Its hard to through a secret part when your parents are out of town when the ring camera will let them know.
I’m older than 40 I didn’t go to these parties in high school because I was a nerd. I definitely went to and hosted parties like this in my college years. It was basically, invite everyone you know and then those people would bring their friends. Bring booze and snacks.Great way to meet new people.
The quality of life of kids has degraded at least in the US and no not primarily from smartphones and social media.
The answer is simple, life is harder for parents.
And also the lack of third places making it a lot harder for both adults and kids to get together with friends in person without having to spend money
Also the move towards car-centric infrastructure. Which is somewhat related to the lack of 3rd places.
A lot of the movies with these parties had the kids showing up by walking or biking, which just is not feasible anymore. I
I also think about all the teen movies that were largely set in shopping malls. Most of the malls around me have shut down, so what’s next? Pretending people hang out and socialize in Wal-Marts for the sake of the movie?
When the 24 hour Walmart opened in my podunk town it was a popular teen hangout after 10 or so.
This was in the late 90s though. I’m not sure what it’s like now, but that was also when teens got cheap ass cars as soon as they had a license.
Cash for clunkers, the economic busts and the auto industry eliminating affordable small cars (in the US at least), and more recently the insurance industry has changed car prices/expenses to make teens in that area less mobile and more isolated. Now it’s mostly drunks and retail employees after a shift in there after 9pm. And it’s not open 24 hours since the pandemic.
They actually do, or Target. Spend some time in there around 8-9pm and watch the little groups of teens wandering the store.
Pretending people hang out and socialize in Wal-Marts for the sake of the movie?
Wal-Mart “Did someone say product placement?”
Yeah the effect of that is really insidious and far reaching, I know it hurt me growing up no question.
The thing is, all the fun things that adults used to be able to do to blow off steam away from kids, keep getting ruined by going more “family friendly”. When I was a kid, there was a thing at the boulder reservoir with music and events, and people would drink and smoke weed and be mostly left alone. They made it family friendly and it started to die, then they decided it wasn’t eco-friendly so they killed it off.
Ragrbrai in Iowa happened the same way. A weeklong ride across the state that changes stops every year. Used to be drunken debauchery at the stops and now it’s family friendly and no fun anymore. Concerts are the same way. I know kids listen to slipknot, but why the fuck should I watch my mouth now that kids are around, when the singers saying much worse (in context) on stage? I’m sure everyone everywhere in America has a story like this. 4th of July on Apple River, in Wisconsin, back in college it was a blast. Alcohol and titties everywhere. I haven’t been since cops started going and enforcing shit.
I blame 2008 a lot of people didn’t have money to spend individually so they had to combo it into family time. Combine that with the fact that a lot of the places that used to cater to adults started to get increasingly ratty and decrepit without being replaced and ya end up with a rather bad feedback loop. In my area for example there’s only really one thing an adult can do at night in public that being go to a bar, but I know for a fact that when I was a kid a lot of places switched over to adults only past 8 PM so that they could attract folks who didn’t want to deal with kids nearby and I’m not just talking about a mini golf course or some shit there used to be a hobby store near me that did adults only Warhammer games at night which just meant bear and cussing.
It’s feels like America never really learned to maintain things.
Smartphones and social media are probably why the kids don’t party like that anymore. They don’t need to gather in one house to all talk when they have their group chats and junk like that. Pretty sad to think about a generation of kids just pissing away their youth looking at a little screen in their hands all day.
Social media has warped many brains into living life as a performance of moments for their feed-posts, and too few exercise their right to Privacy, so everything is tainted with the concept of the Observer that we didn’t have in the past. Yes, we did party like those kids in those movies. It was rad.
Try being more curious about young people and actually listen to them talk when they are willing to be vulnerable to you and come back and tell me this is the problem. That is a lazy, easy narrative there you just spun.
