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The Need to Party
When we use the word ‘party,’ we like the word’s blatant vagueness. The word’s range can be used to include anything from a night of unashamed debauchery to a night spent playing board games.
As social beings, we need parties. Gathering our friends together in one place for an evening builds community within a group, and reminds us that our social foundation is more than several isolated relationships.
The way grabbing a coffee with someone has become our way of building relationships with an individual, parties act to build relationships with the group.
As our collective reaction to the nuclear family has shifted, our reliance on friends has changed as well. For many students, no longer is the family their support group and what defines them. These people have elevated friends from their previous status and placed them where the family used to be. For most, this has not been done out of callousness towards the family, but out of necessity. The family, if it has stayed together, cannot or will not fill these roles of support and characterization. For those who hold onto the family’s place as chief support and social network, parties hold less importance, although still keep their novelty.
For partying to have its desired effect, it must be enjoyable. There is no one out there who believes a good party is one that was thoroughly unenjoyable. In this regard, parties differ from most things we take part in, such as school, work, and family gatherings.
The way in which we party is less important than the fact that we must do it, yet our means often take priority over our ends. For many university students, our means for enjoying ourselves overtake our desired ends of enjoying ourselves and strengthening friendships. When this overtaking occurs, partying can still retain its ability to be enjoyable, but it ceases to be healthy.
While it is easy to lose sight of why we do anything after we have done it for long enough, may you find this letter a reminder of why we party. We are social beings, and we cannot feel whole by ourselves. We need relationships with others to help make us whole. Whether you’re attending your niece’s seventh birthday, your best friend’s stag, or a friend’s dinner party, may you realize why you are there in the first place before you decide on anything else.
With peace + love
John Hennenfent
Editor-in-Chief
Alright, so you guys polled 50 students. If the student body is 3,500, that means you polled 1.4 percent of the entire university. Epic fail. To say this is a “survey” is a joke. Great idea but poor execution!
D. Thiessen, I’m not sure why you felt the need to critique the survey on the page my letter appears on seeing as how they’re quite unrelated, but either way the total undergraduate enrollment is roughly 1,800. Obviously 50 students is still a small sample size. If you would like to criticize things that appear in the newspaper I recommend you writing me a letter and we can publish your opinion in the newspaper. Either way thank you for your feedback.
-John