Competent Excess: Reconfiguring Intoxication Across Early to Mid-Adulthood in Denmark

This article examines how excessive drinking is negotiated among Danish individuals in early to mid-adulthood aged 20–40, challenging dominant assumptions that individuals ‘mature out’ of heavy alcohol use. While much research has framed intoxication as a feature of youth, we draw on nine online focus group interviews ( n = 42) to show how practices of excess persist and are reworked across early adulthood. Participants frequently articulated narratives of increased responsibility, control, and moderation, yet these coexisted with ongoing engagement in heavy drinking. Rather than a linear transition away from intoxication, drinking emerges as a site of tension and negotiation. The analysis identifies three interrelated dimensions shaping this dynamic. First, intoxication is framed as a form of ‘resetting’, enabling temporary disengagement from the demands and pressures of adult life. Second, heavy drinking is sustained through habitual and routinised practices embedded in everyday sociality, where alcohol remains integral to social interaction, celebration, and emotional management. Third, participation in commercialised nightlife reinforces intoxication through normative expectations of pleasure, sociability, and ‘having a good time’. Together, these findings highlight the cultural and social embeddedness of excessive drinking and challenge binaries between youthful excess and adult moderation. We introduce the concept of ‘competent excess’ to capture how individuals incorporate heavy intoxication into socially recognised performances of adulthood, balancing control with the capacity to ‘let go’. In the Danish context, intoxication is not readily problematised but remains culturally legitimised within valued forms of sociability. The article contributes to critical alcohol and drug research by foregrounding continuity, ambivalence, and the normalisation of excess, and by questioning life-course narratives that position moderation as an inevitable outcome of adulthood.