I'm not a drinker (maybe four servings a year and not all at once), but I have always found it disgraceful that people are worried they won't be able to find a decent job if there's a picture online of them clearly drinking or inebriated. Any job that assesses candidates this way, or so I'm inclined to think, is looking for people who are compliant all the way up to and past the point of hypocrisy.

I'm sure we can find better ways to establish whether someone is hamstrung by alcoholism than the presence or absence of photos from gatherings where people had drinks. Good Lord, why am I the only one who finds the ridiculous ridiculous sometimes?

Who wants to be the odd one out? Everyone knows (while rational) that a picture from a party doesn't mean you're alcoholic or unreliable. The people who value their job search in an ordinary fashion will remove such signs because others do. They don't want to stand out for the wrong reasons. But those would be, in fact, the wrong reasons. The criterion is wrong. What's actually being measured, for the most part, is people's willingness to go along with the hypocrisy.

Isn't it a bit disgusting?

Sure I can see the practicality of this norm, but strip-searching immigrants and torturing defendants could also be practical, but that doesn't make it right. Maybe hiring over-judgmentality is less wrong than those examples, but can we really quantify the net harms across millions of instances, and is anyone even trying to tally them?

You might live with an alcoholic and not know, because they're often that good at hiding it until their nuclear core melts down. The photo test is not how society should handle the issue.

I don't say this for myself. Nor do I say it to oppose anyone as a person. I say it because this normal practice is disgusting, disgraceful, hypocritical, and backwards.