Going Out Means More Than It Used To

Ask someone what "a night out" means and, until fairly recently, the answer was fairly narrow: a bar, a club, maybe a restaurant first. That's still very much a real and valid answer nothing about what follows is an argument against it. But it's no longer the only answer, and the range of things that now count as "going out" has quietly become much wider.

The shift is real, but it's more nuanced than the headlines suggest

The "sober curious" narrative has had a lot of coverage, and there's real substance behind it, Gen Z drinking rates have genuinely fallen, and mindful drinking is a mainstream enough idea now that most people under 30 have heard of it. But the more accurate picture, at least in the UK, is less "Gen Z has given up going out" and more "Gen Z has changed what an evening looks like." Recent UK trade data shows 86% of 18-24 year-olds had visited a pub or bar in the previous three months, and six in ten go out weekly, even among a generation widely reported to be drinking less. For a lot of younger drinkers, a "sober" night increasingly means pacing across a longer evening rather than sitting it out entirely, and cask ale and heritage beer styles have actually seen a revival among younger drinkers rather than a decline.

What's really changed isn't attendance. It's the menu of things a night, or a Saturday, might now include alongside or instead of the traditional pub crawl: a run club that ends at a coffee shop, a life drawing class with wine included, a supper club, a pottery evening, a daytime social event that wraps up before dinner. None of this displaces the pub. Most of it still ends up there anyway, in one form or another, the post-run pint, the after-class drink, the debrief.

Why the range has widened

A few things are driving this at once. The most obvious is that fitness and social life have merged in a way they didn't a decade ago Strava's data shows people are now more likely to say they want to meet people through exercise than through a bar, which wasn't a widely held view in, say, 2015. Cost of living plays a role too: a coffee or a class is often a cheaper way to spend an evening than a full night of drinks, without it feeling like a compromise. And there's a simple demand-side story more variety in what's on offer tends to generate more demand for variety, not less; people who've discovered they enjoy a Sunday run club are often more, not less, likely to also enjoy their Friday pub quiz.

This is good news, not a threat to anyone's business model

It's worth being clear about what this trend isn't. It isn't evidence that pubs are becoming irrelevant, or that a well-run pub has anything to worry about from a run club opening up the road. If anything, the data suggests the opposite: people who are socially active in one format tend to be socially active across several, and a night that starts at a class often still finishes at a bar. The pub isn't competing with the pottery studio for the same customer on the same night. They're often serving the very same person, just at different points in the same evening, or the same week.

What's actually happening is an expansion of the map, not a redrawing of it. The pub remains the single most common form of British social gathering by a wide margin. It's just no longer the only form and for a lot of people, especially those newer to a neighbourhood, a class or a club is often the easier front door, simply because it comes with a built-in reason to talk to the person next to you, which a bar doesn't always offer to someone who's walked in alone.

The real problem is that most of this new variety is hard to find

If the definition of "going out" has genuinely widened, the obvious next problem is that most people don't actually know it has. Ticketing platforms and events listings are still mostly built around the old model big, ticketed, promoter-led events while the supper club two streets away, the new run club, or the pottery evening that's just started up rarely shows up in the same search. The variety exists. The discoverability doesn't, yet.

This is exactly why we built GetOut the way we did

GetOut doesn't try to pick a side between the traditional night out and the newer alternatives — it's built to show you all of it, from your favourite local pub's quiz night to the running club two streets over, with the same equal visibility regardless of format, size, or how established the host is. Whatever "going out" means to you this week, the goal is that you can actually find it.

Discover something new. Get out.