This was a post on the GenX subreddit (from a Gen Zer) from just a couple days ago asking about if parties as portrayed in late 90s/early 00s "teen movies" were actually a real thing:
The responses from the Gen Xers were a mix of bewilderment and sadness, stuff like "What do you mean parties like this, it's just a normal teenage party!? I feel so ancient and also so confused by this question." The whole comment section is worth a read, especially the disconnect between how the Gen Xers experienced adolescence and how the Gen Z poster does.
It's really sad to me how we have completely fucked a lot of youth with social media, smart phones, and over-scheduling/over-protection. I also disagree with some of the comments here that are bringing up things like "real estate, transportation, and lodging". Sure, those are issues, but you have families and kids in the suburbs today just like you had families and kids in the suburbs in the 90s, and the fact that kids today can't even recognize "basic teen parties" and question whether they are some sort of made up fantasy can't just be waved away by the fact that real estate is more expensive today.
> It's really sad to me how we have completely fucked a lot of youth with social media, smart phones,
You have to be careful with Gen Z threads like this on Reddit and Twitter. They are inherently biased toward Gen Z people who are chronically online and deep into social media.
If you spend time with kids in the real world, you learn very rapidly that most of them aren't on platforms like Reddit and Twitter. Of those who use Reddit, few of them actually post anything or even have accounts.
The subset of Gen Z who actually post on Reddit is small and a lot of them fit the description of chronically online, so it's no wonder that Reddit Gen Z people speak as if their generation is not socially engaged at all.
That's true. However, I worked as a photographer for about 10 years (quit about 2 years ago) and high school senior photos were one of my specialties, so I got to know a lot of teenagers.
Overscheduling is, I think, the biggest issue. Most of the teens I worked with had something going on almost every night, to the point where rescheduling due to rain or heat was an absolute nightmare. Sports were the biggest offenders. They would often have gym/strength training in the morning and then practice in the evening, almost every evening. Keep in mind I'm mostly talking about summer, so the school year itself was worse. Those that had jobs would do them during the day.
It's completely different from when I graduated high school in '06. Very few sports took over your life in the summer. Football had practice in the mornings for part of the summer, and that's the only one I'm aware of. I don't get the emphasis on sports. I played some in school but never took them seriously and if they required that much time from me I would have been out.
Except the data repeatedly bears out that younger generations are spending more and more time online and in isolation.
The idea that the internet remains the province solely of a few loner geeks is a total fantasy. Reddit is one of the most popular websites in the world.
Also, I was a shy nerd in high school who used reddit, and I still partied. Fuck, I made my own booze to take to parties.
Meanwhile my youngest brother - who is super social - graduated high school in the last few years and reports that partying is totally dead compared to my day.
Basically, the kids who were socially marginalized in the prenetworks era also did not get to see the parties the socially active kids were having, and would have wondered at it all. It would have certainly been also 'a new experience' for them! Except back then they didn't have a place like reddit to go to and wonder out loud.
It's also true that it's "chronically online" GenX folks who are replying to the "chronically online" GenZ folks.
Even if we assume that "chronically online" people and reddit users are nerdier, less social in the real world, tend to be more introverted, less likely to go to parties in general, etc. we're still left with teen parties being normal for the GenX nerds and alien to the GenZ nerds.
As an old, chronically online, more introverted, nerd I can say that I absolutely attended parties in my teens and early 20s (only some of which were lan parties or BBS meetups)
> If you spend time with kids in the real world, you learn very rapidly that most of them aren't on platforms like Reddit and Twitter. Of those who use Reddit, few of them actually post anything or even have accounts.
Certainly true. But it's also undeniable that a huge number of them are on TikTok, Instagram and the like. I think OP's point still stands that today's youth have been affected by that.
I get the same vibe from HN and other places on Reddit. Lots of folks are online in multiple places at all times. If I bring up a random internet topic in real like people give me weird looks.
> You have to be careful with Gen Z threads like this on Reddit and Twitter. They are inherently biased toward Gen Z people who are chronically online and deep into social media.
Wouldn't Gen X responses on those threads also be inherently biased toward Gen X people who are chronically online and deep into social media?
I'm not quite sure if smartphones are still all that popular. With the rise of WFH, (and for Gen-Z, having a Covid lockdown college experience), most people are on actual computers and are sitting at home.
I wonder how the levels of engagement compare between an extremely online GenX person, an average GenZ person, and an extremely online Gen Z person would look like.
No. The “new generation” now knows what the outcasts and the undesirables of the “old generation” felt like. The more I speak to the younger crowd the more parallels I find which just means the “default” shifted towards a society of people who don’t know a different way, but are unaware of what goes on around them. The undesirables of the old knew, but couldn’t do anything about it.
It’s like people who are bewildered when newspapers say bankers got caught having a massive orgy of some 50+ attendees in a hotel in Switzerland. There is always a party, but you’re not invited. Simple as.
I knew the Diddy party charges wouldn’t stick because the aggrieved persons descriptions sound like commonly held parties in Los Angeles with quite a lot of consent involved (and courts aren't able to parse more nuanced aspects of consent, so people are left with a reliance on mutual cooperation)
this detail isn’t as important to people as wondering if I’ve gone to an LA sex party and whatever preconception they have of that and now me
Just like those bankers, and this thread, there is always a party
The type of people posting these questions on reddit today wouldn't have been at those parties yesterday, so I don't think we can extrapolate some overarching theme here
My anecdotal experience with two children who are young adults is that there are still house-parties (nearly) every weekend at high-school, but that there's a lot less drinking, and they're a lot more open and mature (i'm not sure i would have enjoyed being a trans kid in a 90s high school)
I'm not saying the kid who posted this is a 100% representative sample, but at least in my experience of the teenagers I know, childhood has changed drastically in the last 25 years.
If you look at some of the poster's comments there, he laments that even when he does go to house parties, everyone is just sitting around on their phone. I have certainly seen that.
Over protection and coddling are definitely a cause of lower social skills. When I was a kid, parents with leave children with a babysitter who was essentially an older child, sometimes just by a couple of years. Other times the kids would just be wandering around by themselves while parents didn’t care until it was dinner time. “Parties” weren’t just alcohol induced sex fests like they show on TV. Often it was 10 kids bunched around a single computer with $5 worth of chips and soda trying to beat a boss fight. A lot of those things are not only frowned upon now, but as a parent, could land you in jail.
If you wonder why children no longer grow up with a different outlook to life, then that’s probably it.
"It's really sad to me how we have completely fucked a lot of youth with social media, smart phones, and over-scheduling/over-protection."
I honestly believe social media, smart phones, and over-scheduling/over-protection does a lot less damage to the current generation than partying did to my generation. I can recommend the 1995 Larry Clark movie "kids" for a more balanced view how parties often looked like and which negative side effects they could have. Real life was not like in "American Pie" at all and that is where I guess Gen Z is getting their impression from.
> I honestly believe social media, smart phones, and over-scheduling/over-protection does a lot less damage to the current generation than partying did to my generation.
Zuck, is that you? :)
> movie "kids" for a more balanced view how parties often looked like
Teens (and pre-teens) having sex, doing hard drugs and drinking liquor is completely unlike "how parties often looked like" for anyone I know but YMMV.
The article title mentions partying, but there's a chart that's just about going out with 2+ friends. That's a terrible thing to lose. I was a kid in the 2000s, and the vast majority of socializing was just harmless fun, not the extreme.
Digital socialization has replaced many functions of physical parties - Discord hangouts, gaming sessions, and video calls offer connection without the logistics burden or social risks. The question isn't whether socializing has died, but whether its digital evolution provides the same developmental benefits as in-person gatherings.
I honestly am having trouble believing folks think that digital socialization is anywhere near an acceptable substitute (vs. an adjunct) for in-person socialization. And tons of research supports this. Can't remember the woman who talks about AI meaning "Artificial Intimacy", where you have 1500 "friends" but nobody to feed your cat when you go on vacation.
The economic realities shouldn't be discounted. With more competitive conditions, the youth have to work much harder to secure the same opportunities relative to previous generation. With this comes the decline of partying or other high risk or non-productive activities. It's also true of adults - nightclubs are not as much of a thing as they were in decades prior.
> The responses from the Gen Xers were a mix of bewilderment and sadness, stuff like "What do you mean parties like this, it's just a normal teenage party!?
Well, it's a normal teenage party /in the US/.
I think in Europe, partying always looked a lot different (also different from country to country, here). I also mostly was bewildered by parties in teen movies from the early 00s.
I grew up very sheltered, my mom had anxiety and I was a single child.
I remember being unable to comprehend how in media, people could just go somewhere without issues to met with people or even go for a walk. I knew that was a thing, but I could not imagine what it's actually like and if it's real.
I grew up in the 90s-2000s in a place were people were very serious about school. Very few kids were getting drunk etc, there were very few couples and 0 teen pregnancies, but there was still a healthy amount of socializing. That chart showing going out with 2+ friends was still a high % then, and it matched my experience.
This completely changed after iPhones and Facebook became popular enough. It ruined even the regular socializing. Even the few boy bullies started doing this lame-ass cyberbullying instead. Sometimes I wondered where the cool kids were on weekdays, then I checked my Minecraft server logs.
I graduated high school in 2001, which sounds like a similar era, but what I saw seemed very different. So maybe things changed pretty quickly once computers hit the mainstream and I’m just a bit older than you.
At my high school we had several girls get pregnant. I remember a kid getting a DUI and he made a necklace out of the tube used to blow in the breathalyzer and wore it with pride. In my first class of the day the kid who sat next to me had a flask he’d be drinking from at 8am.
A couple years after I graduated news broke that the track coach was basically throwing Diddy parties (we’ll leave it at that to avoid getting graphic). He, and several others, ended up in prison.
This was all in a sleepy little Midwest town that many would describe as charming and quaint.
Though Minecraft didn’t exist until I was already in the workforce. Facebook came out when I was in college. Facebook seemed to be a thing with certain groups (sorority girls seems to have a lot of competitions to get the most friends), but no one in my group of friends in college talked about it at all. I don’t think any of them even had accounts until later. Web 1.0 didn’t really change society, but Web 2.0 shifted it massively, especially once Web 2.0 made its way into people’s pockets.
I worked at the computer help desk at my university. We would get calls from high school seniors, who got accepted, trying to get their student email address early. They wanted to sign up for Facebook. I always found these calls strange, and the sorority girls too. People were either really into it, like an addict, or they were completely indifferent; I saw very little in between in those first years. Facebook probably blew up way more with the mainstream once they dropped the edu requirement. After that, there was a lot of social pressure to join.
Social media has always felt like a proxy for actual social interaction. It scratches just enough of that itch to make people think they are connected to others, without providing any actual connection, as the whole experience is largely passive.
I think this article was way overdone, based on what I see with my teenage kids. They don't go to any "parties", but during the summer they are at the beach around 4x per week with bonfires at night. Almost 1/3 of their class (at a somewhat small school) is there.
And with Snapchat they know where everyone is. It's typical on a Friday school night they are scanning their map to see, "this group is at the mall. this group is at the football. this group went to her house." And then pick where to go.
Honestly, the current method of social gathering seems so much better than what I did in the 80s.
Even after high school, when I moved to the city we had parties quite often. They weren't quite as large, drunk, or disorganized, but people actually got together all the time. Some places were like designated party spots, where no one had kids or demanding jobs so it was a reliable place to head and have a good time.
My kids don't know anyone or anything like that. It's so strange. They still have sleep overs where they play video games and use their phones. That's fine in a way. At their age I was in the woods getting drunk and starting bonfires. It was fun as hell, but maybe something closer to the middle would be ideal.
That's pretty funny. I was a teen in the late '80s and only attended maybe 1 party as depicted in films and it was on a college campus where a couple of buddies and I scammed our way in by acting like we were college students (actually HS Juniors at the time). It was pretty epic. I know of a couple other notorious parties during that time that I didn't attend. I think the answer is a resounding "yes"--that crazy parties were actually a thing.
It was my favorite activity in the world. But that also makes it tough to "let go" when your 30s approach. Even when the hangovers get worse. I'm kinda grateful for the pandemic shutting everything down for a while. Before that I had massive FOMO when I "did nothing" on the weekend. I know a bunch of guys who did nothing else with their lives.
> It's really sad to me how we have completely fucked a lot of youth with social media, smart phones, and over-scheduling/over-protection.
It's also fascinating how every generation in recorded history has similar claims about the next, yet somehow mankind has improved quality of life for so many.
Simply google (without quotes) "list of ancients bemoaning youth" and read millennia of similar claims, some of which could be used today and sound new.
I think it's such a huge mistake to think "well, it's always been like that, this is just a continuation of what's been going on in recorded history." Especially when the data tells a very different story.
For example, just look at one metric: weight. Kids these days (and, obviously, adults as well) are overweight and obese in numbers that are off the charts (off the charts because you barely had any obese kids in decades past). They used to always call it "adult-onset diabetes", which now they prefer to call it Type 2 diabetes because you see so many kids getting it, which is tragic IMO. To be clear, I'm not solely blaming the childhood obesity epidemic on smartphones or social media - I'm just using it as an example of something that has changed for kids that we should be worried about, not just hand wave away as "Meh, adults have always bemoaned youth."
