A Number Is Not a Trend, Until You Understand the Tension Behind It

In 2024, 45% of Dutch adults declared they either didn’t drink alcohol or limited themselves to one glass per day. At first glance, this might seem like a societal step toward collective health, an encouraging signal in line with the Health Council’s guideline. But let’s pause.

Before applauding progress, or lamenting its limits, we must interrogate what lies beneath. Because behavior is never just data. It is signal. It reveals culture, identity, fear, aspiration, and often contradiction.

And this, precisely, is why I care.

Why Sobriety Is Not About Abstinence, But About Governance

What does it mean that nearly half the population aligns with the "no more than one drink a day" policy? Not simply that we’re drinking less. It means that conscious behavioral governance is slowly replacing autopilot consumption.

Governance, true governance, is not about compliance checklists or legal risk mitigation. It’s about the inner structure by which a person or a society decides what it allows itself to do.

Drinking less is not a trend. It's a quiet referendum on the perceived value of control.

Flevoland, Rotterdam-Rijnmond, and South Holland: Case Studies in Cultural Climate

Flevoland leads the nation: 53% comply with the alcohol guideline. Rotterdam-Rijnmond and Zuid-Holland Zuid aren’t far behind. The question is: why these regions?

Simple demography? No. Cultural texture matters more.

These areas have something in common: higher exposure to regulatory messaging, dense urban design, and culturally plural neighborhoods. When a region is structurally complex, risk becomes visible. And when risk becomes visible, governance becomes personal. Sobriety, then, is less about restraint and more about resilience.

Contrast that with parts of North Brabant or Overijssel, where cultural continuity and low-density living might delay such internalized shifts. Not worse, just slower to pivot from tradition to transformation.

The Paradox of Amsterdam: You Light Up, You Work Out

In Amsterdam, we see a fascinating paradox: smoking is high (nearly 20%), and yet exercise compliance is the best in the country. It’s easy to be seduced by judgment here, but resist.

This contradiction is the heartbeat of urban life: pleasure and discipline cohabiting in the same body. It tells us something critical: people are not moral spreadsheets. They are tension maps. They resolve their stress not by eliminating contradiction, but by managing it creatively.

For GRC professionals, this is gold. Because no system will ever make sense until you accept human contradiction as normal, not deviant.

The Young, the Educated, and the Illusion of Rational Freedom

Young people (18–35) show the lowest compliance with alcohol guidelines: only 37%. And the higher the education level, the lower the compliance. Curious? Not really.

Higher education cultivates autonomy. But autonomy without self-structure is just licensed indulgence.

The real revelation is this: those with only primary or vocational education adhere more often to guidelines, perhaps because their margins for error are smaller. Or because they live closer to consequence.

In business as in life, the myth of rational behavior among the educated elite collapses when we examine actual conduct. Structure, not intellect, governs risk. Always.

Smoking, Sports, and the Spectrum of Self-Governance

Let’s look again: smoking rates range from 13% to 20% depending on region. That’s a 7% swing. For a public health policy, it’s huge. For a business culture analyst? It’s a profile of risk tolerance.

Where people light up, they also signal something about their relationship to authority, habit, and self-soothing. Meanwhile, weekly exercise is up nationwide, but is that a health trend or a performance one? In cities like Amsterdam, it’s tied to identity, aesthetics, productivity. It’s not just health, it’s image.

Understanding this tells us how people, and by extension, teams, companies, boards, make decisions under pressure. Some smoke. Some sweat. Some do both.

What This Means for GRC—and for You

If you lead a company, a team, a foundation, ask yourself: what are the contradictions you tolerate because they "average out"? What guidelines do you promote but never embody? What numbers do you celebrate without understanding the human behavior beneath them?

Whether it’s alcohol, tobacco, or Tuesday meetings, the principle is the same:

Culture is not what people say, it’s what they normalize. Governance is not control, it’s permission architecture.

So if 45% of people are behaving differently, it’s not a statistic. It’s a message.

A quiet uprising. An invitation. To design better systems, not stricter ones. To recognize risk not just in red flags, but in grey zones. And to understand that people don’t need to be perfect to evolve.

They just need a structure worth aligning with.