Getting to know the Sober Girl Society - an interview with Millie Gooch

The statistics seem to be on a constant upward trend: young Millennials are turning away from alcohol in vast numbers. To an older generation, it sounds almost impossible. How can you not drink in your twenties? Isn't that what your twenties are for?

These ingrained ways of thinking, of course, are what fascinate us here on The Real Podcast. So this week, for our 12th episode, we sent Shani Higgs, one of the Real Kombucha team who recently gave up drinking for three months (you may have read her Sober Diaries on this blog), to meet Millie Gooch.

Millie is a writer and speaker, and the founder of Sober Girl Society (website here), an ever-growing collective of young women who are fed up with living a hangxiety-fuelled life, their weekends drowned out by beer fear, under constant pressure to succumb to Wine O'Clock. And when we say "an ever-growing collective", we mean it. The Sober Girl Society currently boasts close to 60,000 Instagram followers.

According to Millie, this new tribe is made up of young women, “People like me – busy lives, busy jobs, often working in media – who still wanted a social life but wanted to take alcohol out of the equation”. As our readers will know, this description is one that Shani has come to identify with wholeheartedly. So it made sense to give her the mic and get her talking.

In the following podcast you'll hear Millie and Shani discuss everything from the emergence of the Sober Girl Society, how the growing Sober Curious Movement relates to Cancel Culture and Callout Culture, how to navigate the pitfalls of sober dating, and what's involved in "coming out" as a non-drinker. They also discuss something called the "Pink Cloud" and "the Pink Cloud Dispersal Phase", which is a level of non-drinking science we've so far not discovered!

So, chatting to Millie Gooch about the rise of the Sober Girl Society over a glass of the finest non-alcoholic Prosecco alternative, here's Shani Higgs.