Meet generation stay-at-home: ‘You don’t need to pay to go clubbing: you can sit at home and watch it on your phone’

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 195 points – Meet generation stay-at-home: ‘You don’t need to pay to go clubbing: you can sit at home and watch it on your phone’
theguardian.com

Meet generation stay-at-home: ‘You don’t need to pay to go clubbing: you can sit at home and watch it on your phone’::Why have so many teens and twentysomethings stopped going out?

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Gen-X here. Articles and "hot takes" like this are as old as time. They called my generation "slackers". Ok, I guess the rise of hip-hop, independent film, electronic music, and THE FUCKING INTERNET just happened magically. The called millennial's lazy hipsters, but it was those hipsters that almost single handedly gave us all better taste in...everything and made it acceptable to enjoy life and experiences instead of just stuff.

If Gen-Z wants to chill at home, fucking Let them! I enjoyed lock down. There, I said it. I didn't enjoy people dying, but for about a year most of us got to stay inside and only go out to enjoy being outside. Some bettered themselves. Many realized that they enjoyed staying in, playing roleplaying games with friends over Zoom, baking bread, reading, writing, making music, or simply watching old concerts from the comfort of their own couch. I certainly did. Fuck the haters.

Lockdown was one of the best periods of my life. Getting to stay at home as much as possible and when I did go out people actually respected my fucking personal space.

God I miss it.

The best part was not feeling like I should be doing something else.

I felt like sitting my lazy ass on the couch watching movies and eating popcorn was exactly where I was supposed to be for once.

One hundred. It was like having an excuse to be a loner while also contributing to society, but by your absence from it. You got the feeling that everyone was cooped up for the good of each other, trying to ride this thing out. A beautiful hybrid lonely-solidarity: a unique feeling that will never happen like that again.

Gen-x here. You know boomers built the Internet, right? It wasn't us.

Boomers built ARPANET, later called the internet based on Gopher, Kermit, Usenet, and such. Then, HTML came along in 1994. It wasn't earth shattering, just an easier way to format and navigate. It was this that gen-x took and used to create "the web".

Although it was boomers that created the transport protocols and text formatting code, it was gen-x that took that relic of the cold war and used it to literally change the world.

Gen X also here... I never did the clubbing scene. I can't drink, hate most modern "music", and dislike crowds. Back when I was that age there weren't smoking bans either and I hate that shit too...

So what even was the point? Meh.

I’ve never been to a club, but I did a nice ten years of raving. I’ll still go to one every so often, but I don’t drop X in public anymore. Those were some magical days, though!

For the same God damn reason as all the other things they're not doing that everyone used to do; they're flat fucking broke.

It being potentially fatal to be within five feet of strangers for a few years sure as shit can't be helping either

And this doesn't have anything to do with sky high rents, youth unemployment, low wages, etc. right? It also doesn't help that prices in the bars here after Covid grew by 20-30%. Beer used to be 3-3.5, now it is 4.5-5. Coffee shops saw similar price hikes. Groceries as well.

Seriously, being young now sucks big time. Especially if you are not one of the few who happen to have rich parents.

Here you can't get your own place unless the rent is no more than 0.33 times your own salary. And guess what, rents have been steadily increasing in the last years (decades) and less young people can rent their own places.

So they are now faced with the following dilemma, whether they should go live with roommates and spend a big chunk of their salaries still on rent or live with their parents and have a bit more disposable income at the end of the month.

I think the real issue here is the system is reliant on people spending outside their means and taking on debt, so when large swathes of entire generations stop playing the game, those that benefit from it don't know what to do. Other than try to insult and appeal towards the demographic in the same breath.

As a millennial, I've been blamed for bludgeoning about every industry there is. No big headlines saying "Corporate Vampires Confused: No one just lets us drink their blood anymore!"

Folks are wising up and the MBAs aren't creative enough to save themselves. I hope

The MBAs are just becoming the landlords now. The"lol get their pound of flesh if we stay in or go out.

Because they broke lol. A night out is expensive, and can easily cost over $100.

Public transport to club: $5 Dinner/pre drinks: $30 Club entry: $25 Club drinks: $18 x 2 = $36 Uber home: $30

Sure you probably save money by going for cheaper drinks etc, but then you spend a lot of effort worried about costs for what is meant to be leisure time.

Tbh I didn't really understand paying for online events like twitch donations, but then realised that a night in with supermarket liquor + sub donations is much cheaper than going out.

Another thing to chime in with—when I was still going out to clubs regularly (in the UK over a decade ago), it was pretty much the main way to meet someone new. Nearly all of my romantic relationships started at nightclubs or music festivals. Now people have a sea of apps for that, I imagine it's another reason to not bother with what were already overpriced clubs even back then. And tbh, I get the impression that if someone went to a club to meet a new partner these days, it probably would come across as a bit creepy.

night out is expensive, and can easily cost over $100

I remember when a bar tab for the table that exceeded $100 was a difficult challenge to achieve.

Now it's a couple of hours for one person.

Why would I pay money to do things I don't want to do? Want me at the club? Pay me. Pay me a LOT because that fucking place is noisy and full of attention seekers.

An editorialist got pissy that millennials weren't buying diamonds, and the take was millennials were lazy and not working hard enough to make boomer money.

