Things I Learned This Month On The Jersey Shore With The Barstool Beach House - This Younger Generation Has No Clue How To Party, Drink, Or Stay Out Late. They Don't Make Them Like Millennials Anymore
I originally planned to make this into a a "Top 5 Things I Learned During My Midlife Crisis Month At The Barstool Beach House", but then I remembered how much the faithful Stoolies who still read this blog absolutely love the Beach House content, so I figured why not stretch this thing out more?
Rather than pack 5-6 of the top things I discovered while sharing a house with 15 people in their 20s, all into one blog, like Nicky Smokes did with his Top 5 Moments blog earlier today - I decided to expand upon that and divide each thing into its own blog. Instead of a couple paragraphs for each point, you're getting a whole blog on it. You're welcome. You don't have to thank me. Just always remember who loves you babe.
Since this is the first blog of this series, please allow me to use it as a bit of a precursor to things, and to inform the tens of my fans so confused about why I would sign up for a show such as this.
To put it bluntly, my life is a disaster.
Don't get me wrong, I am incredibly grateful for everything God has blessed me with. I've done things, gone places, met people, and experienced things a dorky kid from Central Massachusetts could only have dreamt growing up. I am beyond fortunate and thankful.
But aside from the work side of things- I'm in one of those ruts where it just feels like you can't figure it out. Where nothing you do seems right. And even the work things haven't been smooth if I'm being completely honest.
We had to close our first business in 12 ventures earlier this year in downtown Chicago after taking an absolute beating for 9 months. (And getting robbed twice by the same guy. Not kidding. Can't make this shit up.) I'm in debt up to my eyeballs and will be paying back friends of mine, probably until I'm dead.
I look around at my closest friends, and almost all of them, except for a small handful, are married to incredible women, raising beautiful kids, and living these picture-perfect lives straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting. And I’ll be honest: it’s really hard not to be insanely jealous of that.
I know, I know, “the grass is greener,” blah blah blah. Trust me, we’ve had plenty of debates about who’s more jealous of whose life. They claim they envy me being single and free, while I sit there staring at their adorable families wondering how I became the weird uncle in a Judd Apatow movie. But deep down, I’m convinced they only say that crap because they don’t want to admit the truth- they know if they did, I might get even more depressed and start showing up at their kids’ soccer games uninvited.
Anyway, back to my point. When you know you’re in a rut- stuck in neutral, spinning your tires, the only way out of the ditch is to give things a serious jolt. You need to shake things up, force some forward momentum, and push yourself out of the mud before you get too comfortable wallowing in it.
That’s exactly what I decided to do. With the blessing and help of my business partners, Bobby and Michael, I went all in on shaking things up. First, I flew to Wales to see Oasis’ reunion shows back in July, then I headed to Wyoming for the Double Rafter cattle drive (yes, I promise that blog is coming this week now that I’ve finally dried out), and most recently, I threw myself into this little Barstool Beach House experiment.
It's been quite the fucking summer.
Reflecting on the past 4 weekends we spent in Manasquan, NJ, I honestly couldn't be happier with my decision to partake in the show. It was seriously such a good time, and I made friends with everybody- not just the cast, but our production, security, and bar friends, that I don't think I ever would have otherwise, had we not been thrown into what was essentially an ant farm drenched in tequila and High Noon, and told to coexist.
I'll also be honest in saying that I was nervous as all hell the weeks leading up to this.
Things got off to a hot start that first weekend when I showed up a day late from my Wyoming trip. After breaking, or trying to break up, Nicky and Annika on the stairs, I went to bed asking myself, "What the fuck was I thinking getting myself into this?"
All I could think about was that famous skit from Chappelle Show where they take the out-of-touch white guy and throw him in a house full of crazy black people- "Mad Real World".
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But not gonna lie, things settled down, people remembered how to act like adults (for the most part), and eveybody ended up getting along. To the point now where we all became so close I feel like I've known everybody a lot longer than a few weeks or months.
I love everybody, but that said, I need to call a spade a spade here and point out a surprising finding from spending a month partying with Generation Zers- they can't party for shit.
I mean no disrespect to any of my castmates. They all gave a real solid effort... in their eyes. And probably the eyes of their parents and grandparents. But not these eyes.
After a pretty fair sample size of four weekends on The Shore, I’ve seen enough. The generational war is over, and Millennials won. Fuck, we didn’t just win, we’re running up the score. Lapping their asses.
I went into this thing worried for myself. I’m not a kid anymore. I figured I’d have to pace myself, strategically hydrate, maybe have to pass on a round of shots that were ordered too quickly, or even, God forbid, pull the ghost-dump move, bobbing and weaving like a boxer between rounds just to survive three straight days of beach parties and late-night chaos. You know, like an adult.
Instead, what happened?
Almost every single one of my much younger Gen Z castmates tapped out early. Embarrassingly early. Sun goes down, music cranks up, we hit the perfect part of the night where the drinks are flowing and bad decisions start to feel like great ones, and poof, the zoomers are gone. Walking home or telling security Mike to grab the church van because evrybody's ready to leave. Tucked in by 11 fucking o'clock even one night!
