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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

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: https://www.reddit.com/r/GenX/comments/1lu102v/were_parties_like_this_ever_actually_a_thing/ 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.

frollogaston 1y ago
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.
- autoexec 1y ago
  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.
Aurornis 1y ago
> 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.
- generalizations 1y ago
  That should also be true of the Gen Xers replying though. So I think that effectively cancels out.
  - Aurornis 1y ago
    No, the legacy social media platforms are more popular with older generations. Facebook is the canonical example of a social media platform that arrived after Gen X was young, but it now heavily used by Gen X while nearly completely shunned by Gen Z, with millenials somewhere in the middle. Reddit and even Twitter are legacy social media platforms for Gen Z, especially younger Gen Z. The very oldest Gen Z people would have been too young to even use the internet when Reddit was launched.
    - lapcat 1y ago
      Nobody should take a Reddit thread as some kind of proof of a broad generalization. But some empirical data is given in the article, for example, Percentage of 12th graders going out with friends two or more times a week: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!lQMo!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F92ebf191-6ed2-4689-b5b2-bb36ba1b6ad9_1364x1064.png https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!lQMo!,f_auto,q_auto:... I think the Reddit thread is just a reflection of the reality rather than an argument for accepting that reality. You can attempt to discount the Reddit thread, but the submitted article wasn't even based on that.
    - throwaway2037 1y ago
      In highly developed countries, I think most people under 40 have moved away from Facebook towards Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok. I thought the main Facebook users are (1) those in developing countries (messenger especially) and (2) parents in highly developed countries who need to get updates for their kids' school/sports/clubs. Is this still broadly true?
- yubblegum 1y ago
  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.
acquiesce 1y ago
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.
- colinwilyb 1y ago
  What's newspaper? ;)
- yieldcrv 1y ago
  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
  - snctm 1y ago
    Indeed.
breakyerself 1y ago
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.
- tlogan 1y ago
  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 :) But we did party way more than kids today.
  - grvdrm 1y ago
    Reminds me that some of the hardest partiers/most adventurous kids were not popular: theater kids!
  - jalk 1y ago
    The majority of the bad decisions we made, was when there were no girls around. It's sheer luck that no one was seriously injured or arrested
- basisword 1y ago
  Getting drunk and making bad decisions (within reason) is: a) fun b) how you learn
namdnay 1y ago
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)
- hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
  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. > 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 https://youtube.com/shorts/5sq4P5RCIrg?si=iMVDyAU4eyzgMN2j I think that's one minor example of the monumental shift that has happened among young people.
fnord77 1y ago
I feel like this article was spawned by that reddit post and subsequent related tweets.
kenjackson 1y ago
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.
- yieldcrv 1y ago
  Its definitely more efficient than riding on your bike or later a car, hoping someone was home
- realo 1y ago
  Aaaahhh... You have "beach" ... with the "bonfires" option pack ... This is very nice urban furniture. Here we have "streets" and , occasionally, "public parks". Forget the "bonfires" option.
  - 9rx 1y ago
    > Forget the "bonfires" option. This right here is emblematic of the change in culture. When Gen X were young you weren't allowed to have bonfires (in most public places) either, but that never stopped anyone. Nowadays the kids are too afraid to do anything.
    - kondu 1y ago
      How much of that is because of the difference in how severely the legal/policing systems punish this kind of harmless activity now vs back then?
      - 9rx 1y ago
        It is possible. How has the punishment for being caught with a bonfire in a place where it is not permitted changed over the last number of decades? Or is it just the reduction in lead? That is what is oft cited as the reason for why crime rates have dropped substantially over a very similar period. Which may leave my framing of the kids being fearful to be a little off, rather the reduction in lead would suggest that they have better impulse control, but I am sure you can understand that the intent there is the same either way.
almosthere 1y ago
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...
zackmorris 1y ago
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.
- throwforfeds 1y ago
  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.
jollyllama 1y ago
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.
DebtDeflation 1y ago
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?
- WorldPeas 1y ago
  still alive and well, across multiple social strata, happy to report.
weinzierl 1y ago
"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.
- barbazoo 1y ago
  > 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.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- frollogaston 1y ago
  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.
danjc 1y ago
One aspect to consider is that the vast proportion of content in automated feeds isn't even sincere - it's just engagement farming.
zygentoma 1y ago
> 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.
whoisyc 1y ago
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.
StefanBatory 1y ago
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.
sorrynorry22 1y ago
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darth_avocado 1y ago
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.
ethan_smith 1y ago
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.
- hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
  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. Here is Scott Galloway talking about the significance of asking someone out in-person vs. online dating, https://youtube.com/shorts/5sq4P5RCIrg https://youtube.com/shorts/5sq4P5RCIrg
  - DaSHacka 1y ago
    For dating in particular, or socialization in general? I think it's far better to be able to connect with acquaintances online, to this day I'm still playing games with friends I had in high school that no longer even live in the same state as me. Whereas had we been forced to only meet in-person, we likely wouldn't have talked to each other for years by this point.
ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
The old "boomer" parties were even wilder. 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.
- lapcat 1y ago
  That's not a boomer thing. It more or less happened to me too.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
    Fair 'nuff. I wasn't even aware that they don't have them, anymore.
- WorldPeas 1y ago
  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.
- watwut 1y ago
  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.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
    Teenage girls have a difficult time, saying no, and teenage boys have a difficult time, accepting "no." It sucks, but that's human nature. Being a teenager is clabbered misery. I suspect that what they do, is have a hunk show up a couple of hours early, with a bottle of tequila.
konart 1y ago
As a millennial - I'm also amazed by these parties. Some of my peers had this kind of experience, but for me this is something from parallel universe. Mostly because I never really understood the fun part.
- ngruhn 1y ago
  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.
danans 1y ago
> 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.
frollogaston 1y ago
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.
- al_borland 1y ago
  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.
scotty79 1y ago
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.
- rubzah 1y ago
  It was always mostly people trying to recreate what they had seen in movies a party should be.
lisbbb 1y ago
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.
angra_mainyu 1y ago
Millennial here - they definitely were real! Even back in 2008-2010 when I was in high school.
- steve_adams_86 1y ago
  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.
SideQuark 1y ago
> 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.
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  > yet somehow mankind has improved quality of life for so many I think it would be hard to argue that Gen Z has a higher quality of life than Gen X
  - SideQuark 1y ago
    Gen Z has worked far less and is much earlier in that career than Gen X, among many other things. Incomes for each income quintile at the same age shows Gen Z as having more income than Gen X did. They are also statistically much worse with money and expenses. You can dig all this out of historical Census data. Find personal (or household) income by age group, do the same for each cohort over time, inflation adjust, and it's pretty clear. So I can certainly argue they have higher quality of life than Gen X at each point in their lives thus far.
- hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
  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.
rufus_foreman 1y ago
>> It's really sad to me how we have completely fucked a lot of youth We? We, kemosabe? I did not completely fuck up a lot of youth. Don't include me in this.
- 47282847 1y ago
  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.

