Why my generation is the last of the hedonists
For millennials, sex, drugs and alcohol are increasingly unpopular. Are they finding their dopamine hits online instead?
More celebrated examples include space travel, Ulysses, anaesthetic and the vote but, all the same, a night out is a miracle of civilisation. No other species generates the surplus resources to wallow in sensory pleasure at will. Even ours got there a millisecond ago in historical time.
If we sometimes forget the recency of mass-market hedonism, perhaps we overrate its future, too. Consider the well-documented abstention of the young: America’s millennial homebodies, the near-third of British 16- to 24-year-olds who refuse alcohol, their avoidance of illicit drugs, the “sexual recession”. Thus did the shuttered nightclub become this decade’s video-rental chain in receivership.
As children of the crash, the New Spartans are taken for economic trauma victims, conscious that each pound spent on transient joys is not spent on the vicious struggle for work and housing. If this exaggerates their material plight, it does at least imply an eventual comeback for hedonism. Economies are cyclical.
The thought cheers, but without quite erasing fears of something larger at work. The first generation to come of age after the crash is also the first cohort of genuine digital natives. Often defined as all those under 18 on December 31 1999, “millennials” are, in truth, two distinct groups: we who were well into our conscious lives before we got our first squawking dial-up connection and those who imbibed the internet as mother’s milk.
At the risk of speaking for millions, the first group tends to an instrumental view of tech: it is there to arrange personal gatherings, and improve the time in between. The emergent suspicion is that, for younger millennials, digital contact with others is socialising.
If this were a change in fashion or habit, it would be reversible. The dread, as voiced by Sean Parker, among others, is a deeper re-wiring of the brain so that it registers the same stimulus from remote interaction as from drugs and physical intimacies. Hence the generational decline in both. If this is going on, it is not just hard to reverse, it is liable to accelerate. Imagine the millennials’ children.
The point is not to stoke a moral panic so much as put forward a thesis. There is a fair chance that mine will be the last generation of hedonists, at least in the familiar sense of that term. The 1980s is the last time a person could be born in the west without being a psychological creature of the internet. In their definition of a good time, then, a child of that decade might resemble a 1960s louche or Jazz Age flapper more than someone born just the other side of 1990.
If so, the decline of clubs — nine years into a general economic expansion, remember, and amid near-full employment — is likelier to be secular than cyclical.
History has thrown up these ruptures before: generations divided along the knife’s edge of a new invention. Think of the difference in teenagers just before and just after the advent of the pill. The world did not cave in. Nor is it clear that Generation Sensible is losing out. The internet’s “social-validation feedback loop” (Parker’s phrase) seems insidious to we who grew up without it. But teetotal Instagrammers will wonder if alcohol is any smarter a way of flooding human dopamine receptors. As for the decline in sex, teenage pregnancies have been falling in England and Wales for a decade.
It just adds up to the harmless if jarring spectacle of the old out-carousing the young. The ease with which I befriend my seniors could speak to a formidable Macron-in-the-classroom maturity on my part. The data suggest something nearer the opposite: I socialise with older people because they are liable to socialise.
The opening to this column, in fact, was prompted by a Generation X-er. “I know it’s absurd to say that human development has been driving towards a night at Frenchie,” he said, over wine at the London restaurant. “But human development has been driving towards a night at Frenchie.” His generation’s hedonism trickled down to mine, and perhaps no further.