Instead of asking, "Where's the afters?" all I heard them asking was if there’s an Uber Eats cutoff time."
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Meanwhile, me and the other old Millennial warhorses were still on the dance floor like it’s 2009, running point on this whole operation. I didn’t just outlast them, I outperformed them.
How the fuck does that even happen?
Glad you asked. Allow me to explain how.
I don’t want to hear about how Gen Z has more "stamina" or "youth on their side." It’s fake news. They grew up in a world of participation trophies, oat milk lattes, and TikTok dances. These kids can go hard for two hours, maybe three tops, but then they hit a wall. Their idea of a "rave" is going to one of these coffee shops where an instagram influencer pretends to DJ while nobody dances and everybody just films everybody else filming. Really bizarre shit.
But it’s not their fault, really. They never learned how to party the right way. You can’t build endurance off canned seltzers and anxiety meds. You build it on decades of bad decisions, $2 beer nights, and ripping shots of Fireball like it’s water.
Millennials were forged in the fire of sloppy college house parties and dive bars that smelled like piss but didn't care how bad your fake ID was.
Gen Zers were forged in vape smoke and Instagram filters.
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We millennials had to earn our fun. We pregamed with actual alcohol, not electrolyte mocktails. We used to have to steal booze from our parents. We would swipe single cans of beer from the fridge like Indiana Jones in the Temple of Doom- praying mom and dad wouldn’t notice.
We’d also resort to sneakily pouring liquor out of the bottles and replacing it with water. Once the bottles were all water we would have to beg homeless people to buy us handles of Bacardi Limon that we could then put into Sprite bottles and ration off for a week or more. We rolled everywhere with those bottles. We would get lit up just to go watch a mid-week basketball game for absolutely no reason. We would drive hours to find a house that was rumored to have parents out of town and somebody throwing a party at it. Post college we would pregame at somebody's place, then head to a bar that was open until 2am, and then leave that for a "late-night" bar that went til 4am (5am on Saturdays).
And the night wouldn't even end there because once that spot would close down, and the sun was coming up, we would have to hit a diner (shout out Tempo and Bijan's) for breakfast. We'd legit not crawl into bed until 6 or 7 am most weekends.
And don't hit me with the "well maybe they just prefer day partying to night time partying" because I got news for you- we do that better too. I'm pretty sure we invented it, actually.
Our first Sunday party at Donovan's Reef (incredible place), the only other person functioning, never mind drinking with me, was Nicky Smokes. And he was so banged up by the end of the day that this was him come 10 pm that night.
Our boat days this trip started at 9am, and I don't think anybody came to life until close to 1 or 2 in the afternoon, right before we had to head home.
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We millennials also had to navigate social dynamics without the safety net of group chats and ghosting. (More to come on this tomorrow.) You wanted to leave the bar with someone? You actually had to walk up, talk to them, and risk rejection in real time. It was brutal, but it built character.
And because we didn’t have every moment livestreamed to TikTok, we went hard as fuck. No fear of the next day’s "cancellation." No curated "photo dump" to make it look like you had fun, either. You either did or you didn’t.
And I know this resonates with a ton of people out there my age, because they told me. Not just DMs on social media, but almost every flight I've been on the past 3 weeks I have had random people, or couples come up to me and say, "thank you for holding it down for us Millenials and showing these kids how to party."
Millennials still run this shit. Full stop. Flat out. End of story. I don't ever want to hear it questioned again.
We may have creaky knees and hangovers that last a week sometimes, but when it comes to actual partying- not staged TikTok clips, not "vibey moments" for Instagram, but the real, messy, beautiful chaos of a night out, we are fucking untouchable.
p.s.- I have two exceptions to this all- the first being Mike Katic.
Guy can fucking go. Yah, he's obviously has a diesel engine under the hood, but he's all heart too. Guy just wanted to stay up and crush beers no matter where the party was. The problem was, whenever the other youngsters felt like leaving, they'd dupe him into thinking they were going back to the house to stay up and drink on the porch all night. Guy was legit up all night til everybody else shut it down, and he was up first every morning except for when I'd get up for Church or to make breakfast.
Second, is Meek Phil.
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I'm not gonna lie. Phil kind of scares me. I love the kid to death, but he scares me. You know how if you own a beagle you have to be careful they don't tip over the bag of dogfood or get into something too big because they don't get a feeling of being full and will eat themselves to death? Well, I'm afraid that might be how Phil is with shots.
He's not even doing it for the cameras, either. When we were at DJais that night, there were multiple times where I would be distracted talking to a smokebomb or a guido barstool fa,n and then I'd turn around to find Phil had sneaked two more grails off the bar and was downing them.
I don't have many regrets from the Beach House. But one big one was Phil not being there the final weekend. (He had a fantasy football draft that they forbade remote drafting in.) It would have been fireworks. If I have to find somebody to take my place next season, I proudly nominate Phil to take up the torch in my honor.