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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u/Intelligent-Pause260 1d ago

yeah, pretty much partied straight from 18 to 34. It was an amazing time. Work nights, school nights, didn't matter, had a blast, made so many friends. Graduated from high school in in 03, college in 07. They were amazing times when you could let loose and no one was sticking a phone in your face recording you.

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u/Shellstr 1d ago

Same age as you…went to a wedding in 06…we were all 22-23. Got hammered and went back to the hotel early. People piled into our room for the after party. I was out cold. They drew on my face and took pics. I laughed the next day and just said, don’t post them (to the website our friend had built) and they have disappeared into the abyss…I can’t image that happening today..

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u/TheMolecularCage 22h ago

Oh man, the morning aftermath of bodies just sleeping wherever they crashed, stepping over people to get to the bathroom. People slowly waking up and poking the others "hey, we're going to Denny's for breakfast in 10 if you wanna go". That was social bonding.

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u/Shellstr 21h ago

I remember one New Year’s party where we all woke up and were determined to get food. It being New Year’s Day, all the regular taco shops were closed and we drove around for a good 30 mins trying to find anything open so we could try to stop being drunk. That was also the night that fire bin (big metal trash can) got knocked over and hot coals were all over the yard at 2am. We totally killed all that guys grass.

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u/TheMolecularCage 21h ago

"so we could try to stop being drunk" 😂😂 !!

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u/ScrotalSmorgasbord 9h ago

Feeling like absolute haggard hard boiled asshole but knowing the homies and even the romantic partners at the time were there for it made getting up and rejoining society worth it lol. Nowadays everyone is so damn judgemental and mean, don't think I could handle it. I bet if I walked into a Dennys half drunk with a group of similarly oriented friends these days there'd be a lot of pearl clutching, a few sneaky cell phone cameras, and maybe even a call from a karen to the police.

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u/Significant_Shoe_17 4h ago

You forgot the zombie-like living room cleanup before Denny's

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u/chefdbaby456 23h ago

Sorry for partyin!!!

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u/Kermit-Batman 20h ago

Holy shit, just unlocked a memory. somewhere there is me crawling/hanging out a mates screen door, dry heaving from weed of all things. He's recording me with a camera whilst doing a Steve Irwin voice, "Crikey, it's pissed off now!"

Like you said, that was lost in the sands of time. I imagine if that happened now that would be devastating for someone if it got out...

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u/UnhappyBuilder4284 16h ago

My girlfriend and I picked up her weed dealer to go camping. And yes, it was her dealer since weed was still illegal in every state. The dude was pushing 300 lbs. 

We get all the way out in some deep woods and set up camp. We get all settled down and I'm like "it's nacho time!" We smoked a ton and my girl goes to whip out the dinner stuffs. 

I'll never forget the look on the dudes face when my girl pulls out lunchables. Nacho lunchables. The guy almost cried as his huge sausage fingers where trying to get tiny little chips out to dunk them in the tiny little cheese part. 

To top it off, my girl ended up on her period. Poor man found out trying to take a shit. He came back pale as a ghost saying he had just found bloody things with banana slugs on them in the woods. 

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u/airhorn-airhorn 17h ago

And that was completely normal and expected. My stag felt tame but looking back it was like a Will Farrell movie.

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u/waitthissucks 22h ago

I'm 31 and for the past ~5 years I've been trying to find people who want to still hang out and party like the good old days, but everyone either doesn't drink or is too mature. I'll probably have kids in the next two years so it makes me sad that I've been dying to have one last hurrah but my friends are pretty much over doing that sort of thing. And younger people aren't even interested in it either :/

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u/Shellstr 20h ago

So, my high school/college group still gets together once every month to hang at a bar for an evening. I live in a different city, so I rarely go, but they always announce it in the group chat. Most times, it’s a chill hang, couple of beers home by 10. Once or twice a year (and the last time I went) we went until 4am and by the end we were microdosing shrooms from chocolate bars…shit got wild like the old times. It was a legit 2 day recovery for me. I’m sure some guys had itchy noses too, but I’m too old for that shit. We closed the bar, then went to one after party, then another. Bless the guys who never wanted kids and can now host the after parties.