frollogaston 1y ago

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.

autoexec 1y ago
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.

Aurornis 1y ago

> 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.

generalizations 1y ago
That should also be true of the Gen Xers replying though. So I think that effectively cancels out.
- Aurornis 1y ago
  No, the legacy social media platforms are more popular with older generations. Facebook is the canonical example of a social media platform that arrived after Gen X was young, but it now heavily used by Gen X while nearly completely shunned by Gen Z, with millenials somewhere in the middle. Reddit and even Twitter are legacy social media platforms for Gen Z, especially younger Gen Z. The very oldest Gen Z people would have been too young to even use the internet when Reddit was launched.
  - lapcat 1y ago
    Nobody should take a Reddit thread as some kind of proof of a broad generalization. But some empirical data is given in the article, for example, Percentage of 12th graders going out with friends two or more times a week: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!lQMo!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F92ebf191-6ed2-4689-b5b2-bb36ba1b6ad9_1364x1064.png https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!lQMo!,f_auto,q_auto:... I think the Reddit thread is just a reflection of the reality rather than an argument for accepting that reality. You can attempt to discount the Reddit thread, but the submitted article wasn't even based on that.
  - throwaway2037 1y ago
    In highly developed countries, I think most people under 40 have moved away from Facebook towards Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok. I thought the main Facebook users are (1) those in developing countries (messenger especially) and (2) parents in highly developed countries who need to get updates for their kids' school/sports/clubs. Is this still broadly true?
yubblegum 1y ago
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.

acquiesce 1y ago

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.

colinwilyb 1y ago
What's newspaper? ;)
yieldcrv 1y ago
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
- snctm 1y ago
  Indeed.

breakyerself 1y ago

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.

tlogan 1y ago
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 :) But we did party way more than kids today.
- grvdrm 1y ago
  Reminds me that some of the hardest partiers/most adventurous kids were not popular: theater kids!
- jalk 1y ago
  The majority of the bad decisions we made, was when there were no girls around. It's sheer luck that no one was seriously injured or arrested
basisword 1y ago
Getting drunk and making bad decisions (within reason) is: a) fun b) how you learn

namdnay 1y ago

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)

hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
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. > 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 https://youtube.com/shorts/5sq4P5RCIrg?si=iMVDyAU4eyzgMN2j I think that's one minor example of the monumental shift that has happened among young people.

