Has anyone else never really enjoyed going to pubs sober?

Hello all.

So there have probably been a few posts on this sub about this topic already, but I was just curious if anyone else never really enjoyed going to pubs sober?

For context, I am a life-long nondrinker. I just never really cared for alcohol, and I also grew up in a house where nobody drank or had much interest in it.

With that said, I have gone to pubs sober on special occasions, such as for someone’s birthday, a wedding etc, but often times, my parents and I were frequently the only ones not drinking.

I am from Ireland for context, and a lot of social life here especially outside the major cities tends to revolve either around the pub or some sort of sports.

In the times when I did go to pubs sober I found them for the most part to be incredibly boring places. It didn’t take long for many people to become pissed drunk, sometimes within the space of an hour or 2. They quickly started to become very annoying, getting progressively louder with each drink and quickly reverting to repeating themselves over and over again. Added to that, I have much better hearing than the average person because I am a blind person so I often found these places to be quite unpleasant environments.

I was only talking about this to my parents the other day, they have often wondered how they didn’t end up like most of the people they grew up with. Most people my parents grew up with turned into raging alcoholics and shadows of their former selves. It appeared that most of their lives revolved around the pub and getting drunk, which I suppose looking back was not too surprising as the church and the pub have been a sort of linchpin of Irish culture as it has stood for generations.

I think things are slowly changing in the bigger cities at least such as Dublin or Galway and Dublin at least has around 2 or 3 late night cafes, but whether they are doing well or not is another story, but it seems that rural areas and smaller cities such as my own have been set up like this as far back as I can remember where there are few alternatives to pubs for social outlets in the evenings.

Most of our locally owned cafes here close at 4 5 pm, and the only cafe open in the city at night is Starbucks. Places such as late evening cafes are all but nonexistent , which I think really is a crying shame as this is much more prevalent on the European continent, and I feel in more recent times at least people are dying for more places to go in the evenings other than chain coffee places or the pub.

Thankfully I have a lot of other hobbies and things to do to keep me busy. I hope going forward though that at some point we will have a lot more late night places to go that aren’t just pubs, bars or nightclubs.