When Did Going Out Become a Performance?

HAS CLUB CULTURE BECOME TOO SELF-AWARE?

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There was a time when going out meant coming home with a story you probably wouldn't be racing to tell the family. These days, there's a decent chance the story has already made it onto someone's Instagram Story before you've even found your coat. But the way we party is changing for reasons that go beyond social media. Nights out are expensive, drinking habits are shifting, and even as pop music continues to celebrate the excess and escapism of club culture, the experience of actually going out seems to have become more complicated.

The nightclub has always been a place to be seen. The outfit, the entrance, the familiar faces across the room: none of this is particularly new. What's changed is the feeling that you're not just there to have a good time, but to think about how that good time looks to everyone else. Somewhere along the way, the performance has started competing with the experience itself.

First, there's the fairly unglamorous matter of money. Between tickets, drinks, taxis and the inevitable late-night kebab, a proper night out can take a considerable chunk out of a week's budget. For anyone paying London or Amsterdam rent, staying in starts to look less like antisocial behaviour and more like sound financial planning.

A 2024 Guardian report on the rise of what it called “Generation Stay-at-Home” explored how younger people are increasingly choosing home entertainment over traditional socialising, with rising costs, online alternatives and changing habits all playing a part. A separate Financial Times report on the decline of late-night clubbing pointed to venue closures, rising operating costs and a shift towards earlier events.

It's not exactly a mystery why someone might prefer a sofa, a decent sound system and a few friends over spending half the evening queueing for an overpriced drink. Nor does drinking less necessarily mean socialising less. Younger people are changing their relationship with alcohol, and the traditional nightclub, where a large part of the business model depends on selling it, has to reckon with that.

But money doesn't explain everything. If the only issue were cost, cheaper nights would solve it. Instead, there's a growing feeling that the idea of going out has changed, too.

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A night out used to have a relatively straightforward audience: the people who were there. You might embarrass yourself in front of a few dozen strangers, do a tactical chunder of your blue WKD, and subsequently become the subject of gossip the following morning via an unfortunate photo on somebody's digicam, but most of it stayed within the room. Now, everyone at the club has a camera in their pocket.

A video of someone dancing questionably, losing their temper or just looking a bit worse for wear can leave the club and circulate through group chats before the night is over. Even when nothing particularly embarrassing happens, the possibility is still there. You can be having a perfectly ordinary evening and still find yourself wondering how it looks from the other side of a screen.

There's also the pressure to look like you're having a good time. The outfit needs to work in photographs. The venue needs to be worth posting. The party needs to justify the price of admission, the journey across town and the hours spent getting ready. If you leave without a good picture, was it even a good night?

It's an absurd question, but one that social media has made surprisingly easy to ask.

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Clothes, music, dancing and the people you surround yourself with have long been ways of communicating who you are, or who you'd quite like to be. From punk to acid house, looking different and making a statement have often been part of the appeal.

People have always cared about how they look on a night out. The 1970s, 80s and 90s were hardly eras of throwing on whatever was lying on the floor and heading to a club. There's nothing wrong with wanting to look good, either. Putting an outfit together, taking a good photograph and feeling part of a scene can all be part of the fun.

The difference is what happens when the image starts to matter more than the experience itself. There's a particular kind of self-consciousness that comes with considering how everything looks from the outside. Nobody wants to be the person who cares too much. Nobody wants to look ridiculous.

The anxiety around this isn't entirely imagined. YPulse research has found that 57% of teenagers and 48% of young adults worry about looking “cringey” because someone might be filming them. Dancing involves looking a bit ridiculous sometimes. You get carried away, lose your rhythm, sing the wrong words or move in a way that would look strange if you stopped to think about it.

And yet, looking ridiculous is often part of having a good time. The dance floor asks for something that the rest of our lives increasingly discourage: a willingness to be seen without having complete control over how you're perceived. It's harder to lose yourself in music when part of your attention is still on how you might look to someone else. We're encouraged to express ourselves, but also to curate that expression; to have fun, but not in a way that might come back to embarrass us. There's a strange contradiction in being told to be yourself while constantly anticipating how that self might look on someone else's phone.

It's tempting to turn all of this into a generational complaint: young people don't go out any more, nobody drinks, nobody dances. Everyone's on their phone. The usual lament about “the kids”, delivered by people who have conveniently forgotten the many hours they spent sitting against a wall in a club, watching everyone else dance and pretending they were having a better time than they actually were.

It would be easy to conclude that young people have simply lost interest in partying, but pop music suggests something a little more complicated.

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Over the past few years, partying has found a new life in mainstream pop. Charli XCX's Brat turned club references, excess, drugs and nights out into a cultural moment, while Troye Sivan's Something to Give Each Other captured the intimacy, euphoria and messiness of a night spent dancing. Addison Rae's music has also leaned into a glossy, dance-pop version of having fun. Across these artists, partying is still presented as something desirable: a little reckless, a little hedonistic, and not necessarily something that needs to be justified the morning after.

There's an obvious appeal to this kind of music. It makes partying sound liberating: the night is young, the music is good, and nobody is particularly concerned with what happens next. But there's a difference between enjoying 365 through a pair of headphones and actually spending €80 on a night out.

If anything, it points to a strange split between the idea of partying and the reality of doing it. We still want the soundtrack, the clothes, the sense of release. Whether we want the expense and the queues is another story.

It's also about venues becoming less affordable, local scenes losing spaces, and a generation finding different ways to spend its time. The pandemic changed social habits, and streaming, gaming and online communities offer forms of entertainment that previous generations didn't have at the same scale. Nor should every young person be expected to want the same version of a night out. A packed club at 3am isn't necessarily more meaningful than a small gig, an early rave or a night spent with friends in someone's kitchen.

The more interesting question is what happens to the spaces where people can come together without needing to spend much, look a certain way or belong to a particular scene. What happens when nightlife becomes a luxury, or when the places that once gave a local music community its identity disappear? Those are bigger problems than whether people are dancing enough.

There's no need to romanticise the past. Clubs have always been full of posturing, bad behaviour and people more interested in being seen than hearing the music. The supposedly carefree nights of previous generations were never quite as carefree as the stories suggest. But there's still something worth protecting about the possibility of going somewhere and briefly forgetting yourself: a room full of strangers moving to the same music, without a shared agenda or any particular need to make sense of it afterwards.

The answer isn't to ban phones or demand that everyone dance like nobody's watching. It's to make nights out worth leaving the house for: affordable, welcoming, and centred on the music.