Rates of teenage depression, loneliness and anxiety have skyrocketed in the pass 15 years, and when you dig into the data it doesn't look like just a rate of diagnosis issue.
Teenagers themselves (as a group) are telling us they are significantly more unhappy than teenagers in years past. We should listen to them.
Hold up. GenX'er here, graduated college in the mid 90s. Are you telling me that college keg parties in the basements of off-campus housing is no longer a thing?
> the fact that kids today can't even recognize "basic teen parties" and question whether they are some sort of made up fantasy
While I agree there is a technology-driven loneliness epidemic,
what is so sacred about those "basic teen parties"?
People from any time before the 70s wouldn't recognize them either. Also, they were fictional caricatures written for movies, not real life, where teen parties were considerably less interesting.
I never saw the point of those. People, alcohol, what's fun about any of that? Tripping over your own legs with a bunch of similarly incapable humans while drowning in noise and fine particulates is toddler level fun. But with potential of acquiring adult level damage.
Some people want to make everything about "walkable cities." Maybe they can come back with socialization stats for non-driving-age kids, or those in Manhattan.
Something tells me that tightly packed populations in urban settings and their landlords are way less accepting of huge parties in an apartment playing loud music than a small number of homeowners in a suburb are about someone in the cul-de-sac having a house party playing loud music.
I mean normal teen parties when I was a teenager were places for teens to get blackout drunk and make bad decisions. I empathize with your position somewhat, but it wasn't all good.
Not all parties were like that. Or at least I was never invited to those. We geeks stuck to LAN parties, got drunk, and played games. Since there were no girls around, we managed to avoid making any bad decisions :)
Responsibility, the ability to respond. Since you are able to do stuff, you also share responsibility, also for things you do not act upon, even if you don’t want to take it on. You can and you were definitely able to make different choices of what you want and wanted to engage with, and what you decided to ignore. You are an active part of society, if you want that or not.
Another day, another well-meaning internet community falling victim to the creative writing major testing water on Reddit before trying to make it in Hollywood.
Ya I'm shocked by it too, said as a Gen Xer born in the late 1970s, occasionally a Xennial.
I partied for 4 years of college which is something like 30 years in sober adult terms. Our ragers were reminiscent of Animal House and Revenge of the Nerds, all of those old party movies that didn't age well. Scenes from Hackers, Fight Club, The Matrix, Trainspotting, Go, Swingers, Made, 200 Cigarettes, SLC Punk, Dazed and Confused, PCU, even Undergrads (a cartoon) were so spot-on for campus life, living for the weekend. Can't Hardly Wait, American Pie, Varsity Blues, Waiting, Superbad, etc came later, and I almost consider those watered down versions of the feral partying that happened earlier just as the internet went mainstream, but still canon.
A Friday night at my city's bar scene today looks like what our Sunday or Monday was. People half tipsy on 2 drinks, even though they're Ubering home later. The faint scent of ganja now instead of basements filled with smoke and first timers trying laughing gas. Nobody puking or disappearing around a corner to relieve themselves. No sound of bottles shattering. I feel like a curator of a museum now, a derelict from a forgotten time.
In fairness, I went to college in the midwest, where there was nothing else to do. Now the West Coast has effectively legalized drugs, awakening much of the country to the full human experience, and people have done the trips and plant medicine and maybe realize at a young age that alcohol and tobacco are rough drugs that tear you up. Which is admirable, but they also prepare you for getting torn up as an adult. To miss out on learning how to make your way home on drunk logic before you black out seems like a crucial rite of passage has been lost.
And it shows. In our country's embrace of puritanical politics like we saw in the jingoist 2000s, regentrified for the antivax era. In the worship of unspoiled beauty, idolizing of influencers, pursuit of financial security over visceral experience. In the fanboyism, bootlicking and drinking the kool-aid for every new evolutionary tech that cements the status quo instead of freeing the human spirit in a revolutionary manner. I gotta be honest, most of what's happening today is laughable to my generation. Blah I sound like a Boomer. Ok cryable then. We're in mourning. We worry about the kids today. All work and no play and all that. It's killing our souls, and theirs.
I guess my final thought after writing this is that partying is one of the most powerful reality-shifting tools in our arsenal. All of this can't be it. This can't be how America ends. You know what to do.
I remember a friend who was going to school in Boston coming to visit me at my college in western Massachusetts freshman year. I brought him to some off campus house in the woods, probably 200 or so people there, huge bonfire in the back, bands playing in the basement. We're passing a bottle of Jameson back and forth. Probably around 1 am everyone just heard someone screaming "that's my fucking couch!" from the outside deck as a few dudes tossed her couch into the bonfire. The flames were as high as the house and 15 minutes later the fire department was there. My friend couldn't believe what was going on, which honestly was a typical Friday night (aside from the couch burning).
I've lived in Brooklyn for about 20 years now, and while the parties still happen, most of them have become corporate. There are $50 covers and $15 beers, with wristbands you have to load a credit card onto instead of $5 covers and $2 beers in an illegal warehouse (cash only). The kids also seem to be taking ketamine a lot more than anything else, so they kinda disassociate and don't really dance that much at the clubs, whereas mdma and coke were things you ran into more when I was their age and people were not shy about grabbing someone on the dancefloor and grinding on each other for the night. They are definitely more sheltered and tame than we were as a whole, which isn't necessarily a bad thing I guess.
I had never really considered partying as a reality-shifting tool, but as someone fond of regional burn events, yeah, it totally is.
Humans have partied for aeons. It's not just about letting off steam, it's about building social bonds, it's about traditions and rituals and marking key points in life.
This whole thread makes me rather sad, but in the same breath, makes me feel like there is real, actionable good to be done by promoting and helping run events. Not corporate pay-to-play curated experiences, which keep you on rails and only serve to condition more consumption behaviors, but relatively low cost, volunteer-run, do-it-yourself events. The latter, from my experience, have an absolutely infectious component of wanting to contribute, volunteer, create art, and drag others into the experience. But they are also a lot of work and not everyone is cut out for it.
It really has me thinking about lowering the bar to any sort of experience that gives folks a reprieve from the default world, however fleeting.
I think you need some sort of youth density for that. If you live in a low-density suburb where most people no longer have kids it's hard, even if you have a tool like the internet.
That is what she gets for having weak boundaries tho. And it is a thing that if you have seen, you will actively teach your kids to avoid - by saying no soom enough.
Yeah and in 30 years a thought post on brainnit will appear in everyone's head and they'll ask Gen-Zer's did you really have a brain that was isolated from everyone elses?
And someone will respond:
It's really sad to me how we fucked you guys up and you didn't even have phones...
This article isn’t wrong, but it neglects to mention real estate, transportation, and lodging. A party needs a venue, and it needs guests. And the guests need a way to get to and from the venue. If they stay a long time, they need a place to sleep.
People these days don’t own real estate. Wealthy people own it all. Normal people are renting apartments or portions of homes. It’s kind of hard to throw a big party without a big home, a yard, a big kitchen, etc. Small apartments are for small get-togethers that probably don’t register as parties.
Likewise, the larger someone’s home is, the more likely it is to be location in an area with low population density and little to no public transportation. Congrats, you can throw a party, but who are you inviting? All your friends are far away. How can they get there? How long can they stay? Can you accommodate them sleeping there? You aren’t friends with your neighbors who can party easily. You are friends with people on the Internet who are strewn about the world.
And of course, if you live in a major city with lots of friends, small apartment strikes again.
This is part of the reason we have seen the rise of more public events like conventions. There’s a hotel involved. It’s a multi-day event worth traveling to. A lot of people you know will be there. It costs everyone some money, but it’s not out of the realm to go a few times a year. Best part, nobody’s home gets trashed!
> People these days don’t own real estate. Wealthy people own it all. Normal people are renting apartments or portions of homes. It’s kind of hard to throw a big party without a big home, a yard, a big kitchen, etc. Small apartments are for small get-togethers that probably don’t register as parties.
This is baffling to me. Most of the parties I went to in high school, college, and my 20s were in people's tiny apartments, small rented houses, and small yards.
Maybe expectations changed? Now it seems more like people feel the need to get ready before going out, to bring something, to pre-coordinate to arrive with a group of friends, to have a lot of space, to have everything pre-cleaned and ready to be the background in photos, and maybe even to have a meat and cheese platter that gets posted to social media. It seems there's much less willingness to just go places, be cramped, and just hang out.
I agree that owning real estate doesn't seem a big issue to me, but urban design does: I lived on both sides of the pond and in the USA getting to a party usually involved driving somewhere. That means organizing to go there with a group and a designated driver to stay sober, or getting a taxi (too expensive, when I was young). In Europe, I could just get on my bike and show up by myself. That lowers the barrier to entry considerably. As far as I can tell, urban sprawl in the US has made it even more car dependent today than when I was growing up.
Gen Z in particular is deathly afraid of having an earnest but unflattering moment captured in someone else's TikTok and distributed to the entire planet.
> were in people's tiny apartments, small rented houses, and small yards
Anymore this feels impossible due to neighbors, landlords, and police. I have so many anecdotes... I don't think it's "getting ready" as much as it's an intolerant society of chronically entitled people. Also, it's increasingly expensive to go out + I truly believe we're experiencing the destruction of "3rd places"
My 20's had a good amount of that too... but it was increasingly at odds with real consequence and risk. I'm just safer at home with my SO, in my space. It's getting much worse for younger generations :(
Good insights -- people now have to have their party look good for their social feeds: insta, tiktok, whatever. I'm forever thankful that I never had to even think about that, and even if people were taking pictures, nobody gave a damn about the background.
In my younger days I threw 100 person parties in a San Francisco apartment - it's standing room only for sure, but so is going to a crowded bar. And I've cooked for 15 without a dining table - you eat on the floor wherever you can find space.
Now I don't disagree with your point; I'm not 22 anymore and live in the burbs and have a less full social calendar, largely due to the logistical overhead of finding my way into the city or getting friends from the city out here. But I do want to say you can have a lot of fun with a lot of friends in a small space with the right attitude :)
Instead of "don't disagree" please say: "I agree" it is proper English and not some stylized, holier-than-thou sounding, completely logically twisted up act.
Everyone gets quick and lazy dopamine from phones. Why bother with anything else?
Think about how much time goes into phones. Who has time to plan? Who has time to coordinate?
Phones are probably why the birth rate is declining too.
You don't even need a house to party. You can use a pavilion at a park, go out in the woods like the rednecks I grew up around did, party at the trailer park. Homes are by no means a limiting factor.
> People these days don’t own real estate. Wealthy people own it all. Normal people are renting apartments or portions of homes.
If you look at a graph of home ownership in the US by cohort at various points in time (see, e.g., https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/08/homeownership...), while the rates are somewhat lower, between the highest point and the lowest point the difference is at worst 10 percentage points.
This sentiment strikes me a lot more as people in their 20's complaining that they're poor because they don't have the financial resources of someone in their 40's, despite having more resources than the latter did at their age.
> This sentiment strikes me a lot more as people in their 20's complaining that they're poor because they don't have the financial resources of someone in their 40's, despite having more resources than the latter did at their age.
Home prices have doubled over the past 20 years, twice the rate of income increases
That’s the absolute percentage difference. Look at the under 35 category, it’s literally down 25%. That means 1/4 people that would have owned a house in that age group don’t now. Under 45 is a relative drop of ~17%, so about 1/5. One in four to one in five people is more than enough to see an effect.
I doubt it’s the only cause at all, this anti-social (“Bowling Alone”) trend has been going on for generations, and probably has multiple causes. But the US housing crunch on young people is adding to it.
And this damn attitude of “the younger generations are just entitled weenies” about housing is about the most infuriating attitude in the world. My parents bought their first house on a single earners blue collar salary at the age of 27. That house, with almost no updates, now literally needs a top 1% salary and payments for 30 years to be able to afford. Don’t tell the kids to stop whining when they’re watching older generations gobble up their future in the name of preserving property values.
That's for the whole country. This site is very heavily biased toward people who live in major cities, where real estate has in fact become the purview of only the rich.
Short version of the history:
Starting in the late 1990s, you had a super-concentration of both good jobs and interesting culture in a short list of cities: SF Bay, New York, LA/OC, Seattle, and a few others. I remember growing up during this period and the whole cultural zeitgeist was "if you don't live in one of those cities, you can't do anything."
These cities have always had an allure, especially creative centers like LA and NYC, but what I mean is that it got much more extreme. It fits with the general cultural zeitgeist of everything centralizing and going to the extreme right side in an increasingly tight power-law distribution.
This was followed by insane real estate hyperinflation in those cities, of course, because if you try to take all the "interesting" stuff in the world's largest economy and a nation of 300+ million people and cram it into a few metros, that happens.
The rest of the country still has a lot of affordable real estate, less so than it used to -- RE has appreciated everywhere and not just in the US -- but it's far less insane than the top-tier cities.
It is really strange to read complaints that the vast vast majority of 20 somethings have no chance of competing against older established households in the housing market.
I would hope so, otherwise that would mean the country/locale is so bad that older households are packing their bags and fleeing.
