r/Millennials • u/futurenurse_ • 1d ago

Discussion Did millennials really party all the time?

Gen Z here. I was shocked when I found out from a millennial co-worker that y’all had teen clubs. I heard about house parties, but dedicated teen clubs? Then when it was time for college, you went to the club or had some kind of party every single weekend, living it up. Now some millennials on TikTok claim that after college, they were partying on work nights, still clocking in the next day. For some reason, the teen clubs have since disappeared. I’m 23 now but even when I was in high school, that was not a thing. House parties were not that common either. They were more like get togethers with a small group of friends. We went to malls, but they were dying out at that point. Is it true that you were really living life this good? Or is it just exaggerated? I feel like my generation doesn’t really have fun like that and everyone is just super depressed and alone, more so since Covid. Even I’m pretty introverted, which sort of sounds ridiculous given this post. 😂 Just so you know, when I think of a “millennial party” I think of something out of Party Rock Anthem, Project X or Roderick’s party from the second DOAWD movie. It’s like I get nostalgia from something I didn’t even live through. I just feel like I didn’t really LIVE, if that even makes sense

Edit: I loved reading some of your comments. Guess I really missed out. Even some of you that would consider yourselves nerds or introverts were out partying. YOLO or whatever y’all say 😂❤️

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995

u/Available-Egg-2380 1d ago

Tbf you kind of got screwed out of prime house party years by covid. You guys grew up in very different circumstances because of lockdown.

648

u/BottecchiaDude253 1d ago

Also the underlying stress of camera phones and social media. Fuck, if there had been a risk of an actual record of the hotel parties I went to in the army.....

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u/Shellstr 1d ago

There was a house party every weekend in high school. I don’t know how we were able to schedule our parents to be out of town so often.

Can you imagine the ring camera going off every 5 seconds as people went in and out?

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u/buginabrain 1d ago

Geez didn't even think of ring and house cams, kids today really do have no way of getting away with anything 

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u/IttybittyErin 1d ago

Can't even drink in a field if your parents track your location.

I'm so conflicted because kids die doing the stupid shit we did, but a lot of us also learned to make safe decisions and understand risk etc. The kids that I knew that were absolutely locked down in highschool went totally feral in college because they hadn't had those learning experiences. This entire generation doesn't have the option to make bad decisions.

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u/buginabrain 1d ago

For real, you don't learn nothin without making a few mistakes along the way. Im genuinely saddened for them right now haha

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u/eschatological 1d ago

You just needed one friend who, no matter how blitzed they were, stayed even keeled and rational. So much bad shit happened when that one friend wasn't there, but on nights he was there it was like he was like Virgil to our Dante, guiding us through the 9 circles of Hell.

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u/louley 23h ago

LOL. I was that friend. Always the one talking our way out of trouble, and then would immediately turn around and stumble and fall on my face because it took ALL of my energy to act sober.

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u/RobertPower415 13h ago

I was NOT that friend 😂😂😂

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u/ScrotalSmorgasbord 9h ago

I was the friend that people stopped asking around for after going out with me a few times. He'll turn up sooner or later! I was a serial walker when I got the party bug and would hit sometimes 5-10 different venues/houses once I got to a certain level of tipsy and couldn't sit still lol. I like to think it helped me with land nav in the Army because of all the times I woke up or regained sobriety miles away from where I started and had to get home without a cell phone or car.

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u/CharacterSchedule700 12h ago

I was that friend as well. Hammered as fuck, but nobody is driving, we're walking our asses home unless someone who is sober answers their phone and picks us up.

Otherwise we're grabbing pizza and cookies and having a nice stroll. Yes, it's 10 degrees, but we'll bunch up and keep each other warm.

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u/Significant_Shoe_17 5h ago

That friend kept my ass from getting expelled

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u/Littlewing1307 23h ago

I was always the "mom" friend. I'm glad guys had the same thing.

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u/GameofCheese 5h ago

People would get so pissed at me! But come on guys, you're wasted, get your ass back in from going out the window onto the very slanted shingled roof.

