Summer 2025 may have the worst dancefloors we've ever seen in the history of raving

Here's a spicy forecast for you: Summer 2025 might well have the worst dancefloors we've ever seen in the history of raving -- because we're going to experience a once-in-a-lifetime combination of multiple factors.

The primary factor is demographics. Summer 2025 events for ages 18+ will, for the first time, open the doors to a cohort of very young ravers who are coming into the scene on the shakiest social skills foundations of any generation to date.

I feel for these folks. They're victims of circumstance and not bad humans. People turning ~18 this year were ~13 in 2020, at the start of the pandemic. Picture what their life was like:

  • Their parents were stressed by the crisis of having to adjust to work-from-home; many of their parents lost their jobs so the stress of the pandemic was especially acute
  • They were thrown into ineffective Zoom-based schooling, and they spent all day staring into screens that were poor substitutes for the classroom experience
  • They were handed mobile phones and ipads at greater rates by parents desperate to keep the kids off their backs so that the parents could get some work done (2021 iPhone unit sales hit a record that Apple hasn't returned to yet; iPad revenues also peaked in 2021)
  • There was a near total absence of in-person socialization at schools; they missed out on a lot of socialization time during the critical years of 13-15.
  • There was a marked decrease in outdoor leisure activities
  • School dances (proms, homecoming dances, social events) were cancelled
  • Their online time ramped up drastically -- "Nearly half of all teens now say that they are online almost all the time. That means around 16 hours per day—112 hours per week .... This kind of continuous use, often involving two or three screens at the same time, was simply not possible before kids carried touch screens in their pockets." -- Jon Haidt

The result for dancefloors is one we're already feeling and seeing reported here anecdotally -- folks who were 14, 15, and 16 when the pandemic started have been entering raves and dancefloors for the last three years and we've seen an uptick in complaints about antisocial behavior at raves, the primary complaints being clustered around a set of behaviors related to narcissism.

What I expect to see, generally, is more of what I've seen an uptick in these last few post-pandemic years (2022 to present) is more "main character syndrome" or self-centered behavior at the expense of collective experience -- in the DSM-5, this would be behaviors connected to narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), a personality disorder characterized by grandiosity, entitlement, and lack of empathy.

This shows up in a variety of ways. It could be as simple as not blowing your cigarette smoke into the air above your head, but instead into the crowd. It can show up as shoving their way through crowded dancefloors without concern or empathy for those they're shoving (see also: "trains" to the front of EDM concerts). It might involve yapping loudly for an opening act they're disinterested in seeing as they camp for the headliner. There are a hundred different ways this shows up in a live music setting.

This next group of folks who are turning 18 this year have essentially spent almost all of their years living a phone-based childhood, with the pandemic years kicking off for them an especially intense immersion period into phone-based childhood.

As a result, we can reasonably expect events marketed for ages 18+ to be especially full of folks who haven't yet learned appropriate pro-social behavior because they're literally the least socially experienced 18-year-olds our dancefloors have ever seen.

The folks turning 18 in 2025 aren't at fault -- they're victims of circumstance. But their inexperience, inadequate socialization, and obsessive relationship to their mobile devices is going to push some of our dancefloors to new lows as they get their rave feet under them.

What can we do about this? We can show them patience and kindness. We can help them find the correct behaviors by modeling those behaviors ourselves. We can also ask them to modify their behaviors -- though this tends to generate defensive backlash. We can be the party we want to see and hope that they notice who is having a good time and try to emulate that. And we can give them free molly. This last suggestion is of course a joke, for legal reasons.

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