2000s

Millennials, are you ready to go back in time to the days of throwing on super low-rise jeans and hitting the clubs (after a few pregame “cocktails,” aka Red Bull and Vodka) on any given weekend? Buckle up, the nostalgia is about to get so good.

Recently fellow millennial Jenna Barclay, whose social media bread and butter is all things nostalgic, had wondered aloud if Gen Zers still “went out” the way our generation once did, because, as she recalled, “when I was in college in the 2000s, going out was huge.” Just what did a typical night of “going out” look like as a millennial? Let Barclay paint a picture with flawless accuracy.

First, there’s the frequency. As Barclay explained, “Our whole week revolved around going out Thursday through Saturday. There's a whole ritual around it.” yup, that check outs.

Then there are the “phases” of a night out, with Phase 1 of course being “getting ready.”

“You would haul all of your cheap Forever 21, going-out outfit options over to your friend's crappy off-campus apartment. And you would get ready together while you drank Francia, or maybe whatever beer you had leftover from the weekend before, like, Keystone Light or Natty Ice. Maybe if somebody just got paid and you were feeling fancy, you had some liquor, like some UV blue that you would mix with soda inside a plastic cup from a gas station with a straw,” she said. Wow, it’s like she lived my life!

After getting ready, would come the “pregame” phase, which “was the first official stop of the night,” where the one and only mission would be to “get as drunk as humanly possible before you went to the main event of the evening.” This would normally be accomplished by a variety of drinking games, such as King’s Cup, Ride the Bus, Presidents and A**holes, etc.

Around 10 or 11 pm (when millennials today are in PJs and watching Love is Blind on Netflix) would be the actual going out phase. And if you’ve done your pregame ritual correctly, this would be when chaos sets in.

“When you were all sufficiently wasted, you would all decide it was time to go to the party. And by this point, you're blackout, basically. I mean, you've taken half a bottle of UV to the face and like drank seven Keystone Light, like you're gone. So, you don't wear a jacket. You're always severely underdressed for the weather. You're probably wearing some super cheap high heels from Charlotte Russe that are probably gonna break, and you go teetering across your crappy college town to some other crappy off-campus house where you mostly just stand in one spot,” said Barclay.

Finally, we have the final (and arguably most fun!) phase of the night: the drunken fast food run. “Taco Bell, Taco Cabana, Watta-Burger, Little Caesars, whatever. It didn't matter as long as you secured the food. And then you'd usually go back to the original spot, the place where you got ready with that group of people. You would eat your food and then you would pass out.” Not gonna lie, this is a phase I haven’t grown out of just yet.

But wait, the event isn’t technically over! Because there’s a lot the morning after phase, in which you and your friend would have to figure out what the heck happened during your night of debauchery.

Keep in mind, kids, that we didn’t have the same modern day conveniences as we do today. So finding out this valuable intel would require, as Barclay explained, “fishing out your digital camera, which you took with you to every stop the night before.”

“And you would hardwire that bad boy to your big, pink, clunky Dell laptop, and you would sit there for like three hours while all 465 pictures that you took the night before uploaded onto the computer. And then you would put them in a public Facebook album that you would call something like, ‘Nights We’ll Never Remember with People We’ll Never Forget.’ And then you would individually caption every single one of the pictures with something like, I don't know, ‘LOL, drunk.’ And then as the cherry on top, you would tag all of your friends in all of these pictures, the worst, the most unflattering photos that have been taken of any human since the dawn of the world. You would tag them in every single one. And then we would just repeat this all the next night.”

Ah. good time. Good times, indeed.

Unsurprisingly, millennials were quick to pounce on this video, and relive their youth a bit.

“Can we talk about how we played beer pong with beer actually IN the cup?! Chugging grass, dirt and all!” one person wrote, while another commented, “To ThE nIgHtS wE wOnT rEmEmBer 😂😂😂😂 literally titled like this. I literally had to go through my fb and untag myself from so many of these albums.”

Still another recalled that “being chosen as the ‘get ready’ house was such an honor.”

A few chimed in to debate which phase of the night was actually the best part. One person argued that “The pregame was always more fun than the actual party,” while another claimed “the group hangover couch rot the next day watching MTV was the best part.”

As far as whether or not Gen Zers enjoy going out the same way millennials did…I think we all know that times have changed. Blame it on coming of age during a pandemic, a rising interest in sobriety, having less disposable income, you name it…by and large, Gen Zers are more likely to host apartment game nights than actually going out. That said, there does seem to be a growing interest in nightlife. And the cool thing is, there’s infinitely more curated options available today, even plenty of clubs that cater to the sober curious. So folks today can have a night out of fun in perhaps healthier ways.

However, according to some Gen Zer’s the comment section of Barclays’ video, some of these questionable traditions live on.

“As a gen z in college at a SEC school trust we do the exact same thing except we go to bars after pre games (we play the same games as yall lol)” one youngster wrote.

Another said, “happy to report i did do this in college, from 2019-2023 :)❤️”

Some habits die hard. Clearly.