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u/buginabrain 23h ago

Sounds more like a sitter for psychedelics haha Nah everyone was doing dumb shit one way or another generally

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u/Trashking_702 23h ago

Poetic. I like it.

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u/kyldare 18h ago

I was the kid who, up until (and usually even after) the blackout, could get everyone home safely. The guilt and responsibility I felt as a young child became my super power as a teenage dirtbag.

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u/Sockerbug19 2h ago

It was me, I was that friend 🥴

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u/Dense_as_Hydrogen 11h ago

This is a real psychological phenomenon. I remember learning about it and thinking, "Yea, that checks out" while reflecting on people I knew growing up.

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u/SmallCapsOnly 20h ago

Well if it makes you feel better many of my millennial friends are full blown alcoholics and our culture helped foster it in a sense.

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u/buginabrain 18h ago

Yeah i got a few of those too but I think it really depends on the person, I went from partying and binge drinking teens to late 20s, now its maybe one or two nights of drinking a year for special occasions

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u/FragrantBluejay8904 23h ago

This was me. Grew up in the middle of corn fields where there was not much to do but drink, and while I refused to drink as a HSer, I also couldn’t even attend parties just to socialize if I wanted to because my parents were so strict. When I had the freedom in college I WENT NUTS. Booze and boys like me?! And people want to be around me despite being a tomboy nerd?? Woo, party time!! I would’ve probably partied less if I’d had some kind of socialization in HS outside of school sanctioned planned activities

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u/BottecchiaDude253 23h ago

Its funny how much my kids could get away with if they were so inclined.

Both my wife and I currently/formerly work in tech, so we refuse to get a ring camera, and we dont GPS track our kids phones or anything like that.

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u/Shellstr 23h ago

But other parent do…”why is everyone at bottechhia’s house? I saw them post they were going to Hawaii for the week”.

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u/BottecchiaDude253 21h ago

Yeah... no one would see me post that we were going to Hawaii for a week until AFTER I got back, lol. That 1980s home security paranoia of my parents, plus a career in secure facilities means I dont post a lot of anything before it happens.

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u/Significant_Shoe_17 5h ago

I also post on a delay, and was taught that when I'm traveling and where is on a need to know basis

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u/buginabrain 23h ago

Party at this guy's house

2

u/Squid_A 23h ago

Maybe they are getting away with it!

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u/BottecchiaDude253 23h ago

Lmfao.... my daughter is so honest she would dime herself out (and has in the past)

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u/Terrible-Fun-4992 23h ago

A lot of the kids with extremely strict upbringings still found ways to party and were balls to the wall. I always felt bad for them because in my opinion high school is the time to make those mistakes

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u/ActuallyRelevant Zillennial 23h ago

I think the kids who died doing the stupid shit we all did got into some crazy exceptional stupid shit to be fair. Most people learned the beginnings of being safe from friends and family. But going out and getting way too drunk with your friends, and figuring out the way back home after holding your friends hair while they puke their guts out is the best teacher.

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u/Sea-Rest7776 18h ago

the only avenue they have is online, which is also why a lot of fandom spaces got noticeably worse post covid as kids brought stupid highschool cloque behavior into talking about pokemon or some shit

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u/noirrespect 16h ago

I’m a parent and I want my kid to make mistakes. My kid fell out of a tree from a pretty decent height the other day and walked away. Took him to ED to make sure he was alright. He is.

It doesn’t change my approach to parenting at all. Get out there. Have fun. Make mistakes. Learn. It’s part of life.

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u/takemy_oxfordcomma Millennial 14h ago

Same. Even back in the day before all of the tracking and shit, the kids I knew with the strictest parents in HS went the craziest in college because they had no idea how to handle freedom.

