Only one in three teetotal in Europe: End of drunken, brand-obsessed generation?

By Bhabani Shankar Nayak* 

A report commissioned by Heineken on The Future Role of Bars in Europe, published in October 2026, found that young people go to bars and pubs to build social lives around food and coffee, not alcohol. They go to meet friends and family. This is not a minor shift in taste. It is part of a wider generational rejection of the commodity culture on which capitalism depends.

The evidence is accumulating. The Health Survey for England (2024), published in 2026, shows that cigarette smoking among adults continued to decline, from 27% in 1993 to 11% in 2024. The adult non-drinker population is growing. Gambling among young people and adults in the UK fell from 65% in 2012 to 48% in 2024. According to Telegraph/NHS data, nearly one-third of Gen Z are teetotal, and one in three Gen Z adults in England does not drink. The Drinkaware Report (2025) finds that 49% of young adults choose no- and low-alcohol drinks to moderate their drinking, nearly double the 28% recorded in 2018. A Bank of America Institute study similarly finds that household spending on alcohol by Gen Z and Millennials has dropped to nearly a 40-year low.

Advertising no longer works the way it once did. No campaign—including “Live like the Captain”—can attract young people to alcohol. Older people now participate at twice the rate of young people in smoking, drinking and gambling. Nightclubs no longer attract Gen Z; pubs are being repurposed as places for food, coffee and friendship. The Night Time Industries Association reports that a quarter of UK towns lost all their nightclubs in 2025. Young people prefer a quieter, more relaxed life to drunken nights on the dance floor. They are building their social lives around gyms, coffee shops, fitness groups and outdoor activities. Thirsty Thursdays and drunken weekends are becoming a thing of the past.

The same shift is visible in consumption more broadly. Luxury brands such as Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Burberry and Dior are experiencing sharp sales declines as young consumers find their products unnecessary. Mass-produced flashy brands have failed to attract them. Young people say these products lack variety, creativity and emotional resonance. They prefer authenticity and aesthetics over propaganda. They are also increasingly sensitive to the exploitative working conditions of low-waged labourers who produce these expensive goods, and to the environmental impact of luxury consumption. Ethical and sustainable consumption is growing among the younger generation.

These declining numbers of drinkers, smokers, gamblers and consumers of luxury goods tell a larger story: capitalism and its advertising industry have failed to attract young people into a vicious, desire-based society built on hedonistic conspicuous consumption and status signalling—a society in which commodity consumption is supposed to define human life. Young people are rejecting that commodity culture and its objectification of life, consumption and culture.

Generation Z is also fighting in the streets, often with humour, to reclaim democratic rights and liberties from an older political establishment that is working to snatch away the very freedoms that are core to being young and creative. The establishment in all spheres of society continues to undermine young people by branding them drug addicts, deviants or apathetic. These claims are simply not true. Anti-youth sentiment is designed to undermine, domesticate and control young people and their free spirit—a spirit that refuses to be confined within narrow silos of identity based on class, race, gender, caste, religion or nationality.

Young people disdain reactionary right-wing thought, behaviour and action. That is why the establishment brands them as disrespectful of culture or tradition, or as apolitical. But there is much to celebrate about Generation Z. They are not buying the propaganda of the capitalist classes and their reactionary nationalist allies. A recent study by the John Smith Centre at the University of Glasgow found that half of 16-to-29-year-olds would refuse to fight for Britain under any circumstances. Narrow nationalism and war-mongering propaganda do not attract young people. They oppose imperialist wars and conflicts. They seek peace, stability, freedom and prosperity.

Young people are not falling into the trap of consumerism, and they are not connecting with one another primarily on the basis of religion, nationality or language. They have developed their own digital sphere in which to connect around shared interests without stepping on others’ toes. This is precisely why older policymakers are trying to curb their digital freedom, shaping the techno-feudal character of digital platform capitalism. Young people are buying neither traditional consumerism nor its digital forms. Celebrating young people, their ideas and their ideals can therefore help us recover from the capitalist and imperialist crisis that is destroying life and the planet.

Young people across the world have realised that capitalism forms alliances with reactionary ideas, organisations, structures, institutions and processes in order to overcome its inherent crises—and that it undermines, domesticates and controls young people, their creativity and their lives in the name of tradition, culture, religion and nationalism. Young people are clear that capitalism is detrimental to the realisation of the youthful spirit and democratic freedom in everyday life. No more fictitious American dreams excite the young. A socialist tendency is therefore growing among young people across the world. The world will be in safe hands if idealistic young people can face the contemporary challenges of patriarchal and racialised capitalism and imperialism—and overcome them by offering a socialist future for the world.

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*Academic based in UK