So the most desirable properties, such as large SFHs, townhouses, penthouses, etc… within a short driving distance of an attractive city will likely be owned by the latter, by definition.
I'm not convinced. I live in Berlin and everyone is living in a flat, yet I've had my fair share of home parties, even in small two room apartments where half the party spilled out to the stairwell.
I'm pretty sure Berlin has public transportation. I have it here in Trondheim, Norway - but only one town that I've lived in the states had busses. They didn't run all night, on Sunday, nor did they visit all areas of the somewhat small town. (I'm from the US, lived more places there than I have in Norway)
Other places had taxis (that you couldn't order ahead of time to get to work on time) and some had none until they uber/lyft. (Don't know the current situation).
I'm going to guess the other thing Berlin has is safe areas to walk. I can go to a party and walk home, safely on walking paths complete with shortcuts, without even being harassed by the police and risk getting arrested and in jail for the night (for public intoxication). None of these were luxuries I had in the states.
And I'll say that yes, I've been in some small apartments - but only some folks with small apartments can host. You probably have no clue how many would host if they only had enough space, but a small apartment with 2 adults that have hobbies limits things.
I don't think Berlin life corresponds much to USA life in this regard. We mostly have suburban sprawl and many areas that would be similarly dense, are not very populated with children/teens (because parent's often move to the suburbs)
Thank you for mentioning this! There's this weird, persistent meme that large corporations are buying up all the housing and nobody owns homes anymore, which is fundamentally not supported by the data.
There are shifting trends in generational home ownership rates, but these are still just initial trends we're seeing. If you look at the data [0] owner occupied has gone down from the 2000s housing bubble, but in the grand scheme of things is not even particularly low.
People also have this mistaken belief that investors like Black Rock are buying up huge swaths of property, when in reality most "investment" properties are bought by families and individuals, consider anyone who know who owns an AirBNB rental or other rental property, they would be considered "investors".
Most Americans still live in a house, and own that house (or at least, some member of their household owns it).
Owning an apartment isn’t materially different than renting an apartment here. It’s sometimes better as many apartments have free or rentable spaces available for parties as a selling point, but rarely can you use that space late in the evening.
Owning a home in an HOA area can drastically cut down on what kinds of parties you can host.
How many of that 2/3 is households that have owned the home for 20+ years—ie, since before the subprime crash?
How many of that 2/3 is households of people 65+? And how many is people under 30? Partying is still largely a young people's game, and even if your "household" owns the home you live in, if that's your parents or grandparents, you're much less likely to be hosting parties there.
yeah, as an East European, it's crazy that our real estate prices are basically the same as the non-super expensive US cities, and we make like one-fifth the salary.
In fact I just checked and the ratio of avg salary to real estate prices is about the same as in New York.
My sister and her husband throw a pretty great annual Halloween party at the house they rent which is 1-2 hours from the nearest city and a good 15-20 minutes from the nearest town.
I don't think the real estate situation helps but I think there's a deeper social problem driving both of those effects.
No, owning a house does not give you more license to throw a party. Not owning a car never stopped anyone determined to go to a party. A place to sleep? What kind of party are you imagining in your head? One where people travel hundreds of miles and need a hotel? Your take is ridiculous. People party in small apartments all the time, I've been to hundreds. I took the bus there many times, or got rides from other friends going to the party, and now ride-sharing is a thing. Sleep?? That was never, ever part of the equation. I know it's a tired cliche, and usually used as a troll, but I can confidently say that you obviously don't get invited to many parties.
I'm not saying this isn't part of the problem, but my experience has been different. When I was in my 20s, my friends and I all lived in apartments and had parties fairly often. I recall that when I was a kid in the 90s my parents often went to small house parties as well. Now, in my 40s, neither I nor anyone I know ever goes to parties despite us all owning houses and cars and living fairly close to one another.
My theory is that people have fewer parties because people have gotten flakier about attending larger social events. It is much easier to cancel plans at the last minute with a text or a social media DM, and people always seem to want to keep their options open. We've moved to getting together only with one other couple/family at a time b/c any time we try to have larger group events half of the invite list will cancel the day of.
You need a home to party? News to my younger self. Parties in crowded shitty apartments, outdoors, or even in cars were the norm when we were young.
This complaint - we don’t have nice houses so we can’t party - is unintentionally emblematic of the root issue in misaligned expectations and excuses for realigned priorities. Nobody Inknew when young had houses either.
Look, it’s not obviously bad to me that young people party less. Blame gaming, blame some resurgent conservative cultural values, blame the internet or even laziness. Maybe the youth today just have better things to do, and that okay. Binge drinking, drugs, and stupid decisions aren’t necessary good investments in time, and many, many, friends from back in the day didn’t survive it. Like less kids smoking cigarettes, maybe this is a good thing (for them and all of us).
But it’s ridiculous to try and turn this behavioral trend into some manifesto on housing inequality. Give me a break.
And even if every person did live in a detached home where they could hypothetically throw a party, there are smartphone connected Ring cameras everywhere. Parents always know what's going on now.
This is such weird reasoning. When you're young and throwing parties where you're implicitly inviting a whole lot of people who you don't know, they will be bringing random chaos and you want to appear judgement proof and have it be someone else's property getting accelerated wear and tear. By the time you own a house with a yard, you're only inviting people you already know, with maybe one layer of transitive trust. Perhaps this focus on owning a house as the first step to doing anything points to the real problem though?
Not in high-density areas like cities. People own homes in low density areas (middle of nowhere), which makes them isolated, hence no communal activities like partying.
Most homes in the US are mortgaged. More likely the banks, which ultimately means the depositors, who are just as likely to be everyday average people (the wealthy normally keep their wealth in things like businesses), own most of it.
Jeez, youngish people feeling left out on investing into real estate see it as root of most of problems this world is facing now.
Sorry but can't agree, as do most folks here backing up with some hard data. That 'glass is half-empty' approach to daily life ain't healthy long term, ever thought about that?
The median new home size skyrocketed in the '80s.[1]
Many of the post-war suburbs were planned communities built with schools, churches, grocery stores, and other necessities within walking distance.[2] Compare that to developments today (and since the '90s), that are all housing, lack sidewalks, and require a car to get to necessities.
Serendipity doesn't happen when everyone's in cars. You don't pull over to invite an acquaintance over for a beer or offer to watch their kids.
I almost never meet people who like the same bands as I do. I can listen to new music that I love at home. If I go to a bar or a party I'm going to mostly hear music I don't like, and if I do like it, I could have already heard it at home.
That reminds me of an article I can't find anymore on the plight of the American poor couple trying to raise a child in a gasp 900sqft. Uh, check real estate sqft averages around the world?
I never was much of a partier as a teen but I've been to a few, and they were all in flats ranging from much smaller than an American house to literally one room sometimes with 15 people in it. Had no problem falling asleep drunk on somebody's kitchen floor or on a couch in a room with a bunch of other people.
Even in the US a dorm room (a tiny, rented place) is a stereotyped party location.
Oh and ofc numbers are wrong. The houses in the US are bigger than ever and homeownership rate is smth like 60%.
This is just absolute total nonsense. Normal people do own real estate. Lots of people rented back then and do now. Friends were “far away” back then too, they took their cars, bummed rides, took buses, whatever. Where do they sleep? Where do you think they slept back then? The floor, the couch, the lawn, or they didn’t sleep at all and just went home in the morning.
Eh, I feel like my (and most peoples) main exposure to house parties was in HS and college when basically no one owns their own home. Rented apartments, houses and family homes seemed to work fine then, I can't really think why that wouldn't be the case now.
Note the age-group with the biggest drop is 15-24, its not like the average 18 year old owned their own home circa 1995.
My spouse and I find that we are overwhelmingly the ones calling to organize playdates rather than vice versa. I'd like to think it's not that my kids are poorly socialized or misbehave - they've always received glowing reports at school. I give my kids business cards with my phone number to pass out to their friends to give to their parents, and there is also a class list where our phone numbers are listed (and where we find these other parents' contact info).
Something happened with the culture of getting kids to play with each other outside of school hours, and I don't know what it was. COVID lockdowns definitely delayed it from starting for our kids, but I know these parents are mostly in my generation, and we certainly played more together.
We live in the suburbs, so it's not a car creep problem - at least, no more than it was 60+ years ago when the numbers were better. When I ask the parents who stay, they tell me a vague mix of weekend junior sports leagues, visiting relatives, and just being really tired after working all week. They're lame excuses: spending time with kids constantly is _also_ really tiring.
Kids having regular playdates would encourage more familiarity among the families and trust in letting kids play unsupervised with each other. Often I take them to the main playground, and it's virtually empty. I can't believe I'm the only one in the community who's unhappy enough about this to try and change it.
Often the kids like to play together, but the parents are the ones that are just... weird and asocial. I hate to bring agism into this, but there definitely seems to be a generational gap with the adults.
Some of my kid's friends are raised by their parents, and others are (apparently) raised primarily by grandparents.
When my kid wants to get together with friends whose (50-60 year old) grandparents bring them by, the grandparents come up to the door, socialize for a bit while the kid runs inside, and then we talk about when the playtime will be over and they can come over to pick the kid up. If it's an event where we both bring the kids, I find it easy to shoot the breeze with the grandparents, have small talk about how the week went, and so on.
When the parents are, say, 25-35 year old range, it's a totally different vibe. They'll drive up, let the kid out of the car, and then race away without even getting out of their car. When playtime is at a local park or something, they sometimes hang around, but they go off into a corner, engrossed on their phone, totally ignoring the other parents (who, depending on their own ages are either chit chatting or locked into their Instagram).
I remember when I was a kid in the 80s, and not only would we love to get together at someone's house, but the parents would also be happy to get together for a little socialization, maybe throw some steaks on the grill, put on some Sportsball, or whatever. This practice seems to be dead now that I'm a parent!
We bought into a nice suburban community. Good schools, low crime, the dream.
No one knows any neighbors. Kids rarely play with one another intra-neighborhood despite a very healthy blend of age ranges. In fact, I’ve loosely associate with exactly one neighbor in the three years. We went out of our way to try and meet neighbors our first month. Most treated us as if we head too many heads on our shoulders.
Despite a heavy presence of children, no one here celebrate Halloween despite it being a beloved night growing up around here. Our first year we invested heavily in decorations and spent hundreds on the King size candy bars.
Society feels… dead compared to me as an early 90s child.
I am probably that sort of parent. Truth is I dread socializing. I enjoy just hanging around with my family in the peace and quiet of my home. Not one to engage in small talk with neighbors, other parents, etc.
My daughter is still a baby, and I don't want her to become a shut-in because of my antisocial tendencies. So yeah, I will take her to the public playground, get her into the local sport activities, this sort of thing. But I would likely be the parent in the playground just sitting by himself while the daughter plays, maybe reading a book (I also hate social media in general, so no doomscrolling for me).
Every family is dual income now, so every family needs to find something to do with their kids once school lets out. Growing up in the 80's most families around were single income and kept kids at home over the summers. As a result, kids ruled the neighborhoods, bouncing around between houses all day, where there could be some reasonable expectation of peripheral oversight. Now, everyone is min-maxing camp schedule to ensure there is child oversight during working hours, and the neighborhoods are empty.
We decided to break from the trend and return our kids to more of a free-range kid paradigm, risking the disruption to our working schedules, this year. It sounds good in theory, but you are left with the realities of every other child friend being wrapped in camp schedules, as well. It took a lot of proactive discussions with other parents to convince them to keep their kids at home and accessible. But you're still left with the dual income problem, so you find yourself hiring a sitter to oversee and shuttle.
The result is an improvement over the 100% booked compartmentalized camp situation, but without the same level of independence that I experienced and have come to credit with really advancing my own personal development as a child.
By BLS statistics, 50% of married couples today both work[1], which is the same as it was in 1978, and lower than it was for most of the 80's and 90's[2]. There are some caveats to those statistics. They cover all married couples, including retirees, and there are more retirees today than in the 80s. It also doesn't differentiate between full-time and part-time work.
However, it does show that the majority of families were already dual-income by the 80's. The trend away from supporting a family on a single income started much earlier than that.
Anecdotally, all my friends in the 80's and 90's had both parents working, and we still got together to play all the time, either in the neighborhood for nearby friends, or dropped off for further ones.
What happened is that everything turned into playdates? When we were kids, the general direction was GTFO, and don't be late for dinner. Who did you go play with? Whoever was at the park. When you got older, you hopefully had access to the skating rink. Or maybe a bowling alley. Before that, kickball at the park. Pretty much every day. Maybe see if you can over shoot the swing again.
Im convinced that car seat rules have played a big role in shaping child socialization.
When was a kid, you were done with your car seat by elementary school so one parent could offer to carpool a minivan full of kids to/from an event.
But now that some kids need their car seat into middle school carpools are gone and every kid needs their parent to pick them up. It requires way more planning and parental involvement
The concept of playdates is amusing to me as an immigrant. In Indian cities where most people live in apartments, the kids just go down and play around with the 10s of kids from the neighborhood. Adults get free time and kids get to socialize and enjoy.
There was a line somewhere about Americans being increasingly unable to handle unstructured socializing.