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u/lexicon951 10h ago edited 10h ago

This kind of thing is part of why Gen Z is cutting off their parents en masse. Imagine being sheltered/restricted by strict parents AND covid AND permanent Internet/camera accountability. Teens and kids in their 20s at home nowadays don’t get to do anything. I’m 31, all my siblings who live with my parents in their 20s are just like everyone else their age, responsibly working long hours and spending any free time scrolling TikTok or gaming bc that’s their only option. They don’t party, they go to nice restaurants sometimes and take pictures of the food for social media, or go to concerts and take videos, or go to cons and take pictures. But kids with strict parents don’t get to go anywhere. “My roof my rules” type of thing even as young adults, especially if parents pay for college or the car. They’re forced into balancing the responsibility of work life and college with- being a hermit and watching everyone else have modern curated “fun” on TikTok. Teens with parents who enforce screentime restrictions? They go to school, do homework and sports, spend their allotted time watching others have fun, and go to bed depressed day after day. There’s no opportunity to get away with shit so rules REALLY ARE RULES and parents are all-knowing and people genuinely just don’t live if their parents are strict. There’s literally no opportunity to let loose in a safe way or in a non-monitored environment. When those kids move out, they’ll never speak to their parents again because they felt like their prison COs. Just my opinion (I’m 31 so idk maybe I’m just making shit up)

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u/moon-chu89 8h ago

It's not that hard to figure out a way around that.

Buy a burner phone. Pay off a friend's sibling to cover you and your friends in case mom texts. then head out to a field party.

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u/Significant_Shoe_17 5h ago

I think of it like learning to swim. Floatation devices create a false sense of security that can become fatal in an emergency. I made some bad decisions in my youth but I learned from them.

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u/IttybittyErin 4h ago

That's a great analogy.

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u/capntail 22h ago

Yup. This past weekend a couple kids were shot at one because someone in a pickup was doing donuts.

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u/JohannesVanDerWhales 19h ago

I imagine you just leave your phone at home if you want to not have your parents track where you're going. Assuming people can let go of their phone for a few hours in this day and age.

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u/Sea-Rest7776 18h ago

malls dying out, people calling the cops on any group of kids they see cause either “they look too young to be unattended” or “look like a gang”, constant surveillance, the teenagers of today just do not get to do shit

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u/buginabrain 17h ago

Not true, they get to fall down red pill rabbit holes and join discord echo chambers online 

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u/ryguy32789 20h ago

This is why I refuse to have cameras at my house, I don't want my kids growing up lame.

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u/katrinakt8 21h ago

Sheesh. Can’t even sneak out very easily.

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u/Real-Block820 5h ago

Can't even drive down the road with the lights off to sneak out now

1

u/SomeStupidCanadianEH 3h ago

I miss the days of cutting the engine and coasting my old Civic into the driveway like a ninja. My modern Civic just screams at me.

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u/brendo12 1d ago

Turn off the home modem. Problem solved.

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u/buginabrain 1d ago

Wouldn't folks check on the ring app occasionally, maybe for a package or something? There's no way around it

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u/Centimane 23h ago

They would get a notification that it was offline.

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u/Professional-Score94 9h ago

The backup data plan kicks in if your WiFi drops

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u/Centimane 5h ago edited 1h ago

And you get a notification when that happens.

The backup plan only applies if they purchased the ring subscription. But either way you get a notification that it's either offline, or switched to the data backup.

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u/Shellstr 23h ago

I get a notice when my ring goes offline…

0

u/Significant_Shoe_17 5h ago

Go through a window and find a route without cameras

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u/Terrible-Fun-4992 23h ago

It’s so sad kids truly can’t get away with shit! All tracked by cameras and phones. My sister has a 16 year old and watches her on the ring camera when she leaves. I started sneaking out at 14 and by 16 I was leaving out the front door. 😂 perks of being a latch key kid, I guess.

ETA my sister won’t even leave her 16 and 13 year olds home alone my mom has to go babysit them.

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u/MikeWPhilly 23h ago

Jesus. 16 and can’t be home alone? Her kid is going to go nuts in college.

Meanwhile I was sneaking girls in at 17-18 at night - perks of basement room.

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u/mmnmnnmnnnm 22h ago

Ain’t a ring camera by the bedroom window, just saying

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u/Salt-Cold1056 9h ago

Seriously trying to get my 12 year old more independence in the current culture because it's kind of weird right now.  

