This Millennial Wants To Know If College Kids Even "Go Out" Anymore

Let’s go back in time for a second. It’s 2005. You’re blasting, “Lose Control” by Missy Elliott from your dorm as you straighten your hair that will surely be burnt to a crisp. You have a mixed drink of Gatorade and Burnett’s Vodka. You’re pre-gaming for the pre-game, and life is good.

One millennial on TikTok, Jenna Barclay, who posts tons of nostalgic content, asked her followers if they knew if kids these days still “went out” on the weekends like we used to do, or if things have changed in the past couple of decades.

“Like do young people even go out anymore? Because when I was young, like when I was in college in the 2000s, going out was huge,” she explained.

“Our whole week revolved around going out Thursday through Saturday. There's a whole ritual around it.”

Barclay then dives into the standard routine of “going out” in the ‘00s, which consisted of different “phases.”

“It started with the getting ready. You would haul all of your cheap Forever 21, going-out outfit options over to your friend's crappy off-campus apartment. And you would get ready together while you drank Francia, or maybe whatever beer you had leftover from the weekend before, like, Keystone Light or Natty Ice. Maybe if somebody just got paid and you were feeling fancy, you had some liquor, like some UV blue that you would mix with soda inside a plastic cup from a gas station with a straw,” she said. “You would get ready, and then you would go as a group to the pregame.”

Oh, the accuracy!

“This was the first official stop of the night, and the object of the pregame was to get as drunk as humanly possible, okay? As drunk as humanly possible before you went to the main event of the evening,” she explained before giving some examples of drinking games millennials used to play like King's Cup, Ride the Bus, or Presidents and A**holes.

Finally, around 10 or 11 pm, it was time to actually “go out.”

“When you were all sufficiently wasted, you would all decide it was time to go to the party. And by this point, you're blackout, basically. I mean, you've taken half a bottle of UV to the face and like drank seven Keystone Light, like you're gone. So, you don't wear a jacket. You're always severely underdressed for the weather. You're probably wearing some super cheap high heels from Charlotte Russe that are probably gonna break, and you go teetering across your crappy college town to some other crappy off-campus house where you mostly just stand in one spot,” she continued.

“Drinking the worst beer you have ever tasted out of a $5 plastic cup for the keg that always ran out super fast. And once it did, it didn't matter because you got wasted at the pregame.”

And lastly, she hones in on the final stop of the night: the quest for drunk food.

“Taco Bell, Taco Cabana, Watta-Burger, Little Caesars, whatever. It didn't matter as long as you secured the food. And then you'd usually go back to the original spot, the place where you got ready with that group of people. You would eat your food and then you would pass out,” she said.

After a night of going out, millennials would then dish on the previous evening, piecing together the night, and then going through all the photos from our digital cameras.

“Then, you would fish out your digital camera, which you took with you to every stop the night before. And you would hardwire that bad boy to your big, pink, clunky Dell laptop, and you would sit there for like three hours while all 465 pictures that you took the night before uploaded onto the computer. And then you would put them in a public Facebook album that you would call something like, ‘Nights Will Never Remember with People Will Never Forget.’ And then you would individually caption every single one of the pictures with something like, I don't know, ‘LOL, drunk.’ And then as the cherry on top, you would tag all of your friends in all of these pictures, the worst, the most unflattering photos that have been taken of any human since the dawn of the world. You would tag them in every single one. And then we would just repeat this all the next night.”

I feel sufficiently called out. And apparently others who watched Barclay’s video felt the same way.

“The pregame was always more fun than the actual party,” one user said.

Another said, “I'm glad this was a universal millennial experience”

One user said, “Can we talk about how we played beer pong with beer actually IN the cup?! Chugging grass, dirt and all!”

Finally, a Gen Z TikTok user weighed in and said, “Idk how I ended up on millennial tiktok but as a gen z in college at a SEC school trust we do the exact same thing except we go to bars after pre games (we play the same games as yall lol)”

Another young person said, “happy to report i did do this in college, from 2019-2023 :)❤️”

So glad to see that these wonderful (and not at all worrisome) traditions still live on, at least for some of the youth!