eastern Europeans. The modern mass-market stuff is even made the same way: syrup and forced carbonation.

There should be a (weak) mushroom tea alternative at such events, I think.

Taking psilocybin in a corporate setting sounds like a bad time imo, even at a low dose. Plus, there's always that one guy at the office Christmas party...

MDMA would be more appropriate.

That's not so far off from how silicon valley really worked in the halcyon days.

Read "What the Door mouse said."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Dormouse_Said

Imagine if people could choose the intoxicant that works for them instead of having to default to booze.

>I don't think it's ever directly hurt my chances of promotion or anything, but I do think it makes socializing harder.

From what I’ve seen (in the US), people will frame in like it will hurt, because drinkers what to drink with other people, but competence wins out at the end of the day.

Being around when decisions get made outside of the office can have an impact though, and it sounds like you’re still there for that. I used to go out with the smokers on their smoke break for the same reason. I didn’t smoke, but going out with them let me be part of the conversation that was sometimes social, but often turned to work and strategy.

Yeah, same, I would also hang out with smokers during their smoke break at a job, despite the fact that I have never really smoked [1]. At that job, most of the higher-ups smoked and I figured it might be useful to be part of the "under the table" discussions.

[1] Outside of half a cigarette when I turned 18 which I thought was pretty gross.