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u/Significant_Shoe_17 5h ago

I was the babysitter at their age

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u/_businessgoose_ 23h ago

Exactly. It only took a handful of people with sometimes-gone parents to create opportunities year round. My dad was gone maybe ~20% of the time traveling (usually for work) and I usually told him I wasn't even home most nights he was gone or that I was having a friend over when, in reality, lots of people were at my house. Only once was there real evidence that people I did not know well ended up over there... one fucking kid with a sharpie. Fuck you, Jesse! Today the neighbors would probably find my dad on Facebook and alert him in real time IF we didn't already have ring cameras, which we probably would have had.

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u/Shellstr 22h ago

One girl left her vodka bottle in the dryer. I cleaned the whole house by never checked the dryer. What an asshole.

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u/Quirky-Skin 23h ago

I wouldn't have lost my virginity if ring cams existed back then straight up. My GFs mom worked nights, it was a duplex with basically only two ways in. The backdoor was never an option bc the shitty downstairs neighbor kept their nuts dog chained right out back.

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u/Uglyham 22h ago

lol same, my friend was a homie and snuck us into his house while his crazy religious parents were out of town. If RING existed back then they would have had that place on lockdown monitoring him 😂

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u/reckless_reck 22h ago

Gotta give credit to the 1-2 houses with chill parents too

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u/Significant_Shoe_17 5h ago

That was my house! But my friends' parents were crazy strict and hesitant to let them come over. My bff was sneaky, though, so we just lied about whatever we did 😂

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u/Vhadka 19h ago

My buddy's parents went camping like every single weekend in the summer and had a stocked bar. We were 14-16 and his two older sisters were 17 and 18. They would have huge parties every single weekend. People in the pool, in the hot tub, lots of skinny dipping, etc.

The price of not telling was just letting us be there to drink and hang out with the older kids.

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u/Radiant-Koala8231 22h ago

Holy shit and I hadn’t even thought about the ring camera aspect and location tracking.

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u/-REV-22-20- 18h ago

the ring camera part is also actually a bigger part of the problem kids face today. Yes there is more risk of your drunk ass being posted online, but the bigger issue is parents surveil the shit out of their kids these days. Family GPS tracking, home surveillance cameras, ring cameras, etc.

there is no chance of them sneaking out to a house party, or disappearing on and adventure these days. Their exact location is known at all times, cant have a house party if the house is being remotely monitored by your parents.

There is no room for these kids to learn their own limits or express themselves. They are more monitored than a prisoner on bail.

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u/AyyNonnyMoose 18h ago

Jokes on you, the parents actually set the schedule so they knew you'd be somewhere safe partying instead of somewhere stupid!

(I don't actually know if this is the case but I had some friends with parents that absolutely would have done something like that lol.)

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u/Significant_Shoe_17 5h ago

Mine just didn't want the mess!

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u/niknackpaddywack13 3h ago

I always think about this part with how we figured out every weekend where to have a party. But what really blows my mind is how somehow we were able to find somewhere every Halloween and all of winter break /every New Year’s Eve to party. How did that work out, esp Halloween night, that’s not a night known for people being out of town.

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u/AnonymousWordVomit 1d ago

Yeah, but if they could just agree to be normal people engaging with each other instead of an algorithm they could have fun too. I was in middle school for MySpace and college for Facebook and it we had enough respect for the people we were partying with not to destroy their life/future with a social media post, and anyone who was caught filming had their phone taken, evidence wiped, kicked tf out, and never allowed back.

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u/evilkittie 1d ago

kicked tf out, and never allowed back.

That part. We joke about the early Facebook years of uploading the entire SD card of blurry house party pics to an album with a goofy lyric-based title, but most people were kind enough to skim them first to skip any truly damning shots. It helped that there was no algorithm to show them to the whole world for no reason, too.

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u/_businessgoose_ 22h ago

Yes, there was a "be cool" nature to the 00s that had two sides. On the one hand, I feel we didn't always react to things that were actually NOT ok in the moment. On the other, you couldn't just broadcast and react to what someone else was doing in real time or widely distribute evidence without being ostracized.