fnord77 1y ago

I feel like this article was spawned by that reddit post and subsequent related tweets.

kenjackson 1y ago

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.

yieldcrv 1y ago
Its definitely more efficient than riding on your bike or later a car, hoping someone was home
realo 1y ago
Aaaahhh... You have "beach" ... with the "bonfires" option pack ... This is very nice urban furniture. Here we have "streets" and , occasionally, "public parks". Forget the "bonfires" option.
- 9rx 1y ago
  > Forget the "bonfires" option. This right here is emblematic of the change in culture. When Gen X were young you weren't allowed to have bonfires (in most public places) either, but that never stopped anyone. Nowadays the kids are too afraid to do anything.
  - kondu 1y ago
    How much of that is because of the difference in how severely the legal/policing systems punish this kind of harmless activity now vs back then?
    - 9rx 1y ago
      It is possible. How has the punishment for being caught with a bonfire in a place where it is not permitted changed over the last number of decades? Or is it just the reduction in lead? That is what is oft cited as the reason for why crime rates have dropped substantially over a very similar period. Which may leave my framing of the kids being fearful to be a little off, rather the reduction in lead would suggest that they have better impulse control, but I am sure you can understand that the intent there is the same either way.

almosthere 1y ago

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...

zackmorris 1y ago

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.

throwforfeds 1y ago
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.

jollyllama 1y ago

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.

DebtDeflation 1y ago

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?

WorldPeas 1y ago
still alive and well, across multiple social strata, happy to report.

weinzierl 1y ago

"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.

barbazoo 1y ago
> 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.
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frollogaston 1y ago
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.

danjc 1y ago

One aspect to consider is that the vast proportion of content in automated feeds isn't even sincere - it's just engagement farming.

zygentoma 1y ago

> 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.

whoisyc 1y ago

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.

StefanBatory 1y ago

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.

sorrynorry22 1y ago

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darth_avocado 1y ago

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.

ethan_smith 1y ago

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.

hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
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. Here is Scott Galloway talking about the significance of asking someone out in-person vs. online dating, https://youtube.com/shorts/5sq4P5RCIrg https://youtube.com/shorts/5sq4P5RCIrg
- DaSHacka 1y ago
  For dating in particular, or socialization in general? I think it's far better to be able to connect with acquaintances online, to this day I'm still playing games with friends I had in high school that no longer even live in the same state as me. Whereas had we been forced to only meet in-person, we likely wouldn't have talked to each other for years by this point.

ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago

The old "boomer" parties were even wilder. 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.

lapcat 1y ago
That's not a boomer thing. It more or less happened to me too.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  Fair 'nuff. I wasn't even aware that they don't have them, anymore.
WorldPeas 1y ago
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.
watwut 1y ago
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.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  Teenage girls have a difficult time, saying no, and teenage boys have a difficult time, accepting "no." It sucks, but that's human nature. Being a teenager is clabbered misery. I suspect that what they do, is have a hunk show up a couple of hours early, with a bottle of tequila.

konart 1y ago

As a millennial - I'm also amazed by these parties. Some of my peers had this kind of experience, but for me this is something from parallel universe. Mostly because I never really understood the fun part.

ngruhn 1y ago
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.

danans 1y ago

> 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.

frollogaston 1y ago

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.

al_borland 1y ago
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.

scotty79 1y ago

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.

rubzah 1y ago
It was always mostly people trying to recreate what they had seen in movies a party should be.

lisbbb 1y ago

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.

angra_mainyu 1y ago

Millennial here - they definitely were real! Even back in 2008-2010 when I was in high school.

steve_adams_86 1y ago
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.

SideQuark 1y ago

> 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.

bluefirebrand 1y ago
> yet somehow mankind has improved quality of life for so many I think it would be hard to argue that Gen Z has a higher quality of life than Gen X
- SideQuark 1y ago
  Gen Z has worked far less and is much earlier in that career than Gen X, among many other things. Incomes for each income quintile at the same age shows Gen Z as having more income than Gen X did. They are also statistically much worse with money and expenses. You can dig all this out of historical Census data. Find personal (or household) income by age group, do the same for each cohort over time, inflation adjust, and it's pretty clear. So I can certainly argue they have higher quality of life than Gen X at each point in their lives thus far.
hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
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.

rufus_foreman 1y ago

>> It's really sad to me how we have completely fucked a lot of youth We? We, kemosabe? I did not completely fuck up a lot of youth. Don't include me in this.

47282847 1y ago
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.