The Wrong Thing to Give Up

January arrives and everyone's giving up wine. Dry January, they call it, as if a month without pleasure somehow earns you virtue points. Meanwhile, those same people are doomscrolling at midnight, checking work emails at dinner, letting their phones steal every quiet moment that used to belong to actual living.

Let's talk about what actually deserves to be given up.

The Real Addiction Nobody Mentions

A glass of wine with dinner takes thirty minutes. Maybe an hour if you're doing it right—sitting with people you care about, letting conversation unfold, actually tasting what's in front of you. It has a beginning, a middle, an end.

Your phone? That's the thing you reach for fifty times before lunch. That's the thing stealing your attention while your kid tells you about their day. That's the thing turning your brain into something that can't focus, can't sit with a thought, can't be present for the life actually happening around you.

But sure, wine is the problem.

What Wine Actually Does

A good bottle creates space. It slows things down. It turns a regular Tuesday dinner into something worth paying attention to. Wine has ritual built into it—you open, you pour, you taste, you're there. Present. Engaged with something real.

Compare that to the empty calories of social media. The mindless snacking on content that leaves you feeling worse than when you started. The algorithmic anxiety designed to keep you scrolling, clicking, comparing yourself to carefully curated lies.

The research on moderate wine consumption keeps suggesting benefits—cardiovascular health, longevity markers, the psychological value of shared meals and rituals. Meanwhile, the research on heavy social media use is unambiguous: depression, anxiety, sleep disruption, attention fragmentation, loneliness despite constant connection.

We're not saying wine is medicine. We're saying the vilification of moderate drinking while we pretend our phones aren't destroying our ability to be human is one of the great hypocrisies of modern wellness culture.

A Better January

Here's our January challenge: Don't give up wine. Give up something that actually deserves it.

Delete one social media app. Put your phone in another room during dinner. Stop checking email after 8 PM. Read a book instead of scrolling. Open a bottle you've been saving.

Because here's the truth: A good bottle of wine, shared or savored mindfully, is one of life's genuine pleasures. It connects us—to each other, to place, to the moment we're in. Your phone? That's an experiment we're all participating in without informed consent. And the results so far aren't good.

The wine isn't the problem. The wine never was.