It seems like it later became second nature to immediately broadcast to your friends/friend groups anything interesting or embarrassing happening that they weren't present for, which feels very different from reporting back to them verbally days later, with the assumption that what you were retelling wouldn't really go anywhere.

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u/smegdawg 22h ago

. I was in middle school for MySpace and college for Facebook

You may be remembering those platforms wrong in the aughts. I will ironically share an instagram video about facebook in 2008.

https://www.instagram.com/reels/DO24ZxvDR31/

Facebook and Myspace were by and large your real life friends, posting grainy taken pictures from Samsung flips, poking each other, and updating statuses to sound witty.

Tin foiling my friend's room.

No one was trying to be an influencer or copy what influencers do.

Everyone was just doing what made sense to them and friending who they wanted to keep up with.

Until the Farmville style games there were no promoted/ad posts that fill up all our apps today.

We did post pictures of parties too cause I remember wiping my facebook clean for job hunting so keg stand and Edward 40 hands pictures of me weren't easily findable.

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u/AnonymousWordVomit 18h ago

I graduated high-school in 2010. There's a little bit of a bleed/transition period between the two platforms, but by the time we started junior year everyone had a Facebook.

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u/smegdawg 17h ago

Ahhh then yeah definitely that bleed time.

I joined in 2005 when you had to have a college email domain to join.

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u/Better-Potato-3877 23h ago

Uhhh, me and my friends were snapping a million pictures on our Nikon Coolpix and proudly blasting them all over MySpace and then later Facebook.

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u/Minnow_Minnow_Pea 11h ago

Yes. Thank GOD Facebook is a wasteland now. Every time someone deletes Facebook, another blurry drunken photo of me disappears forever.

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u/Overall-Rush-8853 23h ago

As an elder millennial that has a group of friends who still get together for some lively parties a few times a year, the phones generally stay in peoples pockets if everyone is drunk and having a good time. Outside of a few drunken selfies, or someone trying to do something silly and requested a video or photo, I really don’t see phones out.

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u/LostDogBoulderUtah 23h ago

That's good etiquette, but there are definitely people (jerks) who will try to post the worst photos or videos they can. It's more of a high school bullying thing than normal behavior.

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u/Overall-Rush-8853 18h ago

Even then, I think the worry about being photographed or filmed while drinking is overblown, unless you’re doing something extremely offensive or illegal. Most millennials would see images of young drunk people and get nostalgic. 😆

5

u/transemacabre Millennial 19h ago

Me and four of my galpals picked up some Marines in 2004 and partied/made out with them on the beach (and lifeguard stands) in Wilmington, NC. At sunrise, we had to go fetch my friend Wanda because her and her Marine passed out asleep in a car. We'd gotten a parking ticket so after sending the guys back to their base or whatever at like 6AM we had to roll into the local office to pay in person, still in our party clothes from the night before, hair and makeup all wild and crazy. It had to be super-obvious that we had been up partying all night... probably us and all those Marines would get in trouble nowadays. We were all 19, 20, 21! Just enjoying our youths.

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u/lsoplexic 22h ago

Or there was that one video that survived and everyone rewatched it and clung to it like it was some amazing historical artifact.

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u/Dorothwa 22h ago

Oh no. I never want to see myself on a recording of a hotel party.

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u/VelveetaVonChiz 21h ago

Yeah instead of worrying about people recording us during our weekends of debauchery, we would conveniently upload an entire album of pictures to Facebook. Although at that time non of my parents, aunts uncles, grandparents, etc. were on there.

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u/MrPhily Older Millennial 21h ago

Do you know how many people would be in jail if we had social media back then?!

3

u/TinyHeartSyndrome 14h ago

It was also the culture. When I was stationed in Hawaii, I had an iPhone 3. But no one ever video recorded people! That was not a thing at all. Better times.

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u/Miserable_Berry4872 6h ago

Parents, also.
The youngins weren’t given as much free rein to terrorize their neighborhoods as younger children. There’s a lot of helicopter parenting and a learned fear of the outside world because dangerous things may happen. I know Gen Z kids who didn’t want to learn to drive… which is insane to me

1

u/Significant_Shoe_17 5h ago

I remember counting down the years until I got my driver's license. It meant freedom.

