Comment by Aurornis
2 days ago
> 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.
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.
Whenever I watch movies/TV shows set in the future but released before the invention of the camera phone, I just insert some headcanon that future society realised the evils of uploading a recording of someone to social media without permission, and decided to ban the cursed devices.
What are you basing that off of?
there are several videos with captions like "bro is dancing" on the internet where the one person trying to be themselves at the function is recorded. It's sad really, at many bigger name venues I see fewer people dancing now, though maybe it's because the drinks aren't as cheap as they used to be.
The stakes are naturally higher and harsher than at any point in history. The government, all kinds, are reinforcing it, and governments are entirely reflective of society, there is no washing your hands of this responsibility.
Gen-Z is not only completely in the right in being sheepish, their predecessors are entirely to blame, and every attempt to claim they were not a part of the increasing surveillance state is a lie.
Even the older members of Gen-Z can be blamed to a small degree.
There is no cure
Of course there is a cure: penalties for publishing someone's likeness without permission. No one is getting media releases when they take these videos and publish them online but they are already supposed to. Make it easier to file lawsuits and watch these non-consensual non-newsworthy published videos disappear.
> 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.
I go through this with my wife for every party we throw. She wants the house cleaned, table set, food spread ready, seasonal cocktails mixed, furniture moved around, decorations just so, etc.
I’m like here’s a giant thing of ice cold booze have fun.
I know this struggle, and the best I've been able to do is to push every time for limited scope. Let's just get pizzas instead of cooking 3 different mains and having a cheese plate, 4 bowls of chips, etc. Social media has really done a number on people (see also those omnipresent balloon arches)
Cleaning your house before a party is a reasonable ask.
People deep cleaned their houses for parties long before social media and smartphones came along.
Only if they were rich or OCD. Plenty of parties were thrown with little prep when there weren't insta/tok/snaps showing off perfection 24/7.
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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.
>> That means organizing to go there with a group and a designated driver to stay sober
That's not what it meant in the 1980's though. That's one of the things that changed. The US in the 1970's and 1980's was much freer in that regard.
People are tired
And partying is expensive
always so much