Until recently, I found the hype around the “sober curious movement” a bit annoying — until something changed my mind.

for MSNBC

If you’ve been on social media in the past five years, there’s a good chance you’ve come across the “sober curious movement.” On TikTok alone, the hashtag has hundreds of millions of views; on Instagram, almost 800,000 videos have the same tag. 

As a recovering alcoholic, I’m a little ashamed to admit that — until recently, — I found the hype around the “sober curious movement” a bit annoying. I had no qualms with the concept — which encourages low or no alcohol consumption as a lifestyle choice and has been adopted largely by Gen Z and millennials — but the trendiness of the term grated on me. It joined a slew of similar phrases that have grown in popularity over the last decade: “Dry January,” “Sober October,” “soft sober” and “sober adjacent.” 

continued at MSNBC