Parties typically have some sort of rules-based activity, be it beer pong or board games. Playdates themselves are perhaps the first manifestation of such phenomenon.
Totally valid observation, but things definitely changed. Neighbors don't know each other as well, so the grandma keeping an eye out the back window doesn't exist anymore. It was a village watching the kids before, its not that way now.
some of our common free range play places included walking to the dump and new home construction sites to have dirt clod wars. maybe some structure isnt bad. i turned out fine but looking back it probably would have been cool to get taken to a park
It was already happening before COVID. All these trends were. That just made it worse.
A major issue is the death of independent child play. In a lot of places if a kid — and we are talking up to early teens — is unsupervised police will be called. It’s entirely the result of daytime TV and true crime making people think there are pedophile nuts hiding in every bush when in reality abductions by strangers are incredibly rare. If a kid is abused or worse it’s almost always someone they know.
One of the things I love about where we live is that kids do still play outside. It’s a safe Midwestern suburb. We moved from SoCal and there you would definitely have some busybody call the cops. Of course it was perhaps more dangerous — not because of crime but cars. All the suburban streets have like 60mph speed limits in SoCal.
It depends where in socal of course like anywhere else. In a more urban part like in la there are no busy bodies, you see kids out skateboarding drainage culverts during school hours all the time.
One factor may have to do with birth rates and construction. I grew up in a neighborhood that was all built up within the span of a few years, and populated by young families, in the early 60s. There were kids all over the place. Anybody who wanted to play would just go out and holler, and they'd have a few other kids almost instantly.
Where my wife and I raised our kids, there was one neighbor with kids, and that's it.
Also, kids are more occupied now. "Back in my day" elementary school kids didn't have homework, and it was pretty minimal even through high school. My kids had homework starting in first grade. Naturally you want it to get done early while the kids are still awake, but this cuts into the prime hours for play. We should simply have revolted against it. But that's hindsight.
I had lots of homework 80s-90s. But still managed to get outside, play, do stupid stuff. My house had all the kids playing video games and when we got tired of that we went to play sports.
I physically cringed reading it. The intention is great but if I was his kid those cards would be staying in my backpack. Making a kid stand out like that is risky as fuck for social standing.
But this is likely the worst forum in the world to talk about typical social skills.
it's the only way it works. It took me MONTHS to get a hold of the number of my son's best friend's parents so that now we can organize maybe an afternoon of play every 4-5 weeks.
Really? While I don’t do it, the alternative is having a kid come home with a scrawled phone number that may or may not be right along with a vague recollection of the name of the parent I am supposed to be calling. Things are a little less akward in our life but it may be because we are closer to what OP describes as grandparents I suppose.
I get the idea, but I would suggest the reaction to an attempt at lubricating social interaction as “cringe” is part of the issue OP is describing.
It would be one thing if it worked. The OP admits that their kids don't initiate socializing but also claims they aren't poorly socialized. Blaming every parent but themselves when their parenting resulted in kids that don't seem to try hard enough.
I would do this. Of course I’d have cards made up that say “Hoopy Frood who really knows where his towel is” as a screen for parents with similar sense of humor.
> We live in the suburbs, so it's not a car creep problem - at least, no more than it was 60+ years ago when the numbers were better.
Kids were not driven to playdates 60+ years ago. They would play with other kids living nearby. Parents would not organize their playdates either.
> When I ask the parents who stay, they tell me a vague mix of weekend junior sports leagues, visiting relatives, and just being really tired after working all week. They're lame excuses: spending time with kids constantly is _also_ really tiring.
I do not seen how these are "lame excuses". Seems like valid things that lower your availability and also valid reasons to want to you remaining time for own rest.
> Often I take them to the main playground, and it's virtually empty. I can't believe I'm the only one in the community who's unhappy enough about this to try and change it.
60+ years ago, 6 years old kids would go to main playground on their own. Partly it is that kids are much less independent these days ... and partly it is that their own rooms are much more fun. So, kids want to stay at home because it is good enough and parents do not want to sit bored on playground.
Parents just want to watch their Internet content and it's easier to just stick their kids in front of a video game or computer vs having an event that requires parenting.
At least when parents are addicted to alcohol they can still be social and function as parents. Not so with Instagram/tiktok.
Oh that rings true and it's so depressive. But I think it has more to do with this notion that everything you do socially is awkward in some degree and could be seeing as bad or hurtful, smartphones didn't help us there with the chance of becoming the next national meme just a tiktok away.
Also social interactions nowadays have become so "one of a kind" and disconnected from a general contract that sometimes it's hard to not feel overwhelmed, I remember being 10 years old and just knocking on the door of my neighbourhood friends to check on them and kind of invite me in, depending on the time I would stay and grab dinner there and only come back home when it was getting too dark. Now as a parent I feel this serendipity is almost gone, you have to officially arrange play dates on parent groups, pick kids up, ask parents what kind of food should I offer, is it ok if I let them play videogames, is it ok to offer sugary drinks, list goes on and on.
In that world consuming media is much easier, but I wouldn't say that's because it is addictive on itself, I think there's a big portion of people that just got tired of trying to navigate how to interact with others. My impression is that the proportion between lurkers to posters increased with time on different platforms including in real life.
I wonder how much of this comes down to wage stagnation and the need for not only both parents to work, but to work more hours and sometimes multiple jobs, just to keep from drowning. Especially when childcare is so expensive, it's a situation that can compound and spiral.
Parties and kids aren't mutually exclusive. In fact some of my best memories growing up were from the times my parents took me to some house party where all the parents were talking and drinking and having their own adult fun, while us kids were running wild over the property and neighborhood until real late. Adults are excited, kids are excited, it just works, see you next weekend.
Why do the kids need play dates? When I was a 7, you’d just talk to the kids down the street. I knew several kids within a few blocks of where I lived.
It seemed like a really far distance that I went to see people but now I realize I never went more than a quarter mile from home to see someone. There were just a lot of families in my area that had kids.
Of course, that’s not true in a lot of the areas I’m in now. My friends experience the same where it’s hard to meet people who have kids of similar age. There might be 50 homes and only 1-2 will have kids near the same age. Many won’t have any kids at all.
Thinking back on it, it was surprising how many kids there were near me near my age growing up compared to now.
There is a coordinated action problem here, I think. (I have three young kids).
When I was a kid, I could be relatively sure that if I went outside on a random day, there would be other kids playing outside. So, all the kids went outside most days to play.
I _could_ send my kid out to play and there _are_ other kids in the neighborhood, but almost all of them are inside playing video games. At best there might be some kids going on a walk with their parents.
If my oldest kid wants to interact with with his friends, his best bet is to get on fortnite, which he does most days _and he doesn't even like fortnite_.
Another aspect of the coordination problem is that when I was a kid all the other children in the neighborhood rode the bus home together, and many of us got home before our parents were back from work, so playing together until dinner time was the natural thing to do.
These days, the school day is longer and more parents drive their kids to and from school, so extra effort is required for kids to get back together.
Kids used to just go outside, find one another, and play. I see that you are attempting to solve the problem with organizing playdates. However, I think that playdates and structured EVERYTHING for kids is a contributing factor to how we got here.
I think at some point, we need to acknowledge media sensationalism (traditional and social media varieties) have not only poisoned politics and bolstered conspiracy theory popularity, but have vastly overstated the dangers of every day life, making childhood and parenting much worse than a generation or two ago.
When I was a kid, we would always hatch a plan on what to do with the rest of the day while we were still at school. As soon as the bell rang, we hurried home to catch something to eat and then it was off to the woods to build that fortress or whatever.
If there was no school, we'd call the house phones of our friends until we had a plan cooked up. And every day without fail we didn't want to go home. So much stuff to do!
Now, watching the kids my friends have - they won't even leave the house if their parents didn't plan a playdate and brought them there. Something is completely off.
I see this SO MUCH, I wonder if you're also in California. I find this state particularly difficult to have a social life in. Everyone is "friendly" but nobody wants to be your friend, always chasing something else and never making time (exceptions apply). It's been exhausting to live here and I can't wait to go back to Europe where social life was not nearly as difficult.
People are friendly everywhere, but they mostly already have a full friend group and so are not looking to add more. Thus breaking in as a new comer is hard. However there are always people who need new friends it is just hard to find them.
A lot of Millennial parents are -- paranoid. We have had neighbors exclaim that they don't want their children saying hi to us or they'll learn to talk to "strangers". Or a neighbor whose little boy played with my daughters for months, but when they moved the mother scowlingly rejected the idea of playdates because part of her goal in getting a bigger house was -- to put it in my words -- insulating him from other children. These tend to be the same parents who micromanage their children in other ways, like very limited diets and excessive summertime clothing, so, again, it seems like some form of paranoia.
> My spouse and I find that we are overwhelmingly the ones calling to organize playdates rather than vice versa.
Why do you think this is? Because it's very true for me too -- not only play dates but also just regular socializing, like hangouts, game nights, happy hours and bar dates, cookouts, holiday, parties, etc. I feel like I'm always the first one to text or call somebody. It makes me question what other people are doing.
That’s interesting to hear, because I feel like all of my friends who have kids have a very conscientious approach towards socializing their kids, setting up play dates, (plus finding other parents they get along with to make new friends with!)
I really wonder what the less involved, less intentional approach would be - hope your kid figures it all out for themselves?
During COVID, every kid in the neighborhood was at my house. School was short maybe 1-3 hours then it was play time. I didn’t know all those kids lived in my neighborhood! Kids had no issue coming over.
I don’t know what the reason is for this phenomenon
Some good answers but also American parents are stretched thin but also perhaps want to be a larger part of their kids lives?
During the week I get maybe 10-30 minutes of quality time with them outside of the routine of weekly life. Maybe?
So if I want to do something with my children and have a relationship with them, the weekends are all I have.
Aaaand of course,quality of life in America is generally in decline and parents usually have no support structure (family etc) so no one has interest in the extra work of doing playdates.
It is kind of paradoxical because kids would like the opposite honestly. I love my parents, they are great people, but knowing myself as a kid if I was asked if I wanted to spend saturday with my friends or with my parents, I'd pick my friends every single time no hesitation. You don't laugh like you do with your friends with anyone else. You don't get into shenanigans. You don't have to worry about "behavior" or anything like that. No matter how nice and open your parents are, friends are truly liberating.
Why so little time? A large part of the daily routine is things they should be doing with you as quality time. You shouldn't be cooking, eating, and dishes alone - that is a couple hours right there per day.
Same, it’s really disappointing how few parents have reached out to play compared to how often I am trying to find one of my kids’ friends who is around to play.
Why are you doing this? Your kids should be able to find their own playmates. If you live on a farm I can see that kids can't get to anyone else's place without your help. The neighbor girl comes over to our house often to play with my daughter often. My son is annoyed that there are so few boys his age in walking distance (but we keep telling him to go visit the ones we know are in the neighborhood). We are lucky that neighbor girl is really outgoing as otherwise my daughter would sit at home complaining there is nobody to play with just like my son does...
There’s no way to say this without coming across as extremely rude, but…
> I give my kids business cards with my phone number to pass out to their friends to give to their parents
If this isn’t the only thing you/your kids do that’s well outside typical social norms, that’s probably the reason nobody else is inviting them. This is almost on the level of parents accompanying their adult kids to job interviews and then wondering why their kid didn’t get an offer.
You might want to pause and think about why policing another person’s behavior like this is so fervently important to you. Most of the parents I’ve met wouldn’t push something like this on their kids but would rather treat it like a collaboration. Kids even at age 5 are capable of explaining that they don’t want to do something and nothing in the parent implied use of fiat. We all need to assume more good faith on the part of parents and of our neighbors if we want to have a social fabric and reasonable discussions.
I've been throwing moderately large parties the past 2 years (12-40 people) and the lack of partying is definitely noticeable. Most people don't reciprocate, making it disheartening to keep doing it. I wanted to build friendships out of it, and hopefully get invited to more parties myself, but so far it hasn't happened. It's a decent amount of set up (cleaning, buying food, coordinating), and a lot of clean up after too. The ROI isn't where I want it.
I kind of wonder if people have just forgot what to do after the party is over. I had hoped it would be "that was so fun, we should host one", but instead it just kinda fades away in their minds.
To each their own.. but I think throwing a party to make friends is a totally reasonable plan and expectation. And if it isn't working out, then the ROI isn't there.
I go to "couples game nights" with my wife and her friends even though I don't really like them. But I like having friends in the neighborhood. So it's worth it to me when one of her friends husbands (who is now my friend) shows me the deck they've been building in their backyard all because I went to a somewhat painful game night.
I think you have it nearly completely backwards. Society would be far better off if more people were willing to do the "un-fun" things (like planning and hosting a party) in order to socialize. GP should be applauded.
Very few people want to host/organize other people.
The end goal of throwing parties shouldn’t be friendship or getting invited to other people parties, it’s building a large loose network of people you’re acquaintances/shallow friends with and becoming a super connector.
If you ONLY want to make friends or get invited to parties I think focusing on finding specific people and spending time with them 1:1 is a much better way to do that.
Many commenters focusing on the ROI part of your comment but I totally agree with your premise based on my own experience as a young person.
