You know who I love? Kids today. I’m an old person (I’m 44) who starts sentences with “Kids today…” and finishes them not with a crotchety whinge about how they have no respect for their elders while swinging my walking stick wildly at the clouds, but with “…ARE REALLY EXCELLENT AND HAVE BEEN GIVEN A BLOODY ROUGH TROT.”

Because I really do think the under-40s have it tough. Life was a lot more linear for my generation, Gen X, and all those who came before me. Whatever challenges we faced, at least things made sense. You knew what your life would look like more or less – work, house, family, retirement, the end. These kids? Climate change. Insecure job markets. Unaffordable houses. Mental health horrors. Half your life lived weirdly and insecurely online. Life is really messy if you’re trying to grow up in 2022.

And now, to top it all off, a bunch of killjoy science boffins have come out and discovered that alcohol is an absolute no-brainer (literally – it will erase your brain) for anyone under 40. Apparently the risks aren’t worth the rewards – your odds of cancer, heart disease and accidents outweigh all the pleasant buzzes and social lubrication. So, not only do these poor kids have to try and navigate the mess the older generations created for them, now we’re telling them they can’t even drink their way through it.

The study looks at the risks of alcohol to different populations as part of the cheerily-titled Global Burden of Disease study, and was recently published in the widely respected medical journal The Lancet, so they’re not messing around.

What it found was that people under 40 shouldn’t even allow a dram of alcohol to pass their lips. Not a sherry, not a sauvignon blanc, not a Sex On The Beach. Ever. It took into account the risks of things like cancers, accidents and cardiovascular disease and concluded, in short, that the relative risks were too bloody high.

To twist the knife even further, the study also found that those over 40 were ok to have a drink – as long as they had no underlying conditions. It may even be beneficial, with some evidence saying that occasional drinking for the 40-pluses – perhaps one standard drink or so a day – may help lower the risk of heart disease, stroke and diabetes.

So yet again, while us over 40s are busy farting up the atmosphere with our noxious greenhouse gases and then hoarding all the houses to protect ourselves from the resulting climate catastrophes, we’re allowed to watch the world burn with a steadying glass of Joh Jos Prüm Auslese, while the young are forced to white-knuckle it unassisted.

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The thing is, science boffins, everything’s bad for you in one way or another, isn’t it? Sugar. Fat. Dairy. Red meat. The charry bits on red meat. Farmed fish. Wild fish. No fish. There is no question in my mind that my current evening diet of the full back catalogue of The Real Housewives of New York City is absolutely obliterating whole swathes of my prefrontal cortex. But I’m not about to stop watching it any time soon, because what else am I going to watch – miserable documentaries about climate change?

The point is, we all know that lots of things are bad for us and we still do them anyway, because life has to be about balance. It has to be about calculated risks, about doing a little bit of bad to squeeze out the little bit of fun that acts as a counterpoint to all the really, really awful stuff out there. And that’s especially true for young people, who have a hell of a lot more bad stuff left to live through than the rest of us.

And while we understand that scientists don’t make the science unpleasant to be mean – they just be science-ing – they also can’t really blame us when we thank them for their service and crack another cold one. 

Cheers.

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