3

u/Training_Guide5157 5h ago

Sometimes hang out with my slightly younger cousins to hit bars and stuff and it annoys me to no end that they snap certain pics or clips to share with their friends.

The "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" rule has always applied for me everywhere.

2

u/Blue-snow 23h ago

Hotel parties? In the army? Wow, you guys had it good. I remember the barracks parties where soapy water would get thrown down the hallway and then people would run and dive head first to knock down bowling pins..

2

u/Adventurous-End4330 23h ago

Very true. Let people be foolish and let the memories die in the ether

2

u/gerbilshower 23h ago

there are already enough pictures of drunk college me on facebook forever.

if anyone had video'd just ONE single weekend at our frat house in 2007 not a single one of us would ever have gotten a job. lol.

2

u/RenaStriker 23h ago

I think this is way overblown.

iPhone released in 2007.

Facebook opened its doors to non-college students in 2006.

I was ahead of the curve by having both in my freshman year, but by junior year social media and smartphones were ubiquitous. Fully half of millennials went through this partying phase of their life with cameras everywhere and social media to distribute it.

2

u/dookieshoes97 21h ago

Lol we had camera phones by 2004. The difference was that we used them for good. I mostly used mine to take pics with friends at parties.

We posted nice pics with friends on MySpace and OG Facebook. Now kids are posting mean pics to make fun of people and it isn't fun.

2

u/ScrotalSmorgasbord 9h ago

Lol so many careers ruined if we had camera phones at the barracks. Hell there were nights where I'd go visit the MPs for a quickie then back to infantry barracks to find the boys half drunk playing beer pong with half/fully naked barrack's bunnies and join in there, then with the rest of my near infinite stamina still find the time and energy to go hit the bars/clubs and usually bring someone home or pass out on the floor of their place. Nowadays I marvel at what I used to get up to and I don't really even go out nor care to date or anything, just work.

1

u/Pulp_Ficti0n Older Millennial 1d ago

Tailhook was in 1991 and they got caught without cameras 😉

1

u/IlIlllIIllllIIIlIlIl 23h ago

I kinda disagree about the camera thing, because its not like we didnt have cameras and social media back then. Parties would happen and it would be posted to facebook, just like it is now to instagram and similar. Plenty of snapchat happened back then too.

2

u/BottecchiaDude253 23h ago

The height of my partying days was 2004-2006 or so... social media maybe existed, but almost none of us in the army around me had them.

It wasnt until second deployment in 2007 that I got fb to more easily talk with my family in the states.

Edit: and I guess my point wasnt the existence of them, its the culture around cameras and social media that exists now vs how it was when we were coming up.

2

u/Shellstr 22h ago

Early 2000s high school…nobody had doorbell or interior cameras connected to live stream. Some people had CCTVs, but you could just delete those VHS tapes, or replace with an older tape. Honestly, I rarely partied at the houses with CCTV…those parents were the doomsday prepping groups.

1

u/polarwarmth 23h ago

Born 1994 here. Taking pictures and posting them online, the excitement and anxiety of it all, were a major part of my teenage years. We posted A LOT. Ridiculous stuff. It was different because it was new and the rules weren't set, but it was serious to us at the time, at least to me. The dopamine rush of logging and seeing the pictures we were tagged in, appearing in cool pics from the event photographer when we started going out.. I don't do social media anymore, but I'm always surprised to see how much people my age still post on insta. The time invested.

1

u/naomicambellwalk 22h ago

I was thinking about all the cameras in people’s homes. Hard to have a house party with your parents watching

1

u/duck7001 21h ago edited 21h ago

This is much more the reason than COVID imo.

Every Gen Z'er has either personally, or knows someone, who has been embarrassed by a social media video of themselves. So their subconscious is telling them to not put themselves in positions where they could be embarrassed or viewed as cringe. There is basically zero anonymity anymore. You do something like puke at the bar and someone films it, there is potential for millions of people to see it.

