THE WORLD IS A STAGE

DRY JANUARY, STIRRED NOT SHAKEN

BENJAMIN SANDERSON

January 8, 2026

Dry January presents itself as restraint, but functions more like administration. Drinking is not refused, merely rescheduled; excess is not condemned, only managed. Behind the language of wellness lies a deeper unease: Intoxication has lost its social alibi, and with it the rituals that once made losing control permissible.

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Dry January arrives with the authority of something already decided. It is less a proposal than a consensus, less a resolution than an ambient assumption, like daylight savings time or airport security lines. One does not announce participation so much as compliance. The point is not abstention but alignment. One aligns with the month, with the calendar, with the moral weather of the moment. The drink is not refused; it is postponed. Beer becomes a scheduling issue. Cocktails are reframed as a future inconvenience. The language around this abstention is conspicuously therapeutic—reset, cleanse, recalibrate—terms borrowed from software updates and colonics, both of which imply that something in the system has been running improperly.

January has always been punitive, but Dry January gives the punishment a tone of self-care. The body, which in December was indulged, displayed, occasionally betrayed, is now treated as a site of repair. We are encouraged to listen to it, though what it is meant to say remains vague. Better sleep, better skin, fewer calories. The claims are modest, almost apologetic. No one promises transcendence. What is promised is clarity. The hangover is recoded as a moral failure, the blur as a lapse in discipline. To drink in January is not a sin exactly; it is simply gauche, like failing to recycle or using the wrong pronouns. One has misunderstood the mood.

What is striking is not the abstention itself—cultures have always cycled through feasts and fasts—but the absence of any shared counterweight. No feast precedes this fast, no ritual that would justify either excess or restraint. December does not function as saturnalia; it functions as retail. The drinking that happens there is private, atomized, often anxious. We do not drink together so much as alongside one another, each person nursing their own reasons. January then arrives not as a necessary correction to excess, but as a managerial response to diffuse unease. The problem is never named, but the solution is implied: Control must be reasserted.

When moderation fails, it organizes.

This is the context in which intoxication now appears: not as danger, not even as pleasure, but as inefficiency. Alcohol interferes with productivity, with optimization, with the smooth maintenance of the self. It introduces error. It makes time uneven. It allows conversations to drift, judgments to soften, plans to dissolve. These are no longer virtues. They are liabilities. What Dry January reveals, quietly but insistently, is that intoxication has lost its social justification. It no longer answers to ritual, to harvest, to festival, to grief. It has been reduced to a habit, and habits are things to be corrected.

This suspicion toward intoxication would have puzzled earlier societies, for whom altered states were rarely accidental and rarely private. What we call drunkenness was once structured, anticipated, even required. The loosening of the self occurred not in opposition to social order but in its service. Moments of collective intensity, religious festivals, seasonal transitions, and rites of passage depended on a temporary suspension of ordinary behavior. The individual dissolved into the group, and in that dissolution, something like social glue was produced. One did not lose control so much as surrender it, briefly, to a larger rhythm.

When Émile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life appeared in 1912, its argument was not about alcohol, but it might as well have been. Durkheim was trying to explain why societies need moments in which the everyday rules no longer apply. In these moments of what he called collective effervescence, emotion circulates, intensifies, and binds. These moments were loud, physical, excessive. They involved singing, shouting, dancing, sometimes intoxication. The point was not escape but renewal. The social order required periodic release, a way of reminding its members that they belonged to something larger than themselves. The self, in these moments, was not optimized; it was overwhelmed.

Moral clarity, applied at street level. Desire redirected by signage.

What matters here is that intoxication functioned structurally, not morally. It was neither condemned nor celebrated in isolation. It was simply one of several technologies through which societies managed intensity. To remove intoxication from this framework and judge it on individual terms—as health risk, as personal weakness—is to misunderstand its historical role. It is also to misunderstand what has replaced it. We have not eliminated excess; we have privatized it. We binge alone and repent together.

The modern anxiety around intoxication has less to do with damage than with disorder. Intoxication makes people unpredictable. It blurs hierarchies. It encourages speech that has not been fully vetted. This is why it was once tolerated only at specific times and in specific forms. Carnival, as Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World (1965) makes clear, was not chaos; it was licensed chaos. Bakhtin understood carnival as a social safety valve, a period in which the world was turned upside down so that it could be righted again. Bodies were exaggerated, laughter was excessive, authority was mocked. Drunkenness was not a problem to be solved but a condition to be staged. The temporary collapse of order reaffirmed the permanence of structure.

What we lack now is the license. Intoxication without a frame becomes embarrassing. Excess without ritual becomes pathology. The laughter that once belonged to carnival now looks suspicious, unserious, even threatening. We are left with a choice between constant regulation and total collapse, with nothing in between. Dry January, in this sense, is not about abstinence; it is about the refusal of sanctioned disorder. It is a month-long assertion that nothing needs to fall apart in order for something to hold.

This refusal is not neutral. It is deeply moral, even when it pretends to be medical. As Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger (1966) showed, societies are less concerned with what is dirty than with what is out of place. Dirt is simply matter that has crossed a boundary. Intoxication troubles boundaries. It confuses inside and outside, intention and impulse, thought and speech. It produces anxiety because it destabilizes categories. This is why periods of social stress so often produce moral panics around substances. The substance is rarely the issue. The issue is control.

