Night Clubs Are a Lie

I’ve never been to the club in your selfie

Hanging out with some people, a friend’s birthday party. ‘Round about midnight, some have a plan to go hit a club, and they ask me if I’m coming. Nope, I’m heading home. Thanks for the invite, though.

They ask a couple times, not because they aren’t sure about my commitment to going home, but just as an encouragement to reconsider. Could be fun.

But no, I’m going home. And I joke that I’m old and tired. But that’s not really it. I’m not particularly sleepy or anything. If anything, I’m a bit wired from all the socializing I’ve done up to then. I’ll probably go home, pour myself a bowl of cereal, play Batman: Arkham Knight a little bit, maybe watch some Netflix, and probably scroll through Reddit in bed before finally going to sleep. I won’t be asleep for another two hours or more, plenty of time in which I could have gone to the club to find out if it’s worth staying up until daylight hours.

Given that sometimes I lie in bed and stare at the ceiling, wondering if I’ve made some wrong choices that have led me to live alone, taking the less social option seems counter to some of my more general life ambitions. Although I’ve gotten better in recent years at cultivating friendships that keep me afloat, I could definitely stand to meet some more people.

And that right there is the start of the problem. The idea that built into going to the club is the potential or promise of meeting people. Why assume that’s a part of it? Instead of it just being about me going with the friends I’m currently hanging with to just drink or dance or whatever.

Partly because there isn’t a scene in any movie or TV show ever made where anyone ever goes to a club or bar and does not meet someone new. It may work out as a smash cut to the next scene where they wake up in bed together, it may be a spectacular failure in getting rejected that’s played for comedic effect, it can be all sorts of scenes in between. Some counter example probably exists somewhere, but casually scanning through the database in my brain of every scene I can remember in any show of people going out to clubs or bars, the vast majority of media representation of “night life” depicts it as an opportunity to interact with new people.