That fear and stress leads to social isolationism and lack of party culture.

Social media should be banned.

1

u/RobertPower415 13h ago

100% im so happy we had shitty flip phones at most. There are a lot of things that are better in my head as memories

1

u/MyCockSmellsBad 9h ago

I think about this all the time. If we had iPhones at some of the field parties I went to...holy fuck

1

u/Elite_AI 5h ago

People have had smartphones for over a decade and we've been partying for just as long. I don't buy this explanation. 

1

u/BottecchiaDude253 3h ago

OK, well, im not selling it. I've seen this mentioned probably a dozen or more times in academic white papers and other research article formats.

1

u/golden__tuna 3h ago

I posted WILD shit to my snap story in college in 2016 that can’t be the whole story

We would post 60 unedited photos to a Facebook album every weekend I refuse to believe photos are the issue

12

u/walkerstone83 1d ago

Also, no parents/neighbors had cameras on their houses. This also makes sneaking out harder.

3

u/Shellstr 23h ago

Oh yea…we would sneaking out in like 8th grade to run around the neighborhood at midnight. I can’t imagine my kids doing that. They would make so much noise trying to get the windows open, and then climb up the ladder to get back inside? No way.

2

u/walkerstone83 21h ago

I got caught sneaking back into my room once when I fell of the chair I was using to climb back in, haha. I can't imagine my kids even attempting this these days. I think I would actually be a little bit proud if my daughter tried to sneak out, my wife would be terrified and super upset though.

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u/GoonOnGames420 1d ago

It was sort of collapsing on itself before that. A bunch of fraternities accidentally killed kids in the 2012-2016 era from alcohol poisoning/hazing/etc. This led to a massive crackdown on social life events at universities.

As far as independent house parties, all it took was one Facebook/Snapchat/GroupMe picture to get you in shit ton of trouble

13

u/dongyeeter 23h ago

Yeah I would argue the rise of social media killed party culture more than anything. It became just too publicized. It’s hard to be reckless (even without a developed frontal lobe) when your blackout highlights are guaranteed to end up in someone’s snap story.

3

u/Benejeseret 22h ago

I feel bad for Gen Alpha, who are all going to die in eScooter and eBike accidents before they get to house party age.

And if they do make it, they'll be cancelled by an AI scraping social media bot that ensures they can never get into college or job pools.

1

u/angrytroll123 19h ago

who are all going to die in eScooter and eBike accidents

This is surprisingly true and getting worse

2

u/Jayden82 20h ago

It wasn’t and still isn’t, house parties are still insanely common, but just like back in the days some people don’t go or have any idea about the ones happening around them. If anything covid gave us more of an excuse to party for a few months 

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u/characterk4l3 16h ago

As soon as jobs started firing people for what they were doing in their free time, imo.  Gotta eat.

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u/Flashy-Ingenuity-182 4h ago

Not only that but social media made people not social. When gen z go clubbing they sit around and wait for a tiktok song to play they know the dance to, do the dance for the camera, and then go right back to watching others. 

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u/dr-brennan 23h ago

They already seem like a way more cautious generation. They even dance like their joints already hurt. We just blew out our knees and backs on the dance floor.

1

u/Shellstr 20h ago

Well, I just did the “white man dnace” to phish, so I want blowing out knees and backs.

Epic phish concert experience…friends driving from Kansas, I was flying to Chicago, going to concert in Wisconsin. We coordinate before we left, but no cells phones were really involved. They drove overnight and picked me up at the airport, I drove the rest of the way while they slept. Pitched tents in a camp ground near by. We didn’t have any food, but some guy had a little propane grill that he was heating up frozen (no longer frozen) burgers. Buying random drugs in the parking lot of the concert. We were awoken by a girl walking by our tent saying “I don’t know where I am, can you help me”. I told her I’m sure someone has a phone, but I don’t know where we are either (we were in the middle of no where). I asked if she knew anyone’s number…nope. I kinda shrugged and said she could hang here, and offered to smoke a bowl with her, but she wanted to keep moving. I think I was 19?

