Why Can’t We Have Fun Anymore? · Eliza Rose Power

Written by Eliza Rose Power · Artwork by Beca Summers

My generation are having less sex, drinking less alcohol, and having less fun than every generation before us - and we’re not actually very happy about it.

I know what you’re thinking, drinking less and fewer lifetime cases of chlamydia is hardly a bad thing. And I’m not trying to say it is. What I’m worried about is that our increasing propensity for mental and physical ‘wellness’ seems to be coinciding with a very real crisis in pleasure. In trying to make ourselves feel better, from the inside out as it were, we’re holding ourselves to standards of behaviour that are, quite frankly, ruining our fun. Rather than for the sake of hangoverfree Sundays and early morning gym sessions, it seems we’re choosing sensibleness over hedonism because we’re deathly afraid of what other people are going to think of us if we act outside of these standards.

It’s not surprising that the ‘clean girl’ aesthetic has taken off in this day and age. The clean girl doesn’t get messy drunk, fall down stairs, or apologetically throw up in Ubers. She rarely drinks, has porcelain skin and a capsule wardrobe, and critically, doesn’t ever upset her friends or family. Now, we could argue it’s about the aesthetic alone — claw clips and gold hoops over minimalist matching activewear — but I think it’s the personality that people are really desperate to emulate. Prudent, disciplined, and effortlessly flawless in every aspect of their lives. It’s also not surprising, then, that this character rarely exists in real life. Humans are complex and flawed, arguably more so than ever in our late teens and early twenties, and we’re not meant to be getting everything right like it can appear some people are on social media.

In the advent of constant social media policing, then, I fear our reluctance to go out and have fun is a product of worrying what we’re going to appear like to others. We’ve all heard some variation of ‘your twenties are there to make mistakes’, but do any of us nowadays actually afford ourselves the space to do so — without being so critical of ourselves that we’re left with debilitating anxiety, or indeed hangxiety, the following day?

Built over years of tearful phone calls detailing what I’d done the night before and sharing the very strong conviction that absolutely no one would ever love me again, my older sister — a millennial — thinks these thoughts are just a product of my own insecurities. That I am so uniquely critical of myself that it’s just me that can’t go out and enjoy myself. But I can’t help but notice this unease around letting loose is expanding far wider than those of us with fragile mental states and especially crippling cases of ‘what will everyone think-itis.’ What to her would have been routine behaviour for a normal, albeit slightly chaotic, night out in the early 2010s, for many of us, it would seem, is an example of our unparalleled moral failing.

It’s not that I want us to keep doing more ‘reckless’ things if they make us feel bad. But can we call this progression towards wellness ‘progress’ if our avoidance of going out or having uninhibited fun comes not from a place of self-love, but from a fear of ruining our perfectly curated public image? It seems the performativity once reserved just for Instagram has seeped into reality, creating a pressure to appear like the perfect student, friend, and partner on and off the screen.

In a culture characterised by oversharing (you need only to momentarily flick through TikTok to work this out), we’re exposing ourselves to the opinions of others and priming ourselves to be influenced by such, more so now than ever. Not only through the responses to our own content, but by absorbing the scrutiny faced by influencers, content creators and other individuals in the public eye. Research has found that this constant social media policing has had more of an effect on our own self-worth and selfesteem than ever before. Whilst not the fault of the individual, our increasingly puritanical virtual culture seems to be hurting us in our actual, real-life, culture.

Like most things in life, the answer to this dilemma appears to be the notoriously elusive concept of ‘balance’. More so than ever, it’s important to achieve a balance between those selfcare Sundays and fun nights out — selfgrowth and self-compassion. This starts with being kinder to ourselves when our behaviour doesn’t perfectly match up to the expectations set by the infamous, if not entirely unrealistic, ‘clean girl’.