Why Teenagers Should Stop Clubbing
TLDR;
Stop clubbing. There’s practically no good that comes from it. You can waste up to 16 hours a week. Hours that you can dedicate to improving yourself, learning new skills, or just spending time with your family. Time compounds so the earlier you start learning and improving, the more successful you’ll be. Clubbing also empties your pockets. It’s also very bad for your health.
Introduction
There were many parties organized the week before I started university. It seemed like a good plan for me to get to know my future classmates and get out of my comfort zone. So, I bought tickets to a bunch of parties, spending almost $100. In the end, I didn’t attend a single one. And I will probably never attend one either. I encourage other teenagers to do the same. In this blog, I’ll explain why.
High Dopamine
Most of what teenagers have to do are boring and time-consuming tasks: studying, working, and learning new skills, . But, completing those little tasks, as boring as they are, gives us some rewards that encourage us to keep going. An extremely stimulating activity like clubbing desensitizes our dopamine baseline levels which makes these rewards feel minimal. As a result, studying, working, and anything productive becomes even more intolerably boring.
The teenage years are the most formative years of our lives. What we do in those years sets the path for the rest of our lives. In those years, we have more time and energy than we will ever have. We should use that energy productively and creatively. We have to use that time to study, work, and learn valuable skills that we can use later in life to build our dream careers. It’s a fact that teenagers agree with and are aware of, but it’s not easy to do. Studying, working, and learning new skills are boring tasks which can be tough in the beginning. Getting from 0 to 1 in anything is very hard and tiresome. The only way one can succeed is to normalize those boring, long hours of learning and applying a new topic in university, or a new skill like programming.
Waste of Time
Clubbing is one of the most time-wasting and useless activities that a teenager can do. It wastes a ton of time directly and indirectly. The time you waste directly when clubbing is getting dressed, the transport to the club, and the clubbing itself. I consider it all a waste of time because nothing productive comes out of it. Most people do a pre-clubbing routine where they gather with their friends and drink for a few hours before going clubbing. They start 2-3 hours before the club which starts around midnight and they usually come back home 4-5 AM. In total, they can waste up to 8 hours, a full working day. They normally do this twice a week, but maybe even more. So, in a single week, they potentially waste 16 hours, directly from clubbing. How much progress do you think you would make towards any goal if you dedicated it 16 hours a week? Even if you are a complete beginner, you will become a powerful programmer after a year of programming 16 hours a week. The same goes for anything else. You could learn to decently play the piano, paint, sing, or play Chess if you worked on it 16 hours a week for a year. And teenagers decide to waste that time. Like money, time compounds. You would have a much more successful career as a software engineer if you started learning programming at 16 instead of 22.
That’s not all. There’s also the indirect wastage of time and productivity that comes from clubbing. People get hangovers the day after they go clubbing. Meaning, they practically lose the day after clubbing as well since they can almost do nothing productive. It takes at least a day or two to get back to the normal productivity level. But there’s more. In Spain, clubs open at midnight. Depending on when you decide to leave, you’ll get home sometime between 5-7 AM. That’s when you normally wake up for your job, school, university, or any other type of responsibility you have. So you’ll go to sleep at 7 AM on Sunday and have to wake up at 6-7 AM on Monday. You can also count that day lost because you haven’t gotten any sleep.
So, all in all, most teenagers waste up to 16 hours a week directly from clubbing, and a few days going through life in “zombie mode”. This is precisely when they have to build the foundations of their life and careers.
Waste of Money
On the rare occasions that I forget my own advice and start looking for tickets to clubs, I stop almost immediately when calculating the prices of the adventure. The entrance ticket to the club is 20-25 euros. I have to get an Uber there and back because I can’t drive (obviously) and public transport would take forever. So it would cost me at least 50 euros for the night. Much more if I want some more drinks after I’ve finished the 2 that come with the ticket. If I were to do that twice a week, that would cost me 100-150 euros for the week. 400-600 euros per month. That’s double what I spend on my food. Everything I eat for a month costs less than that. Especially as a student, clubbing can become extremely expensive.
So, at the same time, you waste the time that you could’ve used to study, learn skills, and develop your career for success, and you put yourself in a worse financial position. It’s baffling to me how most teenagers choose this path.
I was also going to write about how clubbing (excess alcohol, messing up your circadian rhythm routinely, etc.) will have adverse effects on your health as well, but I think those are fairly obvious. At least, I hope they are.
Conclusion
To sum up, clubbing will waste a lot of your time, when it’s the most valuable your time ever will be. It’ll steal the time you’re supposed to dedicate to studying, working, or developing fundamental skills for your career. It’ll jack up your dopamine baseline, so you’re less inclined and motivated to dedicate the time to those activities in the time you have left over from clubbing. And it will empty your pockets, pretty fast and can lead to extremely regrettable decisions. The counter-argument I’ve heard is that “it’s hella fun”. I’ll leave the decision for the more convincing argument to you.