Back in 2003 Americans spent 3 hours per month at parties. It’s only half that now, just an hour and a half per month.
The shift is mostly driven by changes in the group that used to party the most: young people.
Based on Gallup surveys, in the early 2000s 72% of people under the age of 35 drank alcohol. That number has dropped to 61% today.
This reflects young people having less of a social life overall. In the 1980s, more than 80% of twelfth graders went out of the house with friends twice or more per week. Today that number has fallen to just over half.
Yet if you look at national-level results, drinking levels are more or less steady. That means that older generations are picking up the slack.
Likewise, while the national average time partying has fallen by half in the overall population, it’s fallen by 70% among young people.
You could put this down to cultural trends like COVID and digitalisation. Older age groups are perhaps celebrating more because the more hedonistic Gen X and Boomers are replacing the generations that came before them.
There are also economic explanations. As rentier capital squeezes the non-asset class, there is less space for those people to manoeuvre. Physically and financially squeezed, crammed into sharehouses and with fewer owning homes of their own, there is simply less possibility for younger generations to experience “excess”.
What’s not usually considered in these conversations is changing human biology. Sexual hormones – specifically testosterone for men and estradiol for women – are major factors in risk-taking and reward-driven human behaviours.
It’s widely known that testosterone levels amongst men have been falling for three decades, perhaps due to xenoestrogens like microplastics and the ubiquitous hormone disruptors, PFAS. Young women are also affected by PFAS, although the likely behavioural impact is less clear-cut.
Whatever the causes, it is clearly a different world to what it used to be. Many of the usual cultural clichés no longer apply.
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