Why is everyone throwing a huge party?

I turn 30 next month, and I have spent an indeterminate number of hours thinking about it. Not about being 30 — that part I’m fine with, or at least I’ve decided to be fine with it, which is close enough.

I mean the event of turning 30: Whether there even needed to be one, and what it was supposed to look like, and who I was supposed to invite, and whether I’d feel worse doing something or doing nothing.

The answer, apparently, is that I have to do something. I did a cursory search into getting a bar tab somewhere in Brooklyn and discovered that it is surprisingly easy to spend the equivalent of a used Honda Civic (or a three-week trip to Europe) celebrating the fact that you managed to remain alive for another year.

Over the past few years, the humble birthday party has been undergoing something of an arms race, following the ranks of the wedding and the bachelorette.

Spending on non-traditional milestones has exploded over the past decade, and it’s happening at exactly the moment when the traditional milestones (the house, the wedding, the kid) have drifted out of reach for a huge number of people. We are watching a generation replace unattainable markers of adulthood with purchasable ones, and the party industry has been extremely happy to help.

Welcome to the birthdayzilla economy

The Guardian ran a piece this summer about what it called “birthdayzillas” — people whose birthdays now require guests to book flights, clear long weekends, take over cabins upstate or villas in Mykonos, and adhere to a strict dress code, of course. Attending one of these can cost a guest anywhere from a few hundred dollars for a domestic weekend to several thousand for the international multi-day version, which is to say that going to your friend’s birthday now costs roughly what a vacation used to.

The milestone party as a consumer category is skyrocketing. There are divorce parties, pet birthdays, proms that cost more than weddings, graduation trips, half birthdays, and more. The first birthday party particularly has started approaching wedding-level production value, with balloon installations and rented venues and very, very aesthetic themes.

People have always thrown parties to signal status, but it feels like more and more of ordinary life requires an event. And the event increasingly requires a concept, an aesthetic, and a considerable amount of money.

A quick caveat before I get cynical

Weddings and babies have historically received a wildly disproportionate share of society’s ceremonial attention, and there is no good reason that getting married should automatically deserve a room full of flowers while graduating from medical school, leaving a terrible marriage or maintaining a friendship for twenty years gets drinks after work. A broader definition of what counts as a life worth celebrating is probably overdue, IMO.

But I do think it’s worth exploring the sheer amount of consumerism wrapped up in these events, the societal expectations that have ballooned (pun intended) thanks to social media, and what it means that the ceremonies we’re inventing all happen to be things you buy.

The timing of this expansion dovetails with an economy that is getting harder and harder to actually build a life in. It’s happening as the milestones that traditionally organized adulthood are being pushed later, becoming more expensive or disappearing from some people’s lives completely.

At the same time, the institutions that used to tell us where we were in our lives have weakened. We still have a very normal human need to mark time, progress and belonging. Increasingly, we are satisfying that need by inventing our own rituals, and then paying for them.

The milestones moved, and so did the spending

There’s a story about younger generations that goes something like this: Gen Z and millennials have rejected the traditional markers of adulthood. They don’t want houses or weddings or children. They would rather spend $400 at a music festival, eat out for every single meal and own seventeen Labubus.

But most younger Americans haven’t radically changed their definition of success so much as rescheduled it. Ipsos found that Gen Z and millennials are actually more likely than older generations to associate marriage or full-time work with success: 70% still plan to own a home, half still expect to become parents. They want the same things; they just expect to reach them later, differently, or with substantially more difficulty.

The Census Bureau tells a similar story. In 1975, 45% of Americans ages 25 to 34 had achieved the classic package of adulthood: moving out, working, getting married and having children. By 2024, fewer than a quarter had done all four, and the most common combination today is simply being employed and living independently, without marriage or children.

But culturally, our expectations have not caught up. Americans still say the ideal age to buy a home is around 29, while the median first-time buyer is 38. So now, you can be 30, have a career and pay your own bills and still feel as though adulthood hasn’t begun because you rent your home and have no spouse or child.

I’ve written before about the Peter Pan economy: young adults staying in a kind of extended youth because the economics of growing up stopped working.

If the milestones move, the culture around the milestones moves too. And when the gap between the things you can afford now and the things you’re supposedly saving for becomes too big, delayed gratification gets much harder to sell. Why skip the trip, dinner or birthday party to save another $1,000 toward a down payment that needs to be $200,000?

Northwestern Mutual’s research found that 72% of Gen Z and 56% of millennials have delayed a major life event for financial reasons. More grimly: 71% of Gen Z and 60% of millennials worry they may never be able to afford certain milestones at all. When the future feels less guaranteed, spending shifts toward the things you can actually have.

Which is how spending becomes episodic. People cut back on the day-to-day and then go absolutely feral on a handful of emotionally significant events a year. A recent survey found that 76% of Americans planning to travel this year expected at least one trip to revolve around a milestone. Among Gen Z and millennial travelers, it was nearly 90%. Birthdays were the most common reason.

We have a ritual problem

Birthdays are psychologically powerful for a reason. Research on “temporal landmarks” finds that occasions such as birthdays, new years and other significant dates help divide continuous time into mental chapters. They create distance between the person you were and the person you imagine yourself becoming; researchers have found that people become more likely to pursue aspirational goals after these markers.

For most of human history, we did not have to invent all of those markers ourselves.

Religion came with ceremonies for birth, adulthood, marriage and death. Schools had graduations. Unions, neighborhood associations, clubs and civic groups created repeated gatherings and collective traditions. Weddings joined families; funerals made grief communal. Graduation requires you to put on an objectively insane outfit (my high school had us wear wedding dresses) and walk across a stage.

Ritual makes time visible, to ourselves and other people.