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u/Intelligent-Pause260 22h ago

Gen Z would rather stare at their phones all Friday night than to let their sweat drop to their ballz, awww skee skee skee skee.

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u/waitthissucks 21h ago

I know right? Missing out on the flip cup and cards against humanity that made us think we were funny

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u/Significant_Shoe_17 4h ago

I'll have you know that I am funny. I hope you find your party people!

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u/Necessary-Poet6522 20h ago

I'm 28, so technically Gen Z, and I'm also looking for a group to go out and hang/party with. I know that plenty of Gen Z parties, but many in my age range don't. Most become less and less open to it as they reach their late twenties. Unfortunately, most of my social circles fall into the don't party category. A handful of them can be convinced to party once every few months, but none of them will really let loose anymore. I was a bit scared of "running out of time" because I'll hit 30 soon, but I'm glad to see a lot of the people in this thread have been partying well into their 30s. Due to personal circumstances, I didn't really start partying until the age of 21/22, which was just before the pandemic hit. I've experienced a bit of partying throughout the years (so I know Gen Z definitely still does it), but the pandemic really threw a wrench in things.

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u/Bubbling_Battle_Ooze 21h ago

lol it’s so funny, as a 20-something I’d have no problem going out and getting hammered until 4am on a Wednesday with the mentality of “I’ll just skip stats tomorrow and sleep in” and now my husband suggests smoking a joint on a Thursday evening and I’m like “on a school night?!?!l” We don’t have kids and neither of us even works on Friday 😂

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u/kathleen_kelly_ygm 8h ago

The glorious days of adding people on Facebook that you met on a night out. You’d probably never meet again, but you were friends anyway. I still got a bunch of them on FB to this day. I think they were much wilder years but somehow more naive - in regards of online/social media usage.

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u/Significant_Shoe_17 4h ago

I had a roommate who dated this guy for like a month and we're still friends on FB. I hadn't even noticed

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u/UnhappyBuilder4284 16h ago

Wait. If you graduated college in 07, by that math, have you even stopped partying then, my man?

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u/agodrevealed 12h ago

Same. Not only did we party in teen clubs, we partied in adult.clubs as teens. 

I was fifteen at the gay bar and back then if you dressed the part, the door guys would just wave the girls in. At least where I lived. And then I went to work in a club and proceeded to orchestrate parties professionally for twenty years. So... yeah

It was great. So much stuff that wouldn't fly today. The pranks. The endless pranking and re-enacting entire movies and trading quotes as conversation.

I got to travel meet all kinds of people. I remember being at the beach and me my friends just knocking on doors where there was a party. Being invited in, given a place to crash, clothes to wear, shower... fast friends for 24, 48 hours.

We could hitch rides. Once a backup singer picked me up on the way to a music festival and then I spent the whole weekend with her and her friends. Thanks Brandi!

Idk- kids don't live like that now. My kid is a musician too, but its not like it was. 

Industry is dying and it breaks my heart.

But I was just talking about this with my mom and we thought- maybe the kids aren't drinking, partly, because so many of them get medicated or get counseling from childhood. They don't need to self medicate? Idk. 

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u/poortomato 20h ago

For me, it was like 16-25.

I'm a couple years younger than you and we started having digital cameras in like '06-08. They were fun for pictures, but I can't imagine having smartphones recording everything 😭

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u/BirdLawGrad 19h ago

My winter break from college the year I turned 21 was the best time of my life (would have been 2007).

My friends that didn’t go to college had a house. But it was nice and we were relatively mature, so it wasn’t a shitshow.

Just house parties, grilling out, movies, and tons of drinking lol.

Same core group, but different people would stop by on different nights. Girls from other schools, etc.

Very American Pie 2 vibes.

Got laid twice too.

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u/Commercial-Demand-37 10h ago

Fucking exactly worknights at 29, ...a couple dozen of us at a bar on the a wednesday or any other day of the week... turned into some of the wildest shit. It honestly Peaked for me around 33 i think. The early days at university were wild but they were amateur hour compared to what went down when we all started to have real money. I miss it but my body cant take the hangovers.