How I would word it is younger people are generally less inclined to invest in (real/in-person?) social interaction. I suspect some bar for motivation or entertainment has changed so people don't socialise the same. Probably intertwined with rise in mental health issues too. Be less interested in socialising and it's no surprise the result is less socialising, in one form or another.
In my experience yeah people don't often reach out or reciprocate effectively when it comes to socialising. Or they stick to a very small group.
> I wanted to build friendships out of it, and hopefully get invited to more parties myself, but so far it hasn't happened.
From this and other comments, it seems you think you didn't make friends, because you're not invited to other parties. There seems a leap here.
If the others are holding big parties and not inviting you - sure.
If they just don't throw parties, then they likely are still your friends :-)
But as another commenter said: Going to parties is not necessarily the best way to make friends. Whenever I go to a big party, the host is way too busy to spend a meaningful amount of time with me. Of course he's not going to become my friend that way! Going to big parties is for guests to make friends with other guests - not with the host.
I have some good friends who throw only big parties - I've stopped going to them. What's the point if I can't interact with them?
That's about the right size for a potluck. Set a rough guide for the main and have people post what they're bringing. If they're good friends they'll put their dishes in the washer/sink and some will help clean before they leave. If they aren't good guests (bring something + fun + clean up) they don't get invited back. Have it once a month on the same day. Plan to rotate it and talk about it at the party.
Of course people have all sorts of different ideas of what a party should be, what to bring, and what to do while you're there, but doing it all yourself is really hard. If you're getting it catered with cleaning staff, it's very different than having mostly the same close friends, month after month year after year.
If you happen to live in San Diego, I'll happily invite you to my parties! They generally involve board games, making a fire, having dinner, watching a movie, or going to the beach. Alcohol optional. Not super wild, but always a good time for me :)
Also if you just want to make your own parties easier to host, you can ask the guest list if anyone will volunteer to help with specific tasks or supplies.
My grandma was the head of the local Air Force wives' club. Their house was always stocked like a full bar and at least several people stopped by for a visit just about every day. They knew at least 10 of their neighbors well, and some former neighbors too.
Find me community like this anywhere in America these days. Immigrant communities perhaps? Most Americans these days won't interact with their neighbors unless it's to complain or they want something transactionally.
>Find me community like this anywhere in America these days.
The only reason I have become a staple member of my little dead-end, working-class street is because I don't email/text, and last summer I spent outdoors building a tinyhome (that all the passersby watched/asked about).
"How do I get ahold of you?" they used to ask... "Simple," I'd say, "just knock on my door between noon through sunset" [my calling hours, to use the historic term, posted by my doorbell]. Haven't even used my phone but a handful of times this 2025 — turned off entirely since early May — & my social life is what I want it to be, I am not alone any more than I wish to be.
I moved here two years ago, and already know everybody on my street (24 dwellings, total); it's primarily rentals, so when there is a new U-Haul I make sure to bring over a beer/conversation (typically a week after moving in — so they can settle/adjust/remember).
Before living in this working-class neighborhood, I lived in the nicer parts of towns... and honestly, these working-class people are nicer and more giving/understanding/decent than anywhere else I've ever lived (e.g. Westlake Hills [near Austin]; West End [Nashville]; Barton Hills [ATX]; Lookout Mountain [Tenn]).
Stop doing everything on your phone. Start being neighborly.
Example: multiple neighbors and I have jointly-purchased a nicer lawnmower, instead of each buying our own simpler pusher.
My Southern California neighborhood used to be like this. It was a diverse neighborhood of white, Filipino, Viet and Mexicans and it felt alive. Then covid hit and the demographics changed. Prices went up. Now the neighborhood is as quiet at night as where I lived in the bay area a few years ago. No open garages. No music.
People are generally unfriendly now and keep to themselves more. Sad what we've lost. We're still an immigrant community but the immigrants are from different places. I'm sure they paid too much for their houses and feel the stress. There are also some obvious cultural differences with respect to socializing and partying.
> Americans these days won't interact with their neighbors unless it's to complain or they want something transactionally.
It certainly depends. I had great neighbors when I lived on the river in a non-HOA community... many parties were had with sunset beer hangouts on the dock or beach. Military communities are also notably close-knit so what you say makes sense.
> Most Americans these days won't interact with their neighbors unless it's to complain or they want something transactionally.
My family moved into a small cul-de-sac with 5 houses total. I wanted to introduce myself, so I wrote a short letter with a little about ourselves and our contact info, and then dropped it into each neighbors mailbox. Only 1 neighbor wrote back, and 1 neighbor literally _returned the letter_ to our mailbox. So yea, that's the neighborhood I live in.
That’s it - immigrant communities are wonderful in this regard, as are communities with lots of old people (maybe because they’re from a different time, maybe because they’re lonely, who knows).
Yea, our community definitely skews "over 50" and it's a lively, social place. We have an informal rule: If your garage door is fully open, then it's an invitation for anyone to stop by to socialize or chit chat while they're out on their walk or whatever. I know there are people who live in the neighborhood who are under 40, but you almost never see them, even outside of traditional working hours!
I guess we're missing the local social super-connectors that were more numerous 40+ years ago. Perhaps we need to be mentoring, educating, subsidizing, and encouraging people on the little skills and techniques to bring others out of their hideaways.
They definitely still exist, my sister, and both of my sister in laws are extremely social people and regularly hang out, "party", with their neighbors and other friends. I additionally have a couple of coworkers that have block parties, and just really social communities. But they are definitely the exception now, and are only really for people that are just inherently social and extroverted. The rest of us, where "partying" is a lot more of an effort, just kind of don't anymore.
I miss it a little bit, like I enjoy being social for a couple of hours two or three times a week, but not much more. But a bunch of people like me makes for a poor social situation since it is hard to get everyone's social levels aligned.
You got this immigrant. We have a group of a few families. Each hosts at least one large event per year on occasions like Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Years and our own festivals. Everyone and their kids, and other friends / relatives join. Three families ended up on the same street by chance. We regularly cook or get takeout and get together at short notice. Alcohol and food play a big role.
That said, being an immigrant poses other kinds of challenges. So it's not all like the 1970s in the US, or where we came from.
“
It seems that the original modern American swingers were crew-cut World War II air force pilots and their wives. Like elite warriors everywhere, these “top guns” often developed strong bonds with one another, perhaps because they suffered the highest casualty rate of any branch of the military. According to journalist Terry Gould, “key parties,” like those later dramatized in the 1997 film The Ice Storm, originated on these military bases in the 1940s, where elite pilots and their wives intermingled sexually with one another before the men flew off toward Japanese antiaircraft fire.“
Social networks have moved online and have been drowned in ads and TikTok dances. No time for in-person meetups unless you're going to that fancy instagrammable place to take pictures of yourself.
I was a teenager in high school around 2005 and living in the Midwest. There were lots of underage drinking and parties going on during that time.
That being said, most of it was "cool parents" that allowed such behavior because we didn't own anything as teens.
We would have rules like, if you're drinking there, you have to stay the night or call your parents to pick you up.
I think it was just a different time; it seemed more forgiving. Now, a cop will pull you over and give you a DUI and mess up your life for a while. But I heard stories back then ~ '70s, where cops would make sure a drunk person got home safely at night instead of throwing the book at them.
I am sure it is harder for kids today who mostly live online in their algorithmic bubbles. And harder for parents to condone such activity, because who wants to be the parent where cops come knocking on your door and charge you with supplying alcohol to minors?
Elaborating on this a bit, I think it's less that things are less forgiving, but that our risk tolerances have dramatically shrunk. Millennial parents are less risk tolerant with their kids' safety, and Gen Z / A kids and young adults are more careful about the rules.
The root cause of this risk intolerance might be dispersed, just a cumulative result of cable news scare tactics, dropping birth rates and more investment per child, but I suspect a big aspect of it is that risk taking is no longer the only way to get a dopamine hit. Prior to the modern internet, if you avoided all the normal risk-taking behaviors associated with teenagers and young adults, you'd just be bored to death. Now the reward side of the risk-reward balance is just the difference between high-quality fun from meatspace shenanigans versus lower-quality enjoyment derived from social media and online gaming.
Similar age (a bit older) but I always remember our core group of friends' parents would pass around a key-collection plate — "this is a safe environment to have a little bit of fun in" — the only time I ever remember a drunk peer driving home... he was then banned from all future private party invites. Sadly/predictably, he would later perish in a DUI, early 20s...
Damn, I miss the late 90s/aughts. Damn, I'm old (and fat, too; I "made it", somehow!)
Purely anecdotal, but I was recently reflecting at the current trend of people posting really extensive morning routines. Waking up, meditation, yoga, gym, shower, eating breakfast, meal-prepping,....having a whole day before your day starts. While they should impress you with their healthiness and discipline, I just thought how utterly lonely and sterile most of them look like. And you're completely done after work if this is your morning, you can just go to bed and repeat the same the next day. I found it quite sad, actually.
It's an observation that precedes likes and modern influencers, as Baudrillard noticed in his 1989 book America:
"The skateboarder with his Walkman, the intellectual working on his wordprocessor, the Bronx breakdancer whirling frantically in the Roxy, the jogger and the body-builder: everywhere, whether in regard to the body or the mental faculties, you find the same blank solitude, the same narcissistic refraction. This omnipresent cult of the body is extraordinary. [...] This ‘into’ is the key to everything. The point is not to be nor even to have a body, but to be into your own body. Into your sexuality, into your own desire. Into your own functions, as if they were energy differentials or video screens. The hedonism of the ‘into’ [...]"
The replacement of a genuine social life with a kind of machine like, solitary optimization, the point of American Psycho basically, is very much real, common among ordinary people. This is every "second brain" note taking fanatic who never actually does anything but collect notes.
"What people are contemplating on their word-processor screens is the operation of their own brains. It is not entrails that we try to interpret these days, nor even hearts or facial expressions; it is, quite simply, the brain. We want to expose to view its billions of connections and watch itoperating like a video-game. All this cerebral, electronic snobbery is hugely affected - far from being the sign of a superior knowledge of humanity, it is merely the mark of a simplified theory, since the human being is here reduced to the terminal excrescence of his or her spinal chord."
Yeah I know 0 people like this. And I'd believe it if 1-2 people are actually like that without me knowing, cause they need to manage ADHD or something, but not a large number.
No, it's real. I have AuDHD and very strictly defined routines are how I manage to function day-to-day. It's not a productivity hack or how I'll be a billionaire in 5 years though, like scrollheads often promote. It's just how my brain works. A small fraction of those influencers might also be neurodivergent and sincerely posting what works for them.
Well, the loneliness coming through on those posts might just be from the fact that the people that are posting on social media like that are, in fact, lonely and looking for connection. I have a pretty extensive morning routine of practicing music, sitting for meditation/pranayama, food, shower all before work, and then Muay Thai or yoga or strength training in the evening. I just don't post it on social media because I don't have social media. I still go out to see music/art and friends etc, but I also live in NYC where it's easy to do that.
I mean everything you listed there could be done within 2 hours if you do it all at home. Not sure what the big deal is, you wake up at 7 and you’re ready for the day by 9.
But oh yea maybe laying in bed for an hour doom scrolling on your phone before you finally get up is a more efficient use of time.
The article mentions alcohol consumption by kids, but I think it doesn't emphasize enough the effect of efforts like Mothers Against Drunk Driving and strict DUI laws. Back in the 70s and 80s having a few drinks at a party, bar or friend's house was normal and part of the social lubrication. Even drinks during lunch was common where I worked. No more. You either need to have a designated driver, find a taxi (which doesn't exist in most rural areas), or just not drink. The first two are a pain, so people opt for the latter and that social inhibition hangs around, and folks go home early. Have to get up for work in the morning, you know.
Very few places on earth are like that. Even in Europe's dense cities there are a lot of cars, get outside of that and there is no hope of an alternative. Though Europe is somewhat likely to have a bar within walking distance of your house, but a lot of people in Europe drive to whatever bar they drink in at least sometime.
Most of the world's public transportation sees themselves as a way to get to work and so parties which happen off hours in places hard for transport to reach get bad or no service.
I feel like while there were laws against furnishing alcohol to minors and the like, I never really heard of some one's parents getting charged because some kid crashed his car after boozing it up at a party back then. Maybe I just wasn't paying attention but it seems like the enforcement of that really stepped up.
Oh, it certainly happened. Some people don't have a limit and decency isn't on their minds and when they get in trouble the law is used against them. Also bitter neighbors could call the cops on you.
One person's definition of a few is 3 over 4 hours. Another person's is 5 over 2 hours. (That's even mentioning the size of the drink. A standard can of beer or a pint? A 1 ounce shot or 1.5 ounce shot?)
Here-in lies a major problem of drunk driving. (Outside of self-responsibility.)
Readit News
https://www.reddit.com/r/GenX/comments/1lu102v/were_parties_...
The responses from the Gen Xers were a mix of bewilderment and sadness, stuff like "What do you mean parties like this, it's just a normal teenage party!? I feel so ancient and also so confused by this question." The whole comment section is worth a read, especially the disconnect between how the Gen Xers experienced adolescence and how the Gen Z poster does.
