I am a fresher who hates clubbing. Nope, that’s not an oxymoron, I genuinely do not enjoy clubbing. At all. It’s claustrophobic, you can’t actually hear to speak to anyone, it’s easy to lose your friends and to top it all off  (from a student point of view), it’s SO EXPENSIVE! If you’re a student and can afford to pay £4.80 for a single vodka and mixer then I bow to you, but for the majority this isn’t the case. So there you go- clubbing, in my experience, leaves you alone, deaf, and in debt. Obviously I am exaggerating here; there is, evidently, an abundance people who love clubbing (hence the massive crowds), and in this lies the problem. At uni, it is unbelievably easy to feel as though you have no choice BUT to go clubbing. With club nights every evening of Freshers’ Week, and almost every person you’ve met going, you can be made to feel that if you DON’T go you’ll be missing out on the vital ‘getting to know each other’ stage and will end up at the end of the race to make as many friends as possible. Well, A) it’s not a race, and B) I can say from personal experience that NOT going clubbing does not put at any kind of disadvantage in terms of making friends.

As a well known “club hater” (ask any of my friends), I only went clubbing twice in Freshers’ week, and both resulted in me wishing I was in bed less than an hour into the night. That’s not because I had bad company, but just because I’m not a fan of the atmosphere inside a club. Each time, I ended up asking myself the same question: why am I here when I KNOW that I don’t like clubbing? And the answer, both times, was pressure. Not pressure from any one specifically- it was entirely my own choice to go out both times- but just pressure to fit in, pressure to conform to standards which don’t really exist anywhere except in our own heads. And so really, this post is about more than just my personal hatred for clubbing. It’s about why young people, in fact all people, feel the need to do things which we don’t actually enjoy doing just because society has made us think that we should. Which, if you think about it, is ridiculous. I love all of my flatmates, and I have lots of friends on my course- none of whom I have met through clubbing.

And so, I am making a pledge to myself that as of now, I will no longer spend £10 on a ticket to a club unless I KNOW that I am going to have fun, because it will inevitably result in leaving early and having to pay a ridiculous price for a taxi fare. I am no longer going to stress that people will find me ‘boring’, or ‘uncool’, just because I don’t go out every night, because at the end of the day if people can’t except that that’s who I am, then they’re not really people I want to be friends with anyway. And this is something that I encourage everyone to do, whether it’s clubbing that you don’t enjoy, or sport, or wearing what society considers “normal”. If you don’t like it, don’t do it. Life is too short to spend time doing things which don’t make us happy.

Megan x