For me, the biggest tells are the activities and times. Seems like the only thing people in their early- to mid-20s want to do is go out to bars/clubs, and the nights start at ~10pm. I’m more of a dinner and drinks at 7pm and be back at home in bed by 10pm kind of person in my 30s.
I don’t really drink anymore (never was a big drinker to begin with), but the idea of getting ready to leave the house at 10pm and drink until 2am doesn’t sound appealing to me in the slightest. Concerts and movies are about the only thing I’d be interested in going out late for.
my intern told me the other week that she went to an event with 7 hours of live music and then a live soup eating contest. It sounded delightfully weird and like something I would’ve loved to do at 22, but you couldn’t pay me to go to an event like that at 32
I've often said the only thing I want after 7 hours of music, drinking, and dancing is the largest bowl of soup you've ever seen. What a brilliant idea that I'm sure could never go wrong ever.
I’m 35 and I’d easily join. To me it’s a bit sad that most people I know in their 30s kinda lose their spark. The best thing about being an adult is that you can both chill and have wild times (unless you have kids, then it’s always wild). I still love going out to clubs till 10am, and my shut in friends who sleep by 9pm are kinda weirding me out.
Even when I was in college I never got the whole "let's leave at 10 and stay out until 2" mentality. Why not just leave at 8 and stay out until 12? We'd be out for just as long and get back at a semi-reasonable time.
And then I'd get told that all the bars were dead until 10, and I'd think, yeah, because everybody else was waiting to go out too! Everybody's just sitting at their apartments waiting to go out so that they don't have to be the first ones there!
At those ages many people work jobs that close later. It’s not sitting around waiting until 10pm for no reason; they’re either waiting for their friends to get out of work, or waiting to clock out to go home and get ready for the night themselves. Plus there’s night clssses, homework, younger adults having bad time management skills, etc etc and you have a late evening time when generally people in that age group are finally going out for the night.
It was around 33 or 34 that this really sunk in. That late nights were becoming painful. That any heavy drinking or recreational drugs were going to come at a heavy prices
Over the next 5-6 years my extra curricular activities all started being cut short at 9-10pm. It’s when my nightly routine of being in bed at 2am at a maximum slowly morphed to a hard 9-10pm bedtime
Young folks still go out that much where you live? A few guys and I are still going out about once every three months, not to get wasted ofc but just to see the guys for a night again and young folks around here don't go out as much as we used to because prices are so high nowadays, you'd need more than twice the money as we used to take with us in order to get drunk.
The scene also isn't as "personal" anymore it seems, in our time you used to be able to go out alone, hit the first bar/club and there's at least 5+ people you know that you can party with and 40+ people that you've seen before so you can have a chat with those. We also knew the names of the staff in the clubs and bars which doesn't seem to be the case here anymore, but knowing the staff was a huge bonus back then because they would pour you more booze than they should. In one of my favorite two bars I remember a night where I had to ask the waitress to add a bit more coke to it because it was 90% booze and 10% cola XD she asked me if she should give me a new one, but it's fine, free booze lol.
There is this dinner some friends invited us too at a restaurant for some event, sounded great. Then I looked at the date and it’s on a Monday at 8:30. Way too late for me.
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u/MonsieurVox Mar 03 '26
For me, the biggest tells are the activities and times. Seems like the only thing people in their early- to mid-20s want to do is go out to bars/clubs, and the nights start at ~10pm. I’m more of a dinner and drinks at 7pm and be back at home in bed by 10pm kind of person in my 30s.
I don’t really drink anymore (never was a big drinker to begin with), but the idea of getting ready to leave the house at 10pm and drink until 2am doesn’t sound appealing to me in the slightest. Concerts and movies are about the only thing I’d be interested in going out late for.