I am being absolutely serious here with the Weimar Republic comparison. Because people are fucking miserable and it’s fucking terrifying.
A hundred years ago, broke people in big cities would go to fascist rallies because they were free, and because sometimes the organizers gave out free food and beer, and because people had nothing better to do.
And they stayed because hate feels good when you’re hurting and simple violent solutions appeal to the angry monkey parts of our brains.
And the fewer community connections you have - the more the economy strips your life down to work and sleep, or to job hunting and sleep, or to scrounging in the gutter to survive and sleep, and the less you go out and socialize with actual human beings - the more appealing the fascist illusion of unity, of being part of a powerful group, becomes.
And the only difference today is that the fascist rallies are beamed directly into your home.
It’s not just that. Economy in my country isn’t that bad (yet. the increased energy costs are going to fuck us up real soon). Clubs just never got back to the pre-covid numbers. Like even with most of the competition closed down, the biggest one in the capital still didn’t have enough visitors to warrant staying open (having to heat up a goddamn castle with 40-50 meter high ceilings in the winter months may have been a contributor). They’re now an “event center” and will open for special events only.
Turns out we all learned you can just buy drinks and enjoy them at home for much less money, with less noise, etc.
Additionally, statistics are showing that young people are just living healthier lives and consuming less alcohol. And who’d want to go to a nightclub without alcohol?
Concerts, stand-up shows, etc, are still booming though. Stand-up comedy is bigger than ever here, since the scene only started developing some 10-15 years ago (Comedy Estonia had a show called “Esimene eesti keeles!” (“First one in Estonian!”) in 2014). But partying, as in going to a night club, getting wasted, embarrassing yourself in an attempt to pick up a potential partner for the night, is just dead. It’s an old people thing now. Most of the popular “dance music” bands here have been around since the 90s.
It’s a general trend as far as I can tell all over the West.
I saw the steady empoverishment already back when I lived in Britain in the 2010s and am seeing it right now living in my native Portugal.
It is especially obvious by all the stores that closed and never opened again or did open and then closed again not long after, the more away from city centers the more common.
The realestate bubble that really took of after the Zero Interest Policies that were chosen as “temporary” measurs to “recover” from the 2008 Crash (and were never fully undone) is eating the parts of the Economy which are not Rentierism and concentrating wealth in fewer and fewer hands (of those who own the most assets, i.e. the Owner Class) and doing so via multiple pathways:
The other side of the coin is visible in the rise of the Far-Right - as people feel more and more squeezed, the Owner Class funds parties which “explain” the pain as being caused by foreigners, be it “immigrants” (in the words of the farthest Far Right) or “foreign interference” (in the words of the more Neoliberal Far-Right, especially in larger countries which in my experience tend to have higher levels of nationalist delusions of grandeur) - the implicit message is always one scapegoating foreigners to dismiss the responsability of those who by far have and had for all these years the most power and hence shaped things to be as they are now: the very much local power elites and the politicians who are either themselves part of it or willingly act as their minions.
(This is why, for example, Britain ended up with Brexit)
This trend was already visible and the increasingly shitty state of thing was already painfully predictable a decade ago for those paying attention to Economic subjects, but naturally that’s not most people and the Owner Class very purposefully bought most of the Press (were they could, hence why places with a huge Press ownership concentration like the UK and US being even worse than most of Europe) and used it for Propaganda purposes such as spreading the above mentioned “it’s the fault of foreigners” messaging.
Tell me the Pussirohukelder in Tartu is still going…
Püss is definitely still going, though personally I haven’t been there in about a decade. Was more my kinda jam back in university, but it was just so loud I couldn’t stand it anymore at some point.
I can tell you though that Rüütli street feels dead compared to a decade+ ago. Like there’s still bars, there’s restaurants, they all seem to be doing well enough to stay open… But at least when I last visited it on a spring evening a few years ago, it wasn’t as swarming as it used to be in say 2014 or 2015. Of course I guess that was when we still faintly remembered that COVID exists, maybe 2021 or 2022, so perhaps it’s changed for the better.
There’s also plenty of great bars to visit that have been open for a while and are still going. Möku (in the rooms of Genialistide Klubi for well over a decade now), Pirogovi Lokaal and of course Barlova. They all seem to be doing well, the nightclub scene has taken a much bigger hit than the bar scene IMO. I may of course be biased as well, I’ve never liked night clubs and I don’t overly like socializing with the type of people that love night clubs, I like bars and I like people that like bars. If that makes sense at all lol