It's really sad to me how we have completely fucked a lot of youth with social media, smart phones, and over-scheduling/over-protection. I also disagree with some of the comments here that are bringing up things like "real estate, transportation, and lodging". Sure, those are issues, but you have families and kids in the suburbs today just like you had families and kids in the suburbs in the 90s, and the fact that kids today can't even recognize "basic teen parties" and question whether they are some sort of made up fantasy can't just be waved away by the fact that real estate is more expensive today.
You have to be careful with Gen Z threads like this on Reddit and Twitter. They are inherently biased toward Gen Z people who are chronically online and deep into social media.
If you spend time with kids in the real world, you learn very rapidly that most of them aren't on platforms like Reddit and Twitter. Of those who use Reddit, few of them actually post anything or even have accounts.
The subset of Gen Z who actually post on Reddit is small and a lot of them fit the description of chronically online, so it's no wonder that Reddit Gen Z people speak as if their generation is not socially engaged at all.
Overscheduling is, I think, the biggest issue. Most of the teens I worked with had something going on almost every night, to the point where rescheduling due to rain or heat was an absolute nightmare. Sports were the biggest offenders. They would often have gym/strength training in the morning and then practice in the evening, almost every evening. Keep in mind I'm mostly talking about summer, so the school year itself was worse. Those that had jobs would do them during the day.
It's completely different from when I graduated high school in '06. Very few sports took over your life in the summer. Football had practice in the mornings for part of the summer, and that's the only one I'm aware of. I don't get the emphasis on sports. I played some in school but never took them seriously and if they required that much time from me I would have been out.
The idea that the internet remains the province solely of a few loner geeks is a total fantasy. Reddit is one of the most popular websites in the world.
Also, I was a shy nerd in high school who used reddit, and I still partied. Fuck, I made my own booze to take to parties.
Meanwhile my youngest brother - who is super social - graduated high school in the last few years and reports that partying is totally dead compared to my day.
Even if we assume that "chronically online" people and reddit users are nerdier, less social in the real world, tend to be more introverted, less likely to go to parties in general, etc. we're still left with teen parties being normal for the GenX nerds and alien to the GenZ nerds.
As an old, chronically online, more introverted, nerd I can say that I absolutely attended parties in my teens and early 20s (only some of which were lan parties or BBS meetups)
Certainly true. But it's also undeniable that a huge number of them are on TikTok, Instagram and the like. I think OP's point still stands that today's youth have been affected by that.
Wouldn't Gen X responses on those threads also be inherently biased toward Gen X people who are chronically online and deep into social media?
most of the Gen Z people I know fit this description
is there really a significant Gen Z cohort that isn't "chronically online and deep into social media"?
Still one sees them even outside all glued to their screens.
It’s like people who are bewildered when newspapers say bankers got caught having a massive orgy of some 50+ attendees in a hotel in Switzerland. There is always a party, but you’re not invited. Simple as.
this detail isn’t as important to people as wondering if I’ve gone to an LA sex party and whatever preconception they have of that and now me
Just like those bankers, and this thread, there is always a party
My anecdotal experience with two children who are young adults is that there are still house-parties (nearly) every weekend at high-school, but that there's a lot less drinking, and they're a lot more open and mature (i'm not sure i would have enjoyed being a trans kid in a 90s high school)
If you look at some of the poster's comments there, he laments that even when he does go to house parties, everyone is just sitting around on their phone. I have certainly seen that.
> they're a lot more open and mature
Maybe in some ways but hopelessly regressed in others. For example, Scott Galloway talks about how 50% of men aged 18-24 have never asked someone out in person: https://youtube.com/shorts/5sq4P5RCIrg?si=iMVDyAU4eyzgMN2j
I think that's one minor example of the monumental shift that has happened among young people.
If you wonder why children no longer grow up with a different outlook to life, then that’s probably it.
I honestly believe social media, smart phones, and over-scheduling/over-protection does a lot less damage to the current generation than partying did to my generation. I can recommend the 1995 Larry Clark movie "kids" for a more balanced view how parties often looked like and which negative side effects they could have. Real life was not like in "American Pie" at all and that is where I guess Gen Z is getting their impression from.
Zuck, is that you? :)
> movie "kids" for a more balanced view how parties often looked like
Teens (and pre-teens) having sex, doing hard drugs and drinking liquor is completely unlike "how parties often looked like" for anyone I know but YMMV.
Deleted Comment
Here is Scott Galloway talking about the significance of asking someone out in-person vs. online dating, https://youtube.com/shorts/5sq4P5RCIrg
Well, it's a normal teenage party /in the US/.
I think in Europe, partying always looked a lot different (also different from country to country, here). I also mostly was bewildered by parties in teen movies from the early 00s.
I remember being unable to comprehend how in media, people could just go somewhere without issues to met with people or even go for a walk. I knew that was a thing, but I could not imagine what it's actually like and if it's real.
This completely changed after iPhones and Facebook became popular enough. It ruined even the regular socializing. Even the few boy bullies started doing this lame-ass cyberbullying instead. Sometimes I wondered where the cool kids were on weekdays, then I checked my Minecraft server logs.
At my high school we had several girls get pregnant. I remember a kid getting a DUI and he made a necklace out of the tube used to blow in the breathalyzer and wore it with pride. In my first class of the day the kid who sat next to me had a flask he’d be drinking from at 8am.
A couple years after I graduated news broke that the track coach was basically throwing Diddy parties (we’ll leave it at that to avoid getting graphic). He, and several others, ended up in prison.
This was all in a sleepy little Midwest town that many would describe as charming and quaint.
Though Minecraft didn’t exist until I was already in the workforce. Facebook came out when I was in college. Facebook seemed to be a thing with certain groups (sorority girls seems to have a lot of competitions to get the most friends), but no one in my group of friends in college talked about it at all. I don’t think any of them even had accounts until later. Web 1.0 didn’t really change society, but Web 2.0 shifted it massively, especially once Web 2.0 made its way into people’s pockets.
I worked at the computer help desk at my university. We would get calls from high school seniors, who got accepted, trying to get their student email address early. They wanted to sign up for Facebook. I always found these calls strange, and the sorority girls too. People were either really into it, like an addict, or they were completely indifferent; I saw very little in between in those first years. Facebook probably blew up way more with the mainstream once they dropped the edu requirement. After that, there was a lot of social pressure to join.
Social media has always felt like a proxy for actual social interaction. It scratches just enough of that itch to make people think they are connected to others, without providing any actual connection, as the whole experience is largely passive.
And with Snapchat they know where everyone is. It's typical on a Friday school night they are scanning their map to see, "this group is at the mall. this group is at the football. this group went to her house." And then pick where to go.
Honestly, the current method of social gathering seems so much better than what I did in the 80s.
Here we have "streets" and , occasionally, "public parks".
Forget the "bonfires" option.
My kids don't know anyone or anything like that. It's so strange. They still have sleep overs where they play video games and use their phones. That's fine in a way. At their age I was in the woods getting drunk and starting bonfires. It was fun as hell, but maybe something closer to the middle would be ideal.
Mostly because I never really understood the fun part.
It's also fascinating how every generation in recorded history has similar claims about the next, yet somehow mankind has improved quality of life for so many.
Simply google (without quotes) "list of ancients bemoaning youth" and read millennia of similar claims, some of which could be used today and sound new.
I think it would be hard to argue that Gen Z has a higher quality of life than Gen X
For example, just look at one metric: weight. Kids these days (and, obviously, adults as well) are overweight and obese in numbers that are off the charts (off the charts because you barely had any obese kids in decades past). They used to always call it "adult-onset diabetes", which now they prefer to call it Type 2 diabetes because you see so many kids getting it, which is tragic IMO. To be clear, I'm not solely blaming the childhood obesity epidemic on smartphones or social media - I'm just using it as an example of something that has changed for kids that we should be worried about, not just hand wave away as "Meh, adults have always bemoaned youth."
Rates of teenage depression, loneliness and anxiety have skyrocketed in the pass 15 years, and when you dig into the data it doesn't look like just a rate of diagnosis issue.
Teenagers themselves (as a group) are telling us they are significantly more unhappy than teenagers in years past. We should listen to them.
While I agree there is a technology-driven loneliness epidemic, what is so sacred about those "basic teen parties"?
People from any time before the 70s wouldn't recognize them either. Also, they were fictional caricatures written for movies, not real life, where teen parties were considerably less interesting.
But we did party way more than kids today.
a) fun
b) how you learn
We? We, kemosabe?
I did not completely fuck up a lot of youth.
Don't include me in this.
I partied for 4 years of college which is something like 30 years in sober adult terms. Our ragers were reminiscent of Animal House and Revenge of the Nerds, all of those old party movies that didn't age well. Scenes from Hackers, Fight Club, The Matrix, Trainspotting, Go, Swingers, Made, 200 Cigarettes, SLC Punk, Dazed and Confused, PCU, even Undergrads (a cartoon) were so spot-on for campus life, living for the weekend. Can't Hardly Wait, American Pie, Varsity Blues, Waiting, Superbad, etc came later, and I almost consider those watered down versions of the feral partying that happened earlier just as the internet went mainstream, but still canon.
A Friday night at my city's bar scene today looks like what our Sunday or Monday was. People half tipsy on 2 drinks, even though they're Ubering home later. The faint scent of ganja now instead of basements filled with smoke and first timers trying laughing gas. Nobody puking or disappearing around a corner to relieve themselves. No sound of bottles shattering. I feel like a curator of a museum now, a derelict from a forgotten time.
In fairness, I went to college in the midwest, where there was nothing else to do. Now the West Coast has effectively legalized drugs, awakening much of the country to the full human experience, and people have done the trips and plant medicine and maybe realize at a young age that alcohol and tobacco are rough drugs that tear you up. Which is admirable, but they also prepare you for getting torn up as an adult. To miss out on learning how to make your way home on drunk logic before you black out seems like a crucial rite of passage has been lost.
And it shows. In our country's embrace of puritanical politics like we saw in the jingoist 2000s, regentrified for the antivax era. In the worship of unspoiled beauty, idolizing of influencers, pursuit of financial security over visceral experience. In the fanboyism, bootlicking and drinking the kool-aid for every new evolutionary tech that cements the status quo instead of freeing the human spirit in a revolutionary manner. I gotta be honest, most of what's happening today is laughable to my generation. Blah I sound like a Boomer. Ok cryable then. We're in mourning. We worry about the kids today. All work and no play and all that. It's killing our souls, and theirs.
I guess my final thought after writing this is that partying is one of the most powerful reality-shifting tools in our arsenal. All of this can't be it. This can't be how America ends. You know what to do.
I've lived in Brooklyn for about 20 years now, and while the parties still happen, most of them have become corporate. There are $50 covers and $15 beers, with wristbands you have to load a credit card onto instead of $5 covers and $2 beers in an illegal warehouse (cash only). The kids also seem to be taking ketamine a lot more than anything else, so they kinda disassociate and don't really dance that much at the clubs, whereas mdma and coke were things you ran into more when I was their age and people were not shy about grabbing someone on the dancefloor and grinding on each other for the night. They are definitely more sheltered and tame than we were as a whole, which isn't necessarily a bad thing I guess.
Humans have partied for aeons. It's not just about letting off steam, it's about building social bonds, it's about traditions and rituals and marking key points in life.
This whole thread makes me rather sad, but in the same breath, makes me feel like there is real, actionable good to be done by promoting and helping run events. Not corporate pay-to-play curated experiences, which keep you on rails and only serve to condition more consumption behaviors, but relatively low cost, volunteer-run, do-it-yourself events. The latter, from my experience, have an absolutely infectious component of wanting to contribute, volunteer, create art, and drag others into the experience. But they are also a lot of work and not everyone is cut out for it.
It really has me thinking about lowering the bar to any sort of experience that gives folks a reprieve from the default world, however fleeting.
Some girl's parents would leave for the weekend, and she'd quietly invite a friend or two over.
Somehow, word would get out, and 400 people would show up, with multiple kegs, and the place would get trashed.
And someone will respond:
It's really sad to me how we fucked you guys up and you didn't even have phones...
Dead Comment
People these days don’t own real estate. Wealthy people own it all. Normal people are renting apartments or portions of homes. It’s kind of hard to throw a big party without a big home, a yard, a big kitchen, etc. Small apartments are for small get-togethers that probably don’t register as parties.
Likewise, the larger someone’s home is, the more likely it is to be location in an area with low population density and little to no public transportation. Congrats, you can throw a party, but who are you inviting? All your friends are far away. How can they get there? How long can they stay? Can you accommodate them sleeping there? You aren’t friends with your neighbors who can party easily. You are friends with people on the Internet who are strewn about the world.
And of course, if you live in a major city with lots of friends, small apartment strikes again.
This is part of the reason we have seen the rise of more public events like conventions. There’s a hotel involved. It’s a multi-day event worth traveling to. A lot of people you know will be there. It costs everyone some money, but it’s not out of the realm to go a few times a year. Best part, nobody’s home gets trashed!
This is baffling to me. Most of the parties I went to in high school, college, and my 20s were in people's tiny apartments, small rented houses, and small yards.
