Why Young People's Normal Habits Are Now Unbearable

The leisure activities of your 20s that you abandon with age

It is half past eleven, and someone calculates aloud how long it takes to get home and go to bed. Fifteen years ago, you were the last to leave. What used to seem normal for young people and is now rejected has ceased to be a private anecdote and has become a recognizable pattern: mass leisure, staying up late, filler conversation, and obligatory trips are falling off the list. It is not just about age. It is a settling of scores with a lifestyle model that promised more than it delivers.

Clubs, festivals, and drinking in the street: the leisure that no longer compensates

It is not an abstract rejection of partying. It is the concrete cost described by a participant: sweating like a pig, going deaf, shouting to order a drink, and waiting fifteen minutes to pay an exorbitant price for a jug. Botellón (street drinking), weed, commercial music, and packed clubs are among the abandoned activities. The complaint is not sarracena; it is about cost and physical exhaustion.

There is one noted exception: metal festivals, which some maintain as an annual week to let loose, act wild like they are twenty-five, and then return orderly to routine, always in a campsite. Others admit that half an hour in a crowded venue leaves them in a terrible mood. And a warning from another forum user: if you seek tranquility, there is no quiet place at any hour.

The cultural repertoire that ages poorly

Movies about the neuroses of those who have never truly suffered — Woody Allen’s cinema is the cited example —, novelists and poets with a weekly column, singer-songwriters who used to move you but now leave you indifferent, such as Sabina or Serrat, or anyone linked to the Madrid Movement (a cultural and musical movement in Spain during the late 1970s and early 1980s). The underlying reproach is generational: it is argued that Spain overvalues people in the humanities because it is a country with little scientific culture. Some go further and place the decline of domestic cinema in the 1960s and 1970s.

Couple dinners, filler chat, and the group’s silence

Gatherings where no one is entirely themselves in front of other couples. People who talk a lot without saying anything. Those who only appear to criticize others. A change in habits repeats with precision: dinners with friends have become lunches, and long-duration exotic trips have become short getaways.

There is a small detail that portrays the era well: when someone raises a serious topic in the messaging group, the group goes mute. Only jokes and memes seem permitted.

From young votes to rejection of all acronyms

Here the arc is explicit. Left-wing enthusiasm until thirty, right-wing sympathy until fifty, and after that, rejection of both. Another response suggests that youthful enthusiasm has transformed into a frontal rejection of the left. In between appears a much-debated nostalgia: the idea that those who grew up in Francoism and drifted to the left were normal people reacting against real abuses of the regime — classism, cronyism, corruption — and that this lineage has been diluting. There is no agreement, and that is the data.

Work, rowing, and early retirement

Enduring a boss in an office. Acting in a specific way to please others. Keeping the person above happy. Also taxes: when young, you barely work, and the fiscal paycheck does not hurt. Some truly hate only going to work, and they hated it when they were young.

The twist comes with the accumulated paycheck. Those who were proud of never being without a job now think only of early retirement after thirty years and living as far as possible from a rowing machine. Hope for the country’s future, in one participant’s words, has been replaced by a much more modest interest: yourself and a few other people.

Christmas, summer, and holidays: the calendar of weariness

Christmas repeatedly appears among the most rejected: fake benevolence, reckless consumption, family and social obligations, and an artificially prolonged duration that adults endure with a false smile while children and young people celebrate it. Summer trinc closely: two weeks of travel to a crowded destination and the rest sweating, with the added burden of being an oddity if you decide not to move. Travel, for some, has gone from a plan to an obligation.

The repeated alternative is not exotic: home, a book, short getaways to the Pyrenees or Picos de Europa, and preferring autumn and spring to the high season. One person has replaced New Year’s Eve with the Vienna Concert.

Maturity, depression, or simple fed-upness?

The question runs through the issue from start to finish. Some read it as depression. The most repeated answer is different: it is strange not to be fed up, and the one who boasts most about plans is the one who suffers stillness the worst. The temptation of Diogenes and his barrel appears, the phrase that solitude is the price of wisdom, and the balance of someone who, after reviewing childhood, youth, and maturity according to standards, finds only emptiness. There is also the colder thesis: most of what people do at any age lacks meaning.

With that material, there is no closed conclusion. A domestic figure persists that does hold up: half a life without lacking work and a single declared aspiration: early retirement. Not maturity, nor depression. Someone did the math and found the plan did not fit in the body.