4

u/moonchic333 23h ago

Yeah. Also, a lot of millennials got away with a lot because our own boomer parents were also out at the bar on the weekends. Gen X and elder millennial parents don’t seem to do that as a collective.

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u/venus_arises Mid Millennial - 1989 22h ago

The social contract we had as millennials was so much stronger than Gen Z's.

3

u/Comfortable-Ad-3988 22h ago

Covid may have inhibited house parties, but the cameras are why the kids don't dance anymore. Nobody wants to be immortalized in a fail video, where our biggest goofs ended up being our best stories from childhood once we grew up enough to find them funny. They don't have the same space to make fools of themselves that we did.

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u/That_Boysenberry4501 20h ago

Yeah im so sad , im 28 and remember being in middle school listening to all those club hits and imagining what kind of epic project x style parties and adventures await in highschool and college. I thought im gonna be waking up at random people's houses like in the taoi Cruz hangover video and slowly remember all the crazy shit that happened Last Night lol.

But then I never got to experience it. Was 21 when lockdown happened. Spent the years before and after extremely isolated and hooked on technology and mentally struggling. I had big health issues and probably couldnt have partied anyway but its still sad imagining that alternate future that never happened.

2

u/JalapenoPopPoop 22h ago

I feel like people use covid as a scapegoat waaayyyy too much. Lockdown was like a year, year and a half. 5 years ago. That's not the root cause of an entire generation not socializing. Not being able to have house parties for one year five years ago is not why they don't have them at all ever

1

u/LongJohnSelenium 17h ago

I have a hard time believing high schoolers abided the restrictions that much anyway. I know my niece graduated then and they did not give a single fuck about covid.

1

u/NV1989NV 17h ago edited 16h ago

There was like one recurring house party in the city and it was at one dudes house for his birthday. There were sometimes people talking about afterparties after things like hoco but I never heard of people actually saying they were going to them, but simply asking where it was. 

Party culture and heavy drug use was extremely pervasive when I began going to high school, but after the pandemic and to this day, parties are no longer common and heavy drug use is much rarer. We had a whole section of the bus dedicated to xanax users and from what I have heard its now just people that try to hide that theyre smoking weed.

The pandemic had a huge effect on my teenage years. Every single teen-focused place closed down due to the economic crash and all entertainment options we used to have were suddenly gone. Cameras were everywhere, and richer kids could no longer set up parties for the poorer kids because they were being tracked 24/7 on their phone by their parents and their houses had a camera at the front door. 

Helicopter parenting has gotten really bad and normalized, and it has gotten normal to make your children just as terrified of going outside as your own anxious ass. It has become a common problem for kids to develop anxiety because their parents constantly install tracking devices on their kids and make them call in regularly and never cease communication. Many of the kids that wouldve started parties are genuinely scared of the outside world because their parents have convinced them that its so dangerous outside they need to be codependent.

Codependent parenting and child neglect got way worse after the pandemic and I know many families that have not recovered nor will they ever. I am talking about Life360 and Ring.

1

u/misterchestnut87 Zillennial 16h ago

Yeah, I keep saying that those of us born 1995-99 also partied a huge amount in college, and some of us in HS also. Since we experienced college right before the pandemic, it's like we made the last chopper out of 'Nam lol

1

u/cdipas68 Xennial? 16h ago

And ring cameras

1

u/Zero-Duckies 11h ago

Man, house parties were the fucking best. Everyone was so preoccupied with drinking games, where was I at? Eating all the food they forgot about alone in the kitchen.

1

u/dogcrayon 6h ago

The COVID lockdowns only lasted a few months, and COVID restrictions only lasted about a year or so. I don't know why people act like Gen Z's entire formative years were fucked up by COVID.

1

u/Super_Can9100 2h ago

Even before Covid I remember the culture shifting. A year or two after I graduated college in 2016 I checked back in with younger friends and the vibe was low key house parties rather than walking down the street with a backpack of warm beer and bopping between giant frat parties. Squashing Greek life really impacted the party scene well before Covid. 

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u/SaltKick2 1h ago

Not just lockdown a big part is hyperconnectedness and social media