A lot of the institutions that did this work have weakened. Religious participation has cratered. Unions, civic groups and the whole Bowling Alone apparatus are gone or going. Families are scattered across states now instead of clustered in the few zip codes where a birthday meant your aunt turned up with a casserole. And we are simply around each other less: Americans now spend about 35 minutes a day socializing in person, down from 45 two decades ago.

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han has a useful way of thinking about this. InThe Disappearance of Rituals, he argues that rituals historically gave people a shared symbolic structure and helped transform individuals into communities. Modern life, in his view, has produced something closer to the reverse: enormous amounts of communication without necessarily producing much community.

Which brings me back to my 30th birthday. Spending three decades on Earth is, in Western culture, a Big Deal™ — the beginning of your “adult life,” when you’re supposed to get married, start having children and settle into a career path, according to a cursory Google search. Based on those metrics I have achieved a 33% on adulthood, which means I have failed.

I’m not married. I don’t have kids. I don’t own property (I tried — and failed — to do that this summer). There’s no moment where everyone I love gets in a room because a socially recognized Thing has happened to me.

So, maybe our current party obsession isn’t us becoming more narcissistic, necessarily. Maybe we are trying to recreate ceremony in a culture that removed a lot of the ceremony.

So what happens when you take a generation, push the traditional milestones out of reach, dissolve the institutional rituals, and leave intact a deep and extremely normal human need to mark the passage of time in a way other people can see? You get the party industry.

Funflation comes for the birthday

The wedding industry figured out a long time ago that emotional events have almost no price ceiling. Say the word “wedding” to a florist and the quote goes up, because the vendor understands something: you’re way less likely to comparison shop your once-in-a-lifetime day.

That same logic has now been extended to everything else. Adult birthday parties average around $1,185, with the median around $500 — and roughly a third of parents have gone into debt over a child’s birthday party while 45% have blown past their own budget.

What makes this work, financially speaking, is that emotional and expectation-driven spending short-circuits the part of your brain that does math.

Normal purchases typically get evaluated against alternatives — is this worth it, could I get it cheaper, do I need it. Milestone purchases get evaluated against meaning, which has no denominator.

When the question shifts from what does this cost to what does this say about how much I care, you have effectively removed money from the decision.

And because these events are also increasingly rare (you get one 30th, one wedding, one first birthday for your kid) scarcity does the rest of the work. The once-in-a-lifetime framing is what makes a $10,000 quote for a single night in New York feel like something you should at least consider.

And then the internet made the baseline insane

There’s a specific visual language to contemporary social life: the tablescape, the custom cake, the disposable-camera flash photography, the hyper-specific Partiful invitation, the martini tower, the branded matchbook. The party is an event, but it is also an object that can be consumed visually before, during and after it happens.

The internet radically expanded our comparison set. Maybe the benchmark for a good 30th birthday used to be the birthdays of people you knew. Now it can include a model in Copenhagen, an influencer in Los Angeles and a woman whose full-time occupation appears to be having extremely beautiful friends over for dinner.

Your brain does not always distinguish particularly well between “this person is part of an infinitesimally small sliver of the population whose livelihood depends on manufacturing aspirational content” and “apparently this is how people celebrate turning 30.”

I’ve written about this before as expectation inflation and how social media has warped our sense of what’s normal. Repeated exposure shifts our reference point, and algorithms routinely elevate aspirational content because it drives spending. The feed wants us in a state of mild inadequacy, so we’ll spend to get out of it.

And because social media also functions as identity infrastructure, consumption has taken on a second job. You’re buying the thing or experience itself, but you are also buying its usefulness as a signal: this is the kind of person I am.

This is also how milestones became status symbols. When everyone can buy roughly the same objects, scarcity moves to access (the reservation you couldn’t get, the venue nobody’s heard of, the trip that required planning). Experiences are harder to fake and harder to acquire, which makes them better signals, which makes them more expensive, which makes them better signals. And unlike a handbag, an experience comes with built-in social proof, because other people were there and they will post about it, too.

The more we have individualized celebration, the more responsibility we have placed on the individual to manufacture the significance.

A communal ritual didn’t need documentation, because the community was physically present and that was the entire point. A privately funded, individually hosted, aesthetically art-directed event needs proof … otherwise, what exactly happened? So the party becomes a highly curated canvas for communicating your values and taste to a world you’re not in the same room with, which is a strange solution to loneliness, given that it mostly produces more of it.

So, the bar

The explosion of this type of milestone spending, in my eyes, is simply a hyper-individualized solution to an extremely systemic problem.

Everything’s getting more expensive, our public institutions are dissolving, and the community that used to show up by default now has to be summoned, catered and paid for by the person being celebrated. In a way, we’re attempting to buy back the ceremony, security and community that the economy and the culture stripped out, and we’re doing it one $10,000 venue quote at a time.

Of course, I’m still having the party. I opted for a more informal tab at a local bar, which felt like the reasonable middle ground between doing nothing and flying twelve people to France, and I have made my peace with what it cost.

Maybe that’s enough. Maybe the gathering is the whole point, and the meaning is just whatever the people in the room decide to give it. But I think it’s worth asking what we’re actually buying when we buy these events — whether it’s the ritual, or just the shape of one. And whether a ceremony you have to fund yourself, invite people to yourself, and hope enough people attend can really do the thing that ceremonies were for.

I’ll let you know in a month.

At least I don’t live in Northern Germany, where unmarried men who turn 30 must publicly sweep the steps of a local public building or city hall while their friends watch and toss more debris around them (???)

I want to be clear that I’m not arguing the old rituals were inherently better, because plenty of them were exclusionary, patriarchal or compulsory. I’m not advocating a return to the glorious era when society measured a woman’s successful transition into adulthood by whether a man had placed a ring on her finger.