I frown in the mirror, donned in a tiny black dress purchased off Vinted last year, and sigh. I looked nice, I can admit this, but a pulled muscle in my foot meant that I could hardly walk without limping and I was coming to terms with the fact that another night of rest might be better for healing my foot, rather than trekking to the club for the first time in… a while. 

“Unforch despite much stretching, I do not think my right foot is being cooperative enough to debut in 42s tonight :(( v v sorry, I hope we can 42s at some point in the near future!” I sent into the groupchat, unzipping my dress and replacing it with my oversized pyjamas. 

I slumped down into the sofa and unpaused ‘Motherland’. 

It felt hard to believe I turned 24 in less than two weeks when my nightly routine resembled more that of a 44 year old, complete with the random aches and pains that prevented me from having a night out on the town.

I scrolled Pinterest as Anna Maxwell Martin lamented the bore of Sports Day in the background, sporadically saving pins depicting glamorous nights out and feeling more and more like an inadequate 20-something.

Which is ridiculous, I know. 

I’m very fortunate to be in the position where my alternative to a night out is to be curled up on the sofa in a warm flat with a cup of tea, yet I can’t help but indulge in a little disappointment with myself for not making it out. When I was a teenager, I had imagined my twenties would be filled with clubbing in short dresses and platform heels, techno music and neon-coloured cocktails.

 Given how much of an introvert I was then (and still am), it’s a mystery as to why this fantasy appealed to me so much, and I can only attribute it to the expectation that this is what young people are supposed to want. 

But maybe this isn’t what this (my) generation of young people do want.

It’s frequently documented that Gen Z club less than their predecessors, with 26% of 16-25 year olds practising sobriety. A lack of socialisation during the Covid-19 Pandemic combined with a cost of living crisis is speculated to be the cause behind Gen Z’s dwindling interest in nights out, though others (such as my friends) have simply attributed the decline to bars playing shit music. Night club owners, take note.

This feeling of FOMO coupled with worrying attitudes regarding ageing plague my evenings, particularly when I scroll through TikTok comments and see 19 year olds panicking about turning 20 and officially being ‘old’.

Yeah, thanks for that. 

While I know that youth has always been highly coveted, I can’t help but feel we, as a society, have gone off the deep-end when it comes to preserving it, what with the under-10s asking for skincare for Christmas (I was going to link a TikTok as proof but I feel icky linking to a video of a child using retinol) and the rise of ‘preventative botox’. 

The normalisation of injectables among young adults has turned the idea of ageing gracefully into an unpopular concept, a topic quite brilliantly represented in the 2024 movie, ‘The Substance’, though unfortunately misunderstood by audiences as fans point at older celebrities and compare them to younger starlets, insisting that the latter is the substance-induced product of the former. 

Like idk, I feel like anyone doing that probably missed the whole fucking point of the movie.

Anyway, that’s where I’m at, emotionally. My youth is slipping (or already slipped, depending who you ask) away and I have wasted it by not going to the club and instead watching Netflix in an oversized dressing gown from Next (which is insanely comfy tbf, thanks mum xx).

I open TikTok on mute so I can still hear Amanda shrieking at Johnny for putting their house on the market, scrolling through videos of cats and ‘What I eat in a Day’ videos that could qualify as ProAna content. Eventually and serendipitously, I happen upon this video, from @lucycouture333