[Coda]

Originally Posted by littl3chocobo

flies in the face of recorded history -shrugs-

No, it really doesn't, and in fact it's only been in the last 50-60 years that modern American drinking culture has shifted in that direction. In the Western world, the idea of going out to get drunk as a recreational activity in its own right (as opposed to doing so as a way to relax from work or to escape hardship) is comparatively novel in the history of human alcohol consumption. In the Middle Eastern and Western worlds, what recordings we have on the subject from ancient, classical, medieval, and renaissance cultures all unanimously agree that drunkenness is a state to be avoided, a sign of someone who lacks fortitude (whether physical or moral fortitude varies by culture).

The use of alcohol grew since its discovery in prehistoric times because its antimicrobial properties made alcoholic drinks safer than many non-alcoholic drinks. (Of course without modern medical understanding, they didn't understand why, but they clearly understood that people who drank fermented beverages were healthier than those who didn't.) People clearly understood drunkenness and sought to avoid it, mixing their drinks with water in order to retain the benefits and extend their supply while still being able to consume enough to stay hydrated while working.

It wasn't until the 1800s that things started to shift, as industrialization led to an increase in free time but also an increase in stress levels, modernization led to a decrease in the need for alcohol as a preservative and sanitizer, changes in religious practices reduced its religious significance, and new developments in medicine led to alcohol being prescribed for just about everything. Drunkenness at this point was still considered a social ill, something that people should avoid, but the change in schedules and habits introduced the western world to alcoholism as a disorder -- people didn't understand what caused alcohol addiction and the new practices around using it, and especially it wasn't understood what made some people more susceptible to it than others.

This rise in alcohol-related problems that no one had ever seen at scale before is what brought about Prohibition in the United States. Much can be said about the backlash effects that came about during Prohibition, but it was the widespread introduction of legal drinking ages that is the root cause of modern American alcohol culture. Before about 1881, most states didn't have age-based restrictions on who could consume alcohol (but many had already enacted state-level prohibition), and of those that did it was often "parental consent" or an age as low as 16. In the ~30 years following the end of prohibition, every state established drinking ages between 18 and 21, and in 1984 it was federally standardized at 21.

This correlated with the introduction of "teenager" as a social concept. Prior to the 1920s, people between 13 and 19 were basically just small adults, expected to be productive members of society. The introduction of the automobile led to the standardization of high school as an institution. By the 1960s, the idea that 13- to 18-year-old people were not in fact adults but a separate stage of life had become universal.

These two facts together led to a paradigm shift: Being able to drink alcohol correlated with other life events like being able to drive a car or being done with school and being able to work. It became part of the idea of becoming an adult. Sneaking alcohol in advance of legal permission was something that had never been a problem before; now, it had become one of the forms of daring transgression that the new teenagers saw as a way to buck authority and establish identity. Likewise, celebrating one's newfound ability to drink alcohol was something that simply never could have happened prior to the introduction of drinking age limits.

The fact that American-style party drinking didn't start being an issue in Europe until the late 1990s/early 2000s provides a contrasting point of evidence. Europeans by and large didn't develop the same hang-ups about alcohol consumption that Americans did until globalization made American culture as dominant worldwide as the American economy had already become. Children were exposed to sensible alcohol use from a young age; it wouldn't have been a transgressive act for a teenager to try a beer and turning 21 wouldn't have been a specific reason to celebrate with intentional drunkenness. Getting intentionally stupid pass-out drunk just for fun wasn't a social phenomenon.

But if you were born in the United States after around 1980, you would have never known that kind of world. By the time you would have been old enough to know about alcohol in any reasonable context, the idea of going to a party just to get drunk was part of the standard social lexicon. Whether you thought that sounded fun or if it sounded stupid is beside the point; you still knew that was a thing that people did and the world around you didn't seem to be opposed to it. You saw it on TV. You heard about it from your friends. You saw it featured in advertisements.

Yet for as normalized as the idea has become, for as hard as it might be to imagine otherwise, it is in fact a new idea.