Maybe expectations changed? Now it seems more like people feel the need to get ready before going out, to bring something, to pre-coordinate to arrive with a group of friends, to have a lot of space, to have everything pre-cleaned and ready to be the background in photos, and maybe even to have a meat and cheese platter that gets posted to social media. It seems there's much less willingness to just go places, be cramped, and just hang out.
Anymore this feels impossible due to neighbors, landlords, and police. I have so many anecdotes... I don't think it's "getting ready" as much as it's an intolerant society of chronically entitled people. Also, it's increasingly expensive to go out + I truly believe we're experiencing the destruction of "3rd places"
My 20's had a good amount of that too... but it was increasingly at odds with real consequence and risk. I'm just safer at home with my SO, in my space. It's getting much worse for younger generations :(
Now I don't disagree with your point; I'm not 22 anymore and live in the burbs and have a less full social calendar, largely due to the logistical overhead of finding my way into the city or getting friends from the city out here. But I do want to say you can have a lot of fun with a lot of friends in a small space with the right attitude :)
The home ownership rate has been 64%, plus or minus about 1%, for the last 45 years.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RSAHORUSQ156S
https://www.nar.realtor/research-and-statistics/research-rep...
Everyone gets quick and lazy dopamine from phones. Why bother with anything else?
Think about how much time goes into phones. Who has time to plan? Who has time to coordinate?
Phones are probably why the birth rate is declining too.
You don't even need a house to party. You can use a pavilion at a park, go out in the woods like the rednecks I grew up around did, party at the trailer park. Homes are by no means a limiting factor.
It's 100% our phones.
If you look at a graph of home ownership in the US by cohort at various points in time (see, e.g., https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/08/homeownership...), while the rates are somewhat lower, between the highest point and the lowest point the difference is at worst 10 percentage points.
This sentiment strikes me a lot more as people in their 20's complaining that they're poor because they don't have the financial resources of someone in their 40's, despite having more resources than the latter did at their age.
Home prices have doubled over the past 20 years, twice the rate of income increases
This isn't just "complaining"
I doubt it’s the only cause at all, this anti-social (“Bowling Alone”) trend has been going on for generations, and probably has multiple causes. But the US housing crunch on young people is adding to it.
And this damn attitude of “the younger generations are just entitled weenies” about housing is about the most infuriating attitude in the world. My parents bought their first house on a single earners blue collar salary at the age of 27. That house, with almost no updates, now literally needs a top 1% salary and payments for 30 years to be able to afford. Don’t tell the kids to stop whining when they’re watching older generations gobble up their future in the name of preserving property values.
Short version of the history:
Starting in the late 1990s, you had a super-concentration of both good jobs and interesting culture in a short list of cities: SF Bay, New York, LA/OC, Seattle, and a few others. I remember growing up during this period and the whole cultural zeitgeist was "if you don't live in one of those cities, you can't do anything."
These cities have always had an allure, especially creative centers like LA and NYC, but what I mean is that it got much more extreme. It fits with the general cultural zeitgeist of everything centralizing and going to the extreme right side in an increasingly tight power-law distribution.
This was followed by insane real estate hyperinflation in those cities, of course, because if you try to take all the "interesting" stuff in the world's largest economy and a nation of 300+ million people and cram it into a few metros, that happens.
The rest of the country still has a lot of affordable real estate, less so than it used to -- RE has appreciated everywhere and not just in the US -- but it's far less insane than the top-tier cities.
I post this every chance I get:
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...
I would hope so, otherwise that would mean the country/locale is so bad that older households are packing their bags and fleeing.
So the most desirable properties, such as large SFHs, townhouses, penthouses, etc… within a short driving distance of an attractive city will likely be owned by the latter, by definition.
Other places had taxis (that you couldn't order ahead of time to get to work on time) and some had none until they uber/lyft. (Don't know the current situation).
I'm going to guess the other thing Berlin has is safe areas to walk. I can go to a party and walk home, safely on walking paths complete with shortcuts, without even being harassed by the police and risk getting arrested and in jail for the night (for public intoxication). None of these were luxuries I had in the states.
And I'll say that yes, I've been in some small apartments - but only some folks with small apartments can host. You probably have no clue how many would host if they only had enough space, but a small apartment with 2 adults that have hobbies limits things.
People travel there literally to party.
About 2/3 of households in the US own the home they live in. Renting is the minority, not the majority.
There are shifting trends in generational home ownership rates, but these are still just initial trends we're seeing. If you look at the data [0] owner occupied has gone down from the 2000s housing bubble, but in the grand scheme of things is not even particularly low.
People also have this mistaken belief that investors like Black Rock are buying up huge swaths of property, when in reality most "investment" properties are bought by families and individuals, consider anyone who know who owns an AirBNB rental or other rental property, they would be considered "investors".
Most Americans still live in a house, and own that house (or at least, some member of their household owns it).
0. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
Also, it varies quite a lot by state. Over 3/4 of adults own their own home in West Virginia, but in New York it's a bit over 1/2.
Owning a home in an HOA area can drastically cut down on what kinds of parties you can host.
How many of that 2/3 is households that have owned the home for 20+ years—ie, since before the subprime crash?
How many of that 2/3 is households of people 65+? And how many is people under 30? Partying is still largely a young people's game, and even if your "household" owns the home you live in, if that's your parents or grandparents, you're much less likely to be hosting parties there.
In fact I just checked and the ratio of avg salary to real estate prices is about the same as in New York.
I don't think the real estate situation helps but I think there's a deeper social problem driving both of those effects.
My theory is that people have fewer parties because people have gotten flakier about attending larger social events. It is much easier to cancel plans at the last minute with a text or a social media DM, and people always seem to want to keep their options open. We've moved to getting together only with one other couple/family at a time b/c any time we try to have larger group events half of the invite list will cancel the day of.
This complaint - we don’t have nice houses so we can’t party - is unintentionally emblematic of the root issue in misaligned expectations and excuses for realigned priorities. Nobody Inknew when young had houses either.
Look, it’s not obviously bad to me that young people party less. Blame gaming, blame some resurgent conservative cultural values, blame the internet or even laziness. Maybe the youth today just have better things to do, and that okay. Binge drinking, drugs, and stupid decisions aren’t necessary good investments in time, and many, many, friends from back in the day didn’t survive it. Like less kids smoking cigarettes, maybe this is a good thing (for them and all of us).
But it’s ridiculous to try and turn this behavioral trend into some manifesto on housing inequality. Give me a break.
This is only true in some HCOL places ands big cities. Plenty of people own homes.
The article says a similar decline is seen among the wealthy.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RSAHORUSQ156S
Add in the odd issue of younger people not getting their drivers licenses or owning/having access to a car.
It could be anecdotal but I've seen this in a number of locales across the country. Curious if there's hard numbers on it.
Most homes in the US are mortgaged. More likely the banks, which ultimately means the depositors, who are just as likely to be everyday average people (the wealthy normally keep their wealth in things like businesses), own most of it.
Sorry but can't agree, as do most folks here backing up with some hard data. That 'glass is half-empty' approach to daily life ain't healthy long term, ever thought about that?
My own personal theory? Music sucks now, ha ha.
The median new home size skyrocketed in the '80s.[1]
Many of the post-war suburbs were planned communities built with schools, churches, grocery stores, and other necessities within walking distance.[2] Compare that to developments today (and since the '90s), that are all housing, lack sidewalks, and require a car to get to necessities.
Serendipity doesn't happen when everyone's in cars. You don't pull over to invite an acquaintance over for a beer or offer to watch their kids.
1: https://www.bankrate.com/real-estate/average-home-size/#smal...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levitt_%26_Sons#Construction_o...
I almost never meet people who like the same bands as I do. I can listen to new music that I love at home. If I go to a bar or a party I'm going to mostly hear music I don't like, and if I do like it, I could have already heard it at home.
Maybe that is part of it
I never was much of a partier as a teen but I've been to a few, and they were all in flats ranging from much smaller than an American house to literally one room sometimes with 15 people in it. Had no problem falling asleep drunk on somebody's kitchen floor or on a couch in a room with a bunch of other people.
Even in the US a dorm room (a tiny, rented place) is a stereotyped party location.
Oh and ofc numbers are wrong. The houses in the US are bigger than ever and homeownership rate is smth like 60%.
Note the age-group with the biggest drop is 15-24, its not like the average 18 year old owned their own home circa 1995.
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good riddance btw. but we need to adjust because partying is nice. we are still working ad if we have a free employee taking care of half our lives.
welp, it's always a class issue.
My spouse and I find that we are overwhelmingly the ones calling to organize playdates rather than vice versa. I'd like to think it's not that my kids are poorly socialized or misbehave - they've always received glowing reports at school. I give my kids business cards with my phone number to pass out to their friends to give to their parents, and there is also a class list where our phone numbers are listed (and where we find these other parents' contact info).
Something happened with the culture of getting kids to play with each other outside of school hours, and I don't know what it was. COVID lockdowns definitely delayed it from starting for our kids, but I know these parents are mostly in my generation, and we certainly played more together.
We live in the suburbs, so it's not a car creep problem - at least, no more than it was 60+ years ago when the numbers were better. When I ask the parents who stay, they tell me a vague mix of weekend junior sports leagues, visiting relatives, and just being really tired after working all week. They're lame excuses: spending time with kids constantly is _also_ really tiring.
Kids having regular playdates would encourage more familiarity among the families and trust in letting kids play unsupervised with each other. Often I take them to the main playground, and it's virtually empty. I can't believe I'm the only one in the community who's unhappy enough about this to try and change it.
Some of my kid's friends are raised by their parents, and others are (apparently) raised primarily by grandparents.
When my kid wants to get together with friends whose (50-60 year old) grandparents bring them by, the grandparents come up to the door, socialize for a bit while the kid runs inside, and then we talk about when the playtime will be over and they can come over to pick the kid up. If it's an event where we both bring the kids, I find it easy to shoot the breeze with the grandparents, have small talk about how the week went, and so on.
When the parents are, say, 25-35 year old range, it's a totally different vibe. They'll drive up, let the kid out of the car, and then race away without even getting out of their car. When playtime is at a local park or something, they sometimes hang around, but they go off into a corner, engrossed on their phone, totally ignoring the other parents (who, depending on their own ages are either chit chatting or locked into their Instagram).
I remember when I was a kid in the 80s, and not only would we love to get together at someone's house, but the parents would also be happy to get together for a little socialization, maybe throw some steaks on the grill, put on some Sportsball, or whatever. This practice seems to be dead now that I'm a parent!
We bought into a nice suburban community. Good schools, low crime, the dream.
No one knows any neighbors. Kids rarely play with one another intra-neighborhood despite a very healthy blend of age ranges. In fact, I’ve loosely associate with exactly one neighbor in the three years. We went out of our way to try and meet neighbors our first month. Most treated us as if we head too many heads on our shoulders.
Despite a heavy presence of children, no one here celebrate Halloween despite it being a beloved night growing up around here. Our first year we invested heavily in decorations and spent hundreds on the King size candy bars.
Society feels… dead compared to me as an early 90s child.
My daughter is still a baby, and I don't want her to become a shut-in because of my antisocial tendencies. So yeah, I will take her to the public playground, get her into the local sport activities, this sort of thing. But I would likely be the parent in the playground just sitting by himself while the daughter plays, maybe reading a book (I also hate social media in general, so no doomscrolling for me).
It's a difficult balance.
the behavior you described of the 25-35 year range is appalling. and those aren’t my kids so that’s saying something.
Call it what it is, antisocial. Baffling to me…why are people so weird?
We decided to break from the trend and return our kids to more of a free-range kid paradigm, risking the disruption to our working schedules, this year. It sounds good in theory, but you are left with the realities of every other child friend being wrapped in camp schedules, as well. It took a lot of proactive discussions with other parents to convince them to keep their kids at home and accessible. But you're still left with the dual income problem, so you find yourself hiring a sitter to oversee and shuttle.
The result is an improvement over the 100% booked compartmentalized camp situation, but without the same level of independence that I experienced and have come to credit with really advancing my own personal development as a child.
However, it does show that the majority of families were already dual-income by the 80's. The trend away from supporting a family on a single income started much earlier than that.
Anecdotally, all my friends in the 80's and 90's had both parents working, and we still got together to play all the time, either in the neighborhood for nearby friends, or dropped off for further ones.
[1]Table 2 in https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/famee.pdf
[2]https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2014/ted_20140602.htm
When was a kid, you were done with your car seat by elementary school so one parent could offer to carpool a minivan full of kids to/from an event.
But now that some kids need their car seat into middle school carpools are gone and every kid needs their parent to pick them up. It requires way more planning and parental involvement
Parties typically have some sort of rules-based activity, be it beer pong or board games. Playdates themselves are perhaps the first manifestation of such phenomenon.
A major issue is the death of independent child play. In a lot of places if a kid — and we are talking up to early teens — is unsupervised police will be called. It’s entirely the result of daytime TV and true crime making people think there are pedophile nuts hiding in every bush when in reality abductions by strangers are incredibly rare. If a kid is abused or worse it’s almost always someone they know.
