What Tom Holland's experiment raises about drinking "normal"

Normal is relative, okay.

Oliver Thansan
Oliver Thansan
19 July 2023 Wednesday 04:23
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What Tom Holland's experiment raises about drinking "normal"

Normal is relative, okay. Let's put it like this: How much effort would it take you to stop drinking alcohol for a while if you are someone who drinks “normally”? Tom Holland's experiment -great actor, 27 years old- has been, in his words, the most difficult thing in his life.

He didn't get up one day and tell himself he was giving up alcohol. What counts is that he spent a “normal” Christmas, let's say, one of those with a lot of going out and drinking, that he has always had a good stamina (maternal genes, he points out) and that with the turn of the year he decided to spend a sober month. In networks, many users share at the beginning of the year their own

On that January slope, he discovers that his head spends the day spinning around the idea of ​​having a drink. He obsesses. And then he thinks: "Maybe something's wrong with the alcohol." So he "punishes" himself with another month: "If I can be two months sober then I will prove to myself that I don't have a problem." Those four weeks were also regular. He drops a classic in the conversations of alcoholic drinkers about going out and not drinking alcohol: he felt that he could not socialize, that he was not going to go to the pub for a lemon soda, that he could not stay for dinner without alcohol in between. He continued to stretch the experiment and set a goal of half a year, until his birthday. By then he was feeling so well that he has stopped drinking.

It is not about moralizing - the one who writes has only spent months of her adult life without drinking due to pregnancy or postpartum - but the viral clip of Holland's interview in the On Purpose video podcast gives rise to addressing the normalization of non-consumption. "Since I was 13 years old, I have been explaining why I don't do it because simply "I don't want to" or "I don't like it" are not enough," writes a user. I have been that person who asks, between surprised and admired, that string of "but don't you drink? Never? Never in your life? Don't you like it? Not even a vinín from time to time?"

A bartender comments: “I see a lot of people who hate drinking come to bars to socialize and feel the pressure to 'have' to drink”. "In Erasmus, it was all laughs and very friendly at the residence until I said that I didn't drink alcohol," says another user. “But what piece of English [class] activity for the third year of ESO onwards comes out of here”, points out a teacher. And so much.