IF we want to talk about anything regarding the human condition, that talk will necessarily be reductive. Should OP have written a thesis paper?
He clearly stated that this was his opinion. And I think he’s getting downvoted for hitting a leetle too close to home.
Your assumptions are based on your imagination, since you don’t know that I haven’t done that
Then why do your descriptions of nuanced multifaceted humans portray them as such cartoonishly reductive caricatures dissected from any context outside of their control? Younger people by definition have the least control over their circumstance.
Sounds like you don’t like what I wrote. It’s not a big deal, but it is real. I’ve seen before and after, and what I said is what happened.
What up GenX! Yep. We had to leave the house because there was nothing to do there!
I dunno. I moved to Europe and there’s smartphones and social media here. But my colleagues kids are at birthday parties and hanging out with friends and going to events every weekend. This seems like a real US thing.
To my knowledge kids in US have 10x the scheduled activities on weekends compared to the past. Apparently the thought of a kid just lying around all weekend entertaining themselves is gone. They have to have scheduled camps all summer as well.
They have scheduled camps all summer because both parents have to work, and those are often cheaper than regular childcare.
It’s mostly a privileged thing. Everyone else just let’s their kid read books and whatever to pass the time or takes them to the YMCA or boys and girls club, etc.
That sounds hellish to me.
Last weekend there was a big national festival in my area (Nijmeegse vierdaagse). I was late after the friday drinks at work. The trainand the stations were chuck full of teens and early 20 kids. They looked to be havin as much fun and being as stupid as I was at that age. Didn’t seem like much had changed in that regard.
Cameras on phones killed it.
We definitely had to regulate this in college. We threw some ragers where we specifically knew it couldnt be documented where we collected phones and had a whole coat check system. Thankfully, facebook was only for college people, so nothing catastrophic ever happened
And cameras on doorbells etc.
This 👆
Yeah, no records may be kept of a house party.
I (an older millenial) went to a prep school and big parties in huge, beautiful parties happened every few weeks when someone’s parents were out if town. Kegs, red cups, the host freaking out over the mess and people making out/banging in bedrooms were all standard. Because the prep school was small, we would end up getting all our friends from other schools together so they’d end up massive, loud and rowdy affairs. Cops usually got called, but were uninterested in a bunch of kids whose parents were likely lawyers, so no one got in trouble unless they tried to drive drunk. To be young, wealthy and white in America is a good time.
Don’t worry, I am broke now. Still white tho.
Yes, but ours were usually much much more casual and in much smaller houses. TV makes everyone look rich. Broke people have parties too, but they’re chips/dip and BYOB. Also, without the jocks vs. nerds.
My husband was just telling a story this weekend about when he was “ninth grade cool”. Right before a party a cute girl asked if he had the new Prince album. He said yes and then begged his mom to take him to Sound Warehouse to buy it. Unwrapped it, shoved it in his pocket, and got dropped at the party. “Cool! What’s your favorite song?” “Uhh, the first one.”
Sad that kids now don’t have that experience.
Do kids still go parking?
Do kids still go parking?
So many kids today don’t want to drive or learn to drive 🤷♂️ And based on my partners’ kids, they’re much less sexually driven than we were. We did a bunch of stupid shit if there was a hint of a chance of getting laid.
That’s sad. The hours we spent talking, laughing, and making out in cars were the best part of high school. I wonder if some of the disinterest is from anti depressants.
It’s probably from the world burning down around them. Hard to be horny when you’re full of existential dread.
Yeah, absolutely no existential dread from the Cold War. And we all just instantly stopped believing that the world would end in a nuclear holocaust just because the Soviet Union collapsed. Then there was the Gulf war, then 9/11, then another Gulf war. And we’ve known about climate change and how capitalism is killing our planet for practically the entire time, that’s not new. Oil crisis? That’s been a slowly building crescendo of apocalypse since like the 70s.
I’ll buy existential dread as an excuse for not wanting to breed, not as an explanation for teenagers being less horny.