One of the things I love about where we live is that kids do still play outside. It’s a safe Midwestern suburb. We moved from SoCal and there you would definitely have some busybody call the cops. Of course it was perhaps more dangerous — not because of crime but cars. All the suburban streets have like 60mph speed limits in SoCal.
Where my wife and I raised our kids, there was one neighbor with kids, and that's it.
Also, kids are more occupied now. "Back in my day" elementary school kids didn't have homework, and it was pretty minimal even through high school. My kids had homework starting in first grade. Naturally you want it to get done early while the kids are still awake, but this cuts into the prime hours for play. We should simply have revolted against it. But that's hindsight.
Yeah if i was a kid i'd be mortified at having to do this.
But this is likely the worst forum in the world to talk about typical social skills.
We don't have a landline, and there's no way in hell they're getting their own phones at that age.
I get the idea, but I would suggest the reaction to an attempt at lubricating social interaction as “cringe” is part of the issue OP is describing.
That's not really the case with elementary school age kids.
Kids were not driven to playdates 60+ years ago. They would play with other kids living nearby. Parents would not organize their playdates either.
> When I ask the parents who stay, they tell me a vague mix of weekend junior sports leagues, visiting relatives, and just being really tired after working all week. They're lame excuses: spending time with kids constantly is _also_ really tiring.
I do not seen how these are "lame excuses". Seems like valid things that lower your availability and also valid reasons to want to you remaining time for own rest.
> Often I take them to the main playground, and it's virtually empty. I can't believe I'm the only one in the community who's unhappy enough about this to try and change it.
60+ years ago, 6 years old kids would go to main playground on their own. Partly it is that kids are much less independent these days ... and partly it is that their own rooms are much more fun. So, kids want to stay at home because it is good enough and parents do not want to sit bored on playground.
At least when parents are addicted to alcohol they can still be social and function as parents. Not so with Instagram/tiktok.
Also social interactions nowadays have become so "one of a kind" and disconnected from a general contract that sometimes it's hard to not feel overwhelmed, I remember being 10 years old and just knocking on the door of my neighbourhood friends to check on them and kind of invite me in, depending on the time I would stay and grab dinner there and only come back home when it was getting too dark. Now as a parent I feel this serendipity is almost gone, you have to officially arrange play dates on parent groups, pick kids up, ask parents what kind of food should I offer, is it ok if I let them play videogames, is it ok to offer sugary drinks, list goes on and on.
In that world consuming media is much easier, but I wouldn't say that's because it is addictive on itself, I think there's a big portion of people that just got tired of trying to navigate how to interact with others. My impression is that the proportion between lurkers to posters increased with time on different platforms including in real life.
It seemed like a really far distance that I went to see people but now I realize I never went more than a quarter mile from home to see someone. There were just a lot of families in my area that had kids.
Of course, that’s not true in a lot of the areas I’m in now. My friends experience the same where it’s hard to meet people who have kids of similar age. There might be 50 homes and only 1-2 will have kids near the same age. Many won’t have any kids at all.
Thinking back on it, it was surprising how many kids there were near me near my age growing up compared to now.
When I was a kid, I could be relatively sure that if I went outside on a random day, there would be other kids playing outside. So, all the kids went outside most days to play.
I _could_ send my kid out to play and there _are_ other kids in the neighborhood, but almost all of them are inside playing video games. At best there might be some kids going on a walk with their parents.
If my oldest kid wants to interact with with his friends, his best bet is to get on fortnite, which he does most days _and he doesn't even like fortnite_.
These days, the school day is longer and more parents drive their kids to and from school, so extra effort is required for kids to get back together.
I think at some point, we need to acknowledge media sensationalism (traditional and social media varieties) have not only poisoned politics and bolstered conspiracy theory popularity, but have vastly overstated the dangers of every day life, making childhood and parenting much worse than a generation or two ago.
Now, watching the kids my friends have - they won't even leave the house if their parents didn't plan a playdate and brought them there. Something is completely off.
Why do you think this is? Because it's very true for me too -- not only play dates but also just regular socializing, like hangouts, game nights, happy hours and bar dates, cookouts, holiday, parties, etc. I feel like I'm always the first one to text or call somebody. It makes me question what other people are doing.
I really wonder what the less involved, less intentional approach would be - hope your kid figures it all out for themselves?
I don’t know what the reason is for this phenomenon
During the week I get maybe 10-30 minutes of quality time with them outside of the routine of weekly life. Maybe?
So if I want to do something with my children and have a relationship with them, the weekends are all I have.
Aaaand of course,quality of life in America is generally in decline and parents usually have no support structure (family etc) so no one has interest in the extra work of doing playdates.
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Seems like an opening to build a SaaS to encourage kids to socialize.
/s
that's... not actually a terrible idea
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> I give my kids business cards with my phone number to pass out to their friends to give to their parents
If this isn’t the only thing you/your kids do that’s well outside typical social norms, that’s probably the reason nobody else is inviting them. This is almost on the level of parents accompanying their adult kids to job interviews and then wondering why their kid didn’t get an offer.
I kind of wonder if people have just forgot what to do after the party is over. I had hoped it would be "that was so fun, we should host one", but instead it just kinda fades away in their minds.
I know this is HN, but sometimes - maybe, hopefully, sometimes - neither R nor I is involved in an action.
If you aren't enjoying doing it then by all means stop doing it. But throwing a party isn't supposed to have deliverables or action items.
I go to "couples game nights" with my wife and her friends even though I don't really like them. But I like having friends in the neighborhood. So it's worth it to me when one of her friends husbands (who is now my friend) shows me the deck they've been building in their backyard all because I went to a somewhat painful game night.
I think you have it nearly completely backwards. Society would be far better off if more people were willing to do the "un-fun" things (like planning and hosting a party) in order to socialize. GP should be applauded.
The end goal of throwing parties shouldn’t be friendship or getting invited to other people parties, it’s building a large loose network of people you’re acquaintances/shallow friends with and becoming a super connector.
If you ONLY want to make friends or get invited to parties I think focusing on finding specific people and spending time with them 1:1 is a much better way to do that.
How I would word it is younger people are generally less inclined to invest in (real/in-person?) social interaction. I suspect some bar for motivation or entertainment has changed so people don't socialise the same. Probably intertwined with rise in mental health issues too. Be less interested in socialising and it's no surprise the result is less socialising, in one form or another.
In my experience yeah people don't often reach out or reciprocate effectively when it comes to socialising. Or they stick to a very small group.
From this and other comments, it seems you think you didn't make friends, because you're not invited to other parties. There seems a leap here.
If the others are holding big parties and not inviting you - sure.
If they just don't throw parties, then they likely are still your friends :-)
But as another commenter said: Going to parties is not necessarily the best way to make friends. Whenever I go to a big party, the host is way too busy to spend a meaningful amount of time with me. Of course he's not going to become my friend that way! Going to big parties is for guests to make friends with other guests - not with the host.
I have some good friends who throw only big parties - I've stopped going to them. What's the point if I can't interact with them?
Of course people have all sorts of different ideas of what a party should be, what to bring, and what to do while you're there, but doing it all yourself is really hard. If you're getting it catered with cleaning staff, it's very different than having mostly the same close friends, month after month year after year.
maybe co-host one with somebody who you think might enjoy hosting but is reticent to try
Food? A party's just booze and music, maybe even move some furniture out of the way for a dance floor.
Find me community like this anywhere in America these days. Immigrant communities perhaps? Most Americans these days won't interact with their neighbors unless it's to complain or they want something transactionally.
The only reason I have become a staple member of my little dead-end, working-class street is because I don't email/text, and last summer I spent outdoors building a tinyhome (that all the passersby watched/asked about).
"How do I get ahold of you?" they used to ask... "Simple," I'd say, "just knock on my door between noon through sunset" [my calling hours, to use the historic term, posted by my doorbell]. Haven't even used my phone but a handful of times this 2025 — turned off entirely since early May — & my social life is what I want it to be, I am not alone any more than I wish to be.
I moved here two years ago, and already know everybody on my street (24 dwellings, total); it's primarily rentals, so when there is a new U-Haul I make sure to bring over a beer/conversation (typically a week after moving in — so they can settle/adjust/remember).
Before living in this working-class neighborhood, I lived in the nicer parts of towns... and honestly, these working-class people are nicer and more giving/understanding/decent than anywhere else I've ever lived (e.g. Westlake Hills [near Austin]; West End [Nashville]; Barton Hills [ATX]; Lookout Mountain [Tenn]).
Stop doing everything on your phone. Start being neighborly.
Example: multiple neighbors and I have jointly-purchased a nicer lawnmower, instead of each buying our own simpler pusher.
¢¢
People are generally unfriendly now and keep to themselves more. Sad what we've lost. We're still an immigrant community but the immigrants are from different places. I'm sure they paid too much for their houses and feel the stress. There are also some obvious cultural differences with respect to socializing and partying.
Can you say more about open garages and community? Is that about car culture, music, pool tables, garage "bars", sofas, TVs, or something else?
Would the whole local neighborhood be welcomed into open garages, or was open-garage-culture limited to people whom people already knew?
It certainly depends. I had great neighbors when I lived on the river in a non-HOA community... many parties were had with sunset beer hangouts on the dock or beach. Military communities are also notably close-knit so what you say makes sense.
My family moved into a small cul-de-sac with 5 houses total. I wanted to introduce myself, so I wrote a short letter with a little about ourselves and our contact info, and then dropped it into each neighbors mailbox. Only 1 neighbor wrote back, and 1 neighbor literally _returned the letter_ to our mailbox. So yea, that's the neighborhood I live in.
Not cool. How about that other neighbor though?
I miss it a little bit, like I enjoy being social for a couple of hours two or three times a week, but not much more. But a bunch of people like me makes for a poor social situation since it is hard to get everyone's social levels aligned.
That said, being an immigrant poses other kinds of challenges. So it's not all like the 1970s in the US, or where we came from.
“ It seems that the original modern American swingers were crew-cut World War II air force pilots and their wives. Like elite warriors everywhere, these “top guns” often developed strong bonds with one another, perhaps because they suffered the highest casualty rate of any branch of the military. According to journalist Terry Gould, “key parties,” like those later dramatized in the 1997 film The Ice Storm, originated on these military bases in the 1940s, where elite pilots and their wives intermingled sexually with one another before the men flew off toward Japanese antiaircraft fire.“
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sex-at-dawn/201211/n...
It’s much easier to entertain constantly when one half of the relationship has the availability to do it.
If I’m mistaken, then holy heck how did your grandparents do it lmao.
That being said, most of it was "cool parents" that allowed such behavior because we didn't own anything as teens.
We would have rules like, if you're drinking there, you have to stay the night or call your parents to pick you up.
I think it was just a different time; it seemed more forgiving. Now, a cop will pull you over and give you a DUI and mess up your life for a while. But I heard stories back then ~ '70s, where cops would make sure a drunk person got home safely at night instead of throwing the book at them.
I am sure it is harder for kids today who mostly live online in their algorithmic bubbles. And harder for parents to condone such activity, because who wants to be the parent where cops come knocking on your door and charge you with supplying alcohol to minors?
The root cause of this risk intolerance might be dispersed, just a cumulative result of cable news scare tactics, dropping birth rates and more investment per child, but I suspect a big aspect of it is that risk taking is no longer the only way to get a dopamine hit. Prior to the modern internet, if you avoided all the normal risk-taking behaviors associated with teenagers and young adults, you'd just be bored to death. Now the reward side of the risk-reward balance is just the difference between high-quality fun from meatspace shenanigans versus lower-quality enjoyment derived from social media and online gaming.
Damn, I miss the late 90s/aughts. Damn, I'm old (and fat, too; I "made it", somehow!)
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"The skateboarder with his Walkman, the intellectual working on his wordprocessor, the Bronx breakdancer whirling frantically in the Roxy, the jogger and the body-builder: everywhere, whether in regard to the body or the mental faculties, you find the same blank solitude, the same narcissistic refraction. This omnipresent cult of the body is extraordinary. [...] This ‘into’ is the key to everything. The point is not to be nor even to have a body, but to be into your own body. Into your sexuality, into your own desire. Into your own functions, as if they were energy differentials or video screens. The hedonism of the ‘into’ [...]"
The replacement of a genuine social life with a kind of machine like, solitary optimization, the point of American Psycho basically, is very much real, common among ordinary people. This is every "second brain" note taking fanatic who never actually does anything but collect notes.
"What people are contemplating on their word-processor screens is the operation of their own brains. It is not entrails that we try to interpret these days, nor even hearts or facial expressions; it is, quite simply, the brain. We want to expose to view its billions of connections and watch itoperating like a video-game. All this cerebral, electronic snobbery is hugely affected - far from being the sign of a superior knowledge of humanity, it is merely the mark of a simplified theory, since the human being is here reduced to the terminal excrescence of his or her spinal chord."
But oh yea maybe laying in bed for an hour doom scrolling on your phone before you finally get up is a more efficient use of time.
Or live in a place where you don’t drive to get around.
Most of the world's public transportation sees themselves as a way to get to work and so parties which happen off hours in places hard for transport to reach get bad or no service.
Here-in lies a major problem of drunk driving. (Outside of self-responsibility.)