So I'm cynical long before I read the take, since many of these kinds of articles are writteb to appeal to the insecurities of news agency owners rather than what the public is actually experiencing.

Yep, this feels exactly like the articles that attacked millennials when we were coming up. If Gen Z isn’t clubbing, I guarantee this article has the reason why wrong.

IOW, sounds like someone's night club is failing and it's the damned kids staying home all night to blame

Look at Gen Z, killing some of the industries us millennials missed. The kids are turning out alright.

lol I’m mostly in agreement, but I can’t imagine adolescence without that burning need to go out and see what happens. I mean, (Jesus, this makes me feel old), throughout most of high school, we had cell phones, but not smart phones. Smartphones were invented the year I graduated high school.

But, the concept of going out just to be out of the house was so strong in me if I had to stay home one night I felt like the world was ending. “What’s happening out there,” “I bet [so and so] is doing something fun.” “I have to get out of this house.” And then as soon as I left the house, very excited, it was something of a relief to find out none of my friends were doing anything fun, but I’d drag them out of the house and we’d go sit in a parking lot somewhere, spending $2 for a drink and a fries, still being hungry, but not having any more money, finding a friend with weed, or finding a more secluded place to hang out, stand around for hours cracking jokes and listening to music…dude, those were the times. Although, don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t cool or popular. I had my core friends, a true group of losers. But fuck if we weren’t trying to live a more sociable or interesting life despite our social awkwardness. And when we did find a party hosted by someone who’d let us come? We were so excited…and then we ended up hanging out together doing the same shit we were doing in the parking lot. But this time with some girls around.

I can’t imagine an adolescence filled with the desire to stay home.

I spent a lot of nights in, often talking to friends on MSN and exploring the internet, and a lot of nights hanging out with friends, often just at someone's house watching movies.

When I was young I only went out to meet girls. If it was just going to be a bunch of dudes there I stayed home and played video games or worked on projects. That was more entertaining than just sitting around bullshitting.

Shit, man. I spent so much time with my closest friends, they were closer than my family. Different strokes for different folks.

Yeah, I think part of my problem was that most of my friends were not very good people and that kind of fucked me up.

Feels like they're more concerned about clubs and liquor producers not making money than kids staying at home.

Clubs/Raves in VR are a thing. It’s actually really cool.

Really? I wasn’t invited to those. Where can I read about them?

Not for you today. Try again another day with proper shoes!

Spend the night in VR chat KMart, there's always something bizarre happening

I spent most of my 20s in nightclubs. As a patron, bartender, and manager.

There's no fucking way you'll ever catch me in one ever again.

They're just the modern way to monetize the mating ritual, taken to an absolutely ridiculous extreme. It's pretty fuckin disgusting.

I had a similar arc. Learned the hard way: meet someone at a club and now you're with someone that likes going to clubs.

Meanwhile, some of the people you meet there are alright. But most of the people that you'd get along with are probably at home. And most of the club patrons are, well, people who like going to clubs.

Cos they ain't got no fucking money, that's why.

Gasp, gaming and talking to friends online? They should be real world socialising like talking to friends on the landline

"Please come to my club to kill your liver and brain with alcohol, I need to buy a third home!"

Nice scenes (3 photos in article) :

...well they couldn't see anything on this type of phone 😋

This is the best summary I could come up with:

And while the prevalence of slumping on the sofa is partly driven by being broke, rocketing inflation doesn’t entirely explain why a poll in December by the campaign group More in Common found British under-24s were more likely than the middle-aged to support bringing back Covid restrictions such as nightclubs closing or the “rule of six” cap on socialising.

Long before lockdowns curbed their liberty, risk-taking behaviour expressed in teenage pregnancy and youth offending was steadily declining in both the US and the UK, as, more surprisingly, was the number of young people holding either a part-time job or a driving licence – both once regarded as keys to freedom.

In her 2017 bestseller iGen, the American psychologist Jean Twenge blamed smartphone immersion and over-protective parenting for what she dubbed an anxious generation’s tardiness in reaching adult milestones such as dating, driving, getting a Saturday job and generally embracing the outside world.

As boisterous teens emerged from lockdown, a spate of shopping malls and fast food restaurants, from California in the US to West Lothian in Scotland, all imposed similar temporary curfews, bans or rules requiring a “parental escort”.

Though antisocial teenage behaviour can’t be dismissed lightly, what’s striking is that fast food joints, shopping malls, cinemas and beaches were all once spaces for younger teens newly embarking on independent social lives to hang out away from adults.

Yet arguably they have never been more needed: one in four younger teens has had to give up a sport or hobby they enjoyed because their families couldn’t afford it, according to research by youth charity OnSide last year for a report bleakly titled Generation Isolation, which found three-quarters of the children questioned said they now spent most of their free time on screen.

The original article contains 4,655 words, the summary contains 292 words. Saved 94%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

I can stay up late and go clubbing or I can wake up early and do something fun like hiking or carpentry. Both can be fun but the latter has fewer downsides and more upsides.

Had to find out what "sow your wild oats" meant idiom

"If a young man sows his wild oats, he has a period of his life when he does a lot of exciting things and has a lot of sexual relationships."

Or go club anyway, for free. Just went to one with no cover, and didn’t drink anything. They actually had a raffle I did pay for, but I ended up winning. So technically, I profited 🤔