Give us y2k and we’ll party like it’s 1999!
Should be the opposite. Stressful conditions make us want to fuck and make babies. Maybe I’m wrong, but in any case, sex is about the most effective stress relief I know of.
I don’t think your experience in this case is universal. Birth rates have been steadily dropping as things have gotten worse.
I feel the same way as you, but my wife is the opposite of us.
Wasn’t speaking from experience, or today’s social norms. Meant to say that primates fuck and masturbate when stressed. We do as well.
Kids seems so socially anxious and isolated, making a doom loop against making friends and fucking.
Believe it or not, even adults had home parties. It wasn’t just a kids or teens thing. So maybe you missed out as a teen but you can make up for it as an adult. Potluck dinners or game nights are a good way to start. We went to a potluck dinner for 8 people in a studio apartment a couple times when I was at uni.
Average millennial here. Yes, amongst other parties, I had a college friend who hosted a party like this twice a week and everyone (30-50 people) would be shit faced, his dad had a night shift job so we stayed up all night playing N64, beer pong, and other fun filled debauchery. It was magnificent. Each day we’d tape plastic over the floor to keep things clean and reduce wear, guy was a social genius. Actually I eventually got bored of it but they went on for years.
Gen X. Grew up on an acreage and went to highschool in a small town a few kilometres away.
There was always some kind of party on the weekend. Either at someone’s house, or a bush party/pit party. This was the early nineties. So no phones/cameras.
I’m amazed we survived.
What’s a pit party?
Basically a bush party, but we had an old abandoned gravel pit just or of town that you could park your cars along the rim with headlights shining down to where we would light a bug bonfire.
Wait there aren’t parties anymore? What
Apparently kids are socializing in general less. Like it’s a real trend.
Very common. The vibes and people varied based on the people throwing the party. Maybe it was a house party when someone’s parents were out of town. Maybe it was a kegger at the lake kinda outta the way in the dark. And everything in between.
Also, Hollywood wouldn’t have been making films in the 90s and 2000s to make you feel bad if this wasn’t the case. They’d be making the contemporary teens of the day feel bad, which they certainly didn’t because they could identify with the scene.
This is the saddest comments thread I have ever read.
Yes, parties are real.
I threw a party like this in about 1995. I got lucky because a lot of people showed up but they were respectful and didn’t trash my house. I cleaned up in about 2 hours.
I think that one of the things that killed this were the examples on the news of people having their houses destroyed as the party got out of hand.
Another thing that killed these parties was litigious parents. Underage drinking was the norm at these things. Kids would sometimes drive drunk and get in accidents, drown in the pool, etc. Parents of the drunk drivers would sue the parents of the party host for allowing kids to get drunk on their premises. Saying you were out of town and didn’t know did not save the sued parents - they would just be blamed for leaving their kids unsupervised.
Bush parties were also really common in the 90s, but fewer and fewer people live near a large woodlot. In the 90s, even medium cities would have vacant lots scattered throughout the city and many were large enough to (temporarily) conceal a small bonfire and 2 dozen drunk kids. When the cops showed up, we would scatter. Stumbling around the woods in the dark while intoxicated is a cherished memory, but I would probably never do it again, haha.
I didn’t go to a lot of these in my youth, but house parties definitely existed, and still exist. I’m ~40.
A friend of friend just had one this weekend, and I went as a +1. I don’t know what the occasion was but there was a lot of food and drink and socializing. Someone even set up beer pong like when we were younger.
Another friend of mine has pretty regular parties at his place. He just invites a bunch of people and has some food and drink, and it’s a good time. It probably helps that his friend network is massive and he’s generally well liked.
Gen Z stopped havin house parties, cause fewer of them live on their own / with a small group of roomies – a lot more stick around with the parents, and parents aren’t as keen to have a bunch of youth doing drugs and lightly misbehaving all night ;p
