The death of partying in the USA • Hacker News Board

Re: The death of partying in the USA

#341

Post by Auracle » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 4:20 PM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #252

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #249

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_... 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…

> 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…

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.

Re: The death of partying in the USA

#342

Post by slg » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 4:20 PM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #252

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #249

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_... 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…

> 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…

There is still a big difference between not being invited to/attending parties and not knowing if they even exist as a concept.

Re: The death of partying in the USA

#343

Post by whatshisface » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 4:21 PM UTC

dylan604 wrote: post #256

shlant wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> affected by the corporate buying of single family homes > after corps, we have foreign buyers also coming in with cash offers As someone mentioned earlier in the thread, these are memes that are not actually backed by data - commonly perpetuated by groups that blame most issues on billionaires/corporations/investment firms.

So you're insinuating that the specific example of a house sitting empty owned by a foreign buyer is made up? In my neighborhood specifically, there are homes being bought not by single families but specifically buy management companies so they can then rent the property. To deny this happens is just as much of a stick your head in the sand meme as what you are accusing me of.

Management companies will only buy a house if they think they can profit on it, and the price of the house is a cost for them too. This links the affordability of both types of housing: low rents can't support expensive real estate, and vice versa. The rental payments have to pay for the management company's mortgage.

Re: The death of partying in the USA

#344

Post by api » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 4:23 PM UTC

parineum wrote: post #334

api wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Starting in the late 1990s... How old were you then? People have a tendency to remember some time period when everything was carefree and you didn't have to worry about how much stuff cost and all this new, great stuff was happening. And then you find out they were 12 and the time where they think all that went downhill was when they were 20.

18-22

I've asked older people about this for this very reason, and they've generally agreed with me. There's always been an allure to big cities but it went into overdrive starting in the late 90s - early 2000s.

As for real estate prices, that's objective. You can easily look that up. RE prices went insane starting in the 2000s with the 2008 crash only being a brief pull-back in a long bull run. You can also clearly see the divergence with big top-tier cities appreciating at a much faster rate than smaller cities. You can see it in the numbers.

Look into the origin of early personal computers. They're from all over: Albuquerque (MITS), Dallas (TI, Tandy), Boston (DEC), Miami (IBM PC), Philadelphia (Commodore), Seattle (several), etc. In the early 2000s if we re-did the PC revolution it would all be from the SF Bay, because by then if you were doing anything cutting edge in computing it had to be in the Bay Area.

Re: The death of partying in the USA

#345

Post by tlogan » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 4:25 PM UTC

I have a politically sensitive but potentially insightful question.

I live in San Francisco, where we have a desegregation busing policy. In practice, this means kids don’t attend their neighborhood schools. They’re assigned to schools across the city (Instead of investing in improving schools in underprivileged neighborhoods, we (voters) decided it is better (and cheaper) to bus those kids to schools in more affluent areas - but that is beside the point)

One theory I’ve heard is that this setup leads to less socializing (or “partying”) among teens, since their school friends often live far away. That raises an interesting question: To what extent does busing contribute to reduced peer interaction outside school?

Also, how common are these busing policies across the U.S. today? Is San Francisco an outlier, or is this a widespread approach?

Re: The death of partying in the USA

#346

Post by throwforfeds » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 4:25 PM UTC

zackmorris wrote: post #327

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #249

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_... 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…

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 Co…

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.

Re: The death of partying in the USA

#347

Post by preachermon » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 4:25 PM UTC

tlogan wrote: post #289

yubblegum wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Socially marginalized kids were partying too. The only difference was, we weren’t invited to the “cool” parties. These days, there’s definitely a lot less partying overall.

as a socially marginalized kid in those days, I ended up banding together with other sm kids and we had our own parties.

Re: The death of partying in the USA

#348

Post by cortesoft » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 4:26 PM UTC

surgical_fire wrote: post #143

ryandrake wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, t…

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…

As a parent who is an introvert married to another introvert, it is definitely a challenge. It is hard not to feel overwhelmed when our kids have friends over, and the desire to avoid that is strong. We have to actively tell ourselves that we have to sacrifice our quiet for our kids social lives. I don’t really enjoy socializing with other parents while my kid plays, either, and my wife hates it even more than I do.

It really takes active effort to make sure our kids have play dates.

Re: The death of partying in the USA

#349

Post by micromacrofoot » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 4:27 PM UTC

prewett wrote: post #217

micromacrofoot wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"

There's been 65% inflation over the past 20 years, so to properly compare housing prices you need to multiply the 20 years ago price by 1.65. A house that doubled in price in twenty years only increased by 20% in terms of actual purchasing power (2.0 / 1.65). [1] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

Housing prices doubling accounts for inflation.

In 2000 a median house would cost 3x the median income, in 2025 it's 6x (and in some cities, 8x or more)

Affordability has changed, it's well documented fact. This isn't napkin math or whinging.

Re: The death of partying in the USA

#350

Post by torginus » Thu, Jul 10, 2025, 4:29 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #56

Apreche wrote: post #28

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 witho…

> Normal people are renting apartments or portions of homes. About 2/3 of households in the US own the home they live in. Renting is the minority, not the majority.

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.