So, God Hates Us: A World Without Beer

Let’s get one thing straight: the agricultural revolution wasn’t about bread. Any historian who tells you our hunter-gatherer ancestors decided to settle down for the sheer fucking thrill of baking a nice sourdough is a goddamn liar. They did it for beer. That glorious, malty, liquid courage that made life between the Tigris and Euphrates less of a sun-scorched waking nightmare. Without the happy accident of some soggy grain fermenting into the world’s first buzz, there’s no reason to farm. Why would you? You’ve got perfectly good mastodons to chase off cliffs. So, instead of bustling Sumerian cities kickstarting civilization, you get a few scattered, grumpy settlements where people are miserably eating gruel and wondering if this whole “not being nomadic” thing is really worth the effort. The Fertile Crescent? More like the Vaguely Disappointing Trapezoid.

The dominoes, of course, fall in the saddest, most pathetic way imaginable. The Egyptians, lacking the liquid compensation required to convince thousands of dudes to haul giant fucking rocks across a desert, manage to build a few respectable, yet deeply unimpressive, pyramids. Think less “awe-inspiring wonder of the ancient world” and more “ambitious garden gnome.” The Romans? A bunch of uptight bastards who conquer the known world fueled by nothing but sour wine, anger, and aggressively terrible haircuts. Their empire collapses not from barbarian invasions—who’d want to invade this joyless turd of a continent?—but from sheer, collective ennui. Medieval Europe is even worse. The monasteries, with no divine calling to brew the world’s finest ales, are just quiet buildings full of sexually frustrated men staring at walls. Life for the average peasant, already a shit-smeared pageant of misery, is now devoid of its one saving grace: the local tavern. You just work in the mud, get the plague, and die sober. Fuck that.

Then comes the Industrial Revolution, which promptly shits the bed. You cannot—and I cannot stress this enough—convince a person to work a 16-hour day in a satanic, child-maiming textile mill without the promise of a pint at the end of it. It’s psychological bedrock. The great engines of progress sputter and die, choked by a workforce that is, for the first time, sober enough to realize how utterly screwed they are. Karl Marx, instead of getting tanked on lager and writing Das Kapital, publishes a mildly irritated pamphlet titled “Work is a Bit of a Bummer, Isn’t It?” which fails to ignite a global movement. Revolutions are built on drunken fury in smoky pubs, not quiet sips of chamomile in your sad, cramped hovel.

And the modern world? A sanitized, beige-colored hellscape. The Roaring Twenties never roar; they just sort of clear their throat awkwardly. World Wars are fought with a grim, level-headed efficiency that is somehow even more terrifying. Post-war suburban life, without the barbecue beer or the lawnmower beer, is exposed for what it truly is: a desperate, soul-crushing pantomime of happiness. Happy hour is replaced by “Mandatory Contemplation of Your Failures Hour.” Sports are just organized running. Humanity, in its infinite, sober wisdom, looks out at the world it has built—a world of quiet desperation, sensible bedtimes, and flawlessly hydrated piss—and collectively wishes it had stayed in the primordial soup. What a fucking waste.