Liquid conviction. Nothing left to metabolize but righteousness.

To talk about intoxication, then, is to talk about how societies manage excess. And excess is not optional. As Georges Bataille’s The Accursed Share (1949) argued, civilizations generate more energy than they can productively use. This surplus must go somewhere. It can be invested, militarized, aestheticized, or wasted. Intoxication belongs to this last category. It is expenditure without return. From an economic perspective, it is irrational. From a social one, it is necessary. To eliminate waste is not to become efficient; it is to become brittle.

Modern societies dislike brittleness being named. We prefer to imagine ourselves as resilient, adaptive, self-correcting. Dry January fits neatly into this fantasy. It promises renewal without loss, clarity without sacrifice. What it cannot account for is the quiet violence of constant self-surveillance. There is no collective effervescence in optimization. There is no shared excess in wellness. The rituals we have left are solitary and corrective. We fast alone. We drink alone. We reset alone.

This failure becomes more visible when excess is denied its ritual outlets. René Girard, in Violence and the Sacred (1972), argued that societies manage internal tension by displacement. When mimetic rivalry intensifies, violence threatens to spiral. Rituals—sacrifice, transgression, collective intoxication—function as pressure valves. They absorb and redirect aggression. When such mechanisms disappear, tension seeks new targets.

Intoxication, in this sense, is not indulgence but pacification. It softens hierarchies, blurs rivalries, suspends calculation. The refusal of intoxication restores sharp edges. It clarifies difference. It makes competition legible again. This may feel virtuous, but it is not without cost. History offers a clear example of what happens when societies attempt to legislate sobriety. Daniel Okrent’s Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (2010) documents how Prohibition transformed alcohol from a social practice into a criminal economy. Drinking did not disappear; it became more potent, more theatrical, and more violent. Excess does not respond well to repression. It migrates.

The language that animated Prohibition—health, morality, productivity—has not vanished. It has been modernized. Iain Gately shows in Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol (2008) that alcohol has always been either celebrated or condemned depending on its utility to power. The substance itself never changes. The alternating tolerance and panic around it does.

Richard Davenport-Hines traces that oscillation with grim consistency in The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Social History of Narcotics (2001), where intoxication appears as both pleasure and threat, to be embraced or feared in cycles that resolve nothing. Each attempt at control promises finality; each produces new symptoms. Modern wellness culture is simply the latest iteration. Alcohol is no longer a sin or a crime; it is inflammation, anxiety, bad sleep. The body becomes a spreadsheet. What is being optimized is not joy but legibility. The self must remain continuous, coherent, and available. Anything that disrupts this continuity is suspect.

Bar run dry. Furniture outlasting function.

And yet intoxication persists, precisely because it still does something regulation cannot replace: It alters time. It interrupts intention. It allows speech to wander. These are now framed as side effects rather than purposes, but they remain the reasons people drink.

The same tension appears in art. The romantic myth of the drunken artist has been officially retired, but the need for altered perception remains. Charles Baudelaire, in Artificial Paradises (1860), treated wine and hashish not as escapes but as amplifiers, technologies that intensified perception and revealed the fragility of reason. He was unsentimental about the risks, but he understood the stakes: A life without altered states was a flattened life.

Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947) pushes this into tragedy. Here drunkenness is metaphysics. The Consul drinks not to forget but to confront. Alcohol becomes a medium through which history, guilt, and fate press in. This is not advocacy. It is seriousness.

Social histories like Peter Clark’s The English Alehouse: A Social History, 1200–1830 (1983) remind us that intoxication once belonged to public spaces—taverns, cafés, salons—where ideas circulated because bodies were present. Drinking facilitated sociability. It lowered thresholds. It allowed thought to move laterally.

The impulse itself predates alcohol. Terence McKenna’s Food of the Gods (1992), however speculative, points toward something durable: that humans have always sought altered states. More grounded work, such as Plants of the Gods (1979) by Richard Evans Schultes and Albert Hofmann, shows how carefully such states were once cultivated, ritualized, and contained. Meaning emerged from structure, not chemistry.

Literature charts the same need. In Alethea Hayter’s Opium and the Romantic Imagination (1968), intoxication is inseparable from the birth of modern interiority. Altered states did not create art, but they altered the conditions under which art could be imagined.

Finally, February 1st

Against this history, Dry January appears less as reform than as amnesia. It treats intoxication as a flaw rather than a function. It offers restraint without ceremony, clarity without meaning. It assumes that control is its own reward.

Edward Slingerland’s Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization (2021) attempts to remind readers that intoxication has played a structural role in human societies. That such a reminder feels necessary tells its own story. We have become a culture that needs footnotes to justify losing control.

Dry January will pass, as it always does. February will arrive with its quiet permissions. But the deeper unease remains. We have learned how to optimize ourselves. We have not learned how to let ourselves go—together, deliberately, and without shame. What we lack is not discipline, but ritual.

Benjamin Sanderson (b. 1968 in Modesto) runs the Golden Horn Tavern in Reno: low light, cheap drinks, stalled time. He teaches a night course on the social history of altered states at a community college in Fernley.

Cover image: Abstinence performed publicly, so temptation knows it has been defeated.