Why Aren’t Young People Going Out Anymore?

Something I’ve noticed more and more over the last few years is just how few young people seem to be going out.

I live in a lively town. It’s not London or another major capital city, but it’s certainly not some tiny village where nothing happens. There are pubs, bars, restaurants and plenty of places to go.

Yet whenever I walk into my local pub, almost everyone seems to be over 40.

Go somewhere busier on a Friday or Saturday night and the crowd gets a little younger, but even then I’d say the overwhelming majority of people I see are over 30.

It didn’t used to be like this.

Years ago, pubs and bars were packed with people in their late teens and twenties. Going out was simply part of being young. You met your friends, bumped into people you knew, met people you didn’t know, flirted, argued, laughed, embarrassed yourself and occasionally met someone who ended up becoming important to you.

Now a huge part of that has disappeared.

The usual explanation is that going out has become too expensive.

And yes, it has. Drinks are expensive. Taxis are expensive. Restaurants are expensive. Rent and practically everything else are expensive.

But I don’t think that comes close to explaining what we are seeing.

The bigger change is much more fundamental:

Young people no longer feel the same need to go out.

And that matters far more than the price of a pint.

We Have Moved Social Life Onto a Screen

For most of human history, if you wanted social interaction, you had to physically go somewhere.

You had to leave your house.

If you were bored on a Friday night, you couldn’t lie in bed scrolling through hundreds of videos made by hundreds of people. You couldn’t message ten friends simultaneously. You couldn’t open Instagram and see what everyone you knew was supposedly doing. You couldn’t spend three hours watching TikTok.

Being alone was actually being alone.

That created an incentive to get up, get dressed and go somewhere.

Technology has removed much of that incentive.

A person can now spend an entire evening consuming an endless stream of human faces, voices, stories, messages and entertainment without having a meaningful interaction with another human being.

It feels social enough to scratch the itch.

But it isn’t the same thing.

And I think that distinction explains far more about the decline of nightlife than people want to admit.

What Changed?

There isn’t one single cause, but I think several things have happened at the same time:

• Social media has become a substitute for socialising. People can feel connected to friends all day without actually seeing them. Messages, group chats, stories, likes and videos provide a constant low-level simulation of social contact.

• Entertainment no longer requires leaving the house. There has never been more entertainment immediately available to someone sitting alone in a bedroom. TikTok, YouTube, Netflix, gaming, streaming and social media can occupy every spare minute of the day.

• Our lives have become increasingly performative. There is a strange phenomenon now where documenting an experience can become almost as important as having it. People travel alone, photograph themselves somewhere beautiful and upload the perfect selection of images. The online version of the experience becomes part of the purpose of the experience.

• We increasingly build avatars of ourselves. Instagram in particular encourages people to create a carefully edited version of their lives: the right holidays, clothes, restaurants, body, friends and experiences. Maintaining that digital identity can start competing with actually building a messy, imperfect life with other people.

• Dating has moved online. One of the oldest reasons young people went out was incredibly simple: to meet someone. Bars, clubs, parties and social events created opportunities for romance and sex. Dating apps and social media have moved a huge amount of that process onto phones.

• Friendships themselves have become digitised. People can maintain dozens of relationships without meeting those people for weeks or months. Previous generations simply didn’t have that option.

• Young people have grown up with this as normal. Someone who is 45 or 50 remembers a childhood and adolescence before smartphones and algorithmic social media. Someone who is 20 may barely remember a world without them. These aren’t simply two generations using different technologies. They developed their social habits in fundamentally different environments.

And that last point is perhaps the most important.

Why Are Older People Still Going Out?

When I look around a pub and see people in their forties, fifties and sixties, I don’t think it’s a coincidence.

These are generations who learned that maintaining friendships means physically seeing people.

They learned that if you’re lonely, you ring someone and meet them. If you want to find out what’s happening in someone’s life, you sit opposite them and talk. If you want to meet new people, you put yourself in situations where strangers are present.

Those habits were established before Instagram and TikTok existed.

Younger generations have been offered an alternative from an incredibly early age.

The phone says: you don’t need to go anywhere.

Your friends are here.

Entertainment is here.

Dating is here.

Pornography is here.

Games are here.

News is here.

Validation is here.

Attention is here.

Everything is here.

Except, of course, another person.

We Are Replacing Companionship With Content

This is the part I find most disturbing.

We spend a lot of time talking about whether artificial intelligence will eventually replace human relationships. Will people have AI girlfriends? AI boyfriends? AI friends? Will people become emotionally attached to machines?

Maybe.

But perhaps we’re missing something that’s already happened.

We have already started replacing companionship with content.

Instead of meeting people, we watch people.

Instead of telling a friend about our lives, we post our lives.

Instead of having experiences purely because we want them, we increasingly turn experiences into material for an audience.

And when we’re lonely, there is always another video.

Another reel.

Another notification.

Another person talking into a camera.

Another little hit of something that feels vaguely like human company.

The danger isn’t necessarily that everyone consciously decides they prefer TikTok to their friends. It is that digital substitutes make loneliness sufficiently tolerable that we don’t take the actions that used to cure it.

And Then There’s the Price Argument

Of course going out is expensive.

But I think we may sometimes confuse cause and effect.

Pubs and bars have enormous fixed costs. Rent, wages, energy, insurance, stock and taxes don’t disappear because fewer people walk through the door.

If a venue once had a constant stream of younger customers and now relies heavily on a smaller group of regular customers, it cannot necessarily slash its prices to attract people back. It still has bills to pay.

So declining attendance and rising prices can reinforce each other.

Fewer customers make hospitality businesses harder to sustain. Businesses raise prices or cut costs to survive. Going out becomes less attractive. Fewer people go out.

It’s a vicious circle.

And if the underlying problem is that a generation doesn’t particularly want to spend Friday night in a pub anyway, making beer slightly cheaper isn’t going to reverse a massive cultural change.

This Is Bigger Than Pubs

The pub is really just the visible symptom.

What we’re talking about is the gradual disappearance of what sociologists sometimes call “third places”: places outside home and work where people simply exist around other people.

Pubs. Cafés. Clubs. Community centres. Churches. Sports clubs. Local events. Even shopping centres and high streets.

These places used to generate countless accidental interactions.

You bumped into somebody.

Someone introduced you to someone else.

You overheard a conversation.

You became a regular.

You recognised faces.

You developed a sense that you belonged somewhere.

None of those interactions looked particularly important at the time. Collectively, though, they formed the social fabric of a community.

An algorithmic feed can’t reproduce that.

The Consequences Are Becoming Harder to Ignore

The debate about the effect of social media on young people is no longer confined to worried parents complaining about phones.

In the United States, courts and governments have been grappling with allegations that some of the world’s largest technology companies designed products in ways that encouraged compulsive use among children and teenagers.

That doesn’t prove that social media alone explains every change in young people’s mental health, relationships or social behaviour. Obviously it doesn’t.

But it should put an end to the idea that questioning what these platforms have done to childhood and social life is somehow hysterical or anti-technology.

These companies have built some of the most powerful behavioural systems ever created, and their business models depend heavily on keeping people’s attention.

Every hour spent scrolling is an hour that has to come from somewhere.

What Have We Actually Gained?

Technology has made communication unbelievably convenient.

I can speak to someone on the other side of the planet instantly. I can maintain friendships that geography would once have destroyed. I can discover communities of people interested in obscure things that nobody around me cares about.

Those are genuine benefits.

But convenience isn’t the same thing as connection.

A group chat isn’t sitting around a table.

A like isn’t affection.

A follower isn’t necessarily a friend.

Watching someone’s life isn’t knowing them.

And being constantl