Disclaimer: these are only the reasons I go to bars. In no particular order.
To exploit alcohol deals—it’s sometimes possible to get alcohol at a bar cheaper than retail price (including tip and cover). Presumably it’s a loss leader for something else, or the bar is exploiting some sort of bulk discount.
I’ve observed plenty of mating/courting behavior at bars, but since the bars in my area are mostly not-gay bars, I don’t go to bars to find mates.
To enter a kind of disassociated, free-flowing mental state brought on by the right combination of dancing, inebriation, and music. It’s quite cathartic when the stars all line up correctly.
To sing karaoke and not feel self-conscious about it.
To exploit alcohol deals—it’s sometimes possible to get alcohol at a bar cheaper than retail price (including tip and cover). Presumably it’s a loss leader for something else, or the bar is exploiting some sort of bulk discount.
Where are you from? In both Ireland and Italy alcohol is at least as expensive in bars as in supermarkets, usually several times as expensive. (It is a lot cheaper in bars in Czech Republic, but I’ve never bought alcohol in supermarkets there so I don’t know whether it would be even cheaper.) It is not uncommon for people to drink alcohol with roommates before going out.
I used to do amateur musical theatre, and one line I heard a lot was “oh, you’re so brave to get up in front of all those people!” It feels churlish to tell them I do it because I have narcissistic tendencies coupled with a craving for the approval of my peers.
I don’t much like them. The way I normally wear my hair codes as too casual so I have to do it differently, and they make me feel judged (not wrongly, of course). Neither really applies to karaoke :)
Sometimes because they are bad at singing, so they need to be drunk to enjoy the sound of their own singing (compare listening to badly performed music).
I used to believe I was very bad at singing (mainly because my parents told me I was), but I sang karaoke (when drunk) a couple of times and noticed that people actually enjoyed me singing, so I started singing karaoke regularly, and I still do so. I’ve had a few people contacting me on Facebook and wanting to get to know me because they think I’m such an awesome singer—if three years ago someone had told me this would happen, I would never have believed them.
I on the other hand, believe I am very bad at singing because what I hear when I sing is horrible. I have fairly good (if untrained) musical hearing and love listening to others sing, so I think it’s likely I’m right about myself.
My parents have indeed always told me I sound horrible and have no musical talent and must never sing. But I think their actual influence was mostly in convincing me not to try to learn/practice to sing.
can be somewhat different from what others hear. Try recording yourself and listening back. (Though for some reason most people hate that, at least with non-singing speech—I think I once read about some study about that on Language Log.)
ETA: More anecdotal evidence that people might underestimate how good they are at singing:
A couple weeks ago I was in the bar where I usually sing karaoke on Mondays, and a girl (whom I knew by sight because her boyfriend studies in the same university department as me, but with whom I had never spoken before) was about to sing a song; the bartender asked her whether she would be OK with me accompanying her, she accepted and we started singing; but the song was much higher than my usual singing voice, so I had to strain my voice to sing in tune and I thought I sounded ridiculous, whereas she had a beautiful voice. (I could have used falsetto, or sung an octave lower, but I didn’t feel like experimenting while singing with someone I barely knew.) So I kept my mike further and further away from my mouth (noticing she looked disappointed) until after the end of the second verse I put the mike down and let the girl go on singing alone.
Today I ran into that girl by the coffee vending machines in my university, and she asked whether that night I had stopped singing because she was so bad I had trouble keeping in tune with her, and said that this means a lot to her, because she’s taking singing classes; when I explained her the actual reason I had stopped, she told me she thought I actually sounded fine. I said she sounded great too, and she said that she still had much work to do; then she asked me whether I was taking singing classes at [such-and-such school, which some of the guys at the bar were attending]. She seemed quite surprised when I told her I wasn’t.
I wonder whether some analogue of the Dunning–Kruger effect–impostor syndrome combination applies, whereby bad singers think they sing better than they actually do, and good singers think they sing worse than they actually do.
I don’t drink, don’t like trying to hold a conversation over loud music, and don’t like starting conversations with strangers if I don’t think we’ll have anything in common. Why the hell do I go to bars?
1) Everyone else is there. It’s a Schelling Point for non-specific social activity.
2) It’s public. There are a whole host of complicated hospitality / power dynamic / pragmatic considerations that come with inviting people to your home, or being invited to someone else’s. Bars take responsibility for all the trappings of hospitality.
3) It’s a ubiquitous venue. In an urban area you’ll always be able to find a bar in walking distance, whereas you can’t say the same for a park or a museum.
4) It’s a designated area for social interaction. If I did want to talk to a stranger, this is permitted in bars, whereas it’s prohibited in most other venues. (Your mileage may vary here; The UK is a lot more staid about these things than the rest of Europe and North America.)
4) It’s a designated area for social interaction. If I did want to talk to a stranger, this is permitted in bars, whereas it’s prohibited in most other venues. (Your mileage may vary here; The UK is a lot more staid about these things than the rest of Europe and North America.)
To the point where I sometimes wonder whether the UK has “bars” at all, of the sort being talked about. Go into any pub in the UK, and it will be mostly full of people in small groups who already know each other and went there to talk to each other. In a few specialised environments (e.g. a university campus during the first few weeks of a new year) it may be more common for strangers to strike up new acquaintances in “bars”, but I’m not aware of anywhere where it’s a general custom. Perhaps in “nightclubs”, which I’ve never been in, but from observation of the queues outside such places, nobody goes to such a place alone, whatever they then do inside.
Talking to strangers in pubs happens more in Australia. But I’ve seen people just talk to each other in specialist pubs in the UK, e.g. goth pubs or metal pubs. Subcultural bonding provides some assumable group membership.
it will be mostly full of people in small groups who already know each other and went there to talk to each other
doesn’t imply “no-one ever meets anyone new”, though it’s not obvious from outside observation.
nobody goes to such a place alone
doesn’t imply that they’re not interested in meeting new people; indeed, it is easier to meet new people when you’re not alone (social proof i.e. he’s not enough of a weirdo as to not have any friends, having a wingman reduces anxiety, etc.). Also, logistics (if there’s several of you, you can share a taxi which is cheaper than taking one alone, or if someone has a car they can be the designated driver, etc.)
To the point where I sometimes wonder whether the UK has “bars” at all, of the sort being talked about. Go into any pub in the UK, and it will be mostly full of people in small groups who already know each other and went there to talk to each other. In a few specialised environments (e.g. a university campus during the first few weeks of a new year) it may be more common for strangers to strike up new acquaintances in “bars”, but I’m not aware of anywhere where it’s a general custom.
It’s not the general custom in bars but you can do it. It just requires a thick skin and some not all that high level of social skills. You start a conversation about some random bollocks with someone and if they don’t tell you (politely or not) to piss off, you keep going for five to fifteen minutes, say “It was nice meeting you, you want to hang out sometime?” or if the bar is busy enough you go off and repeat the process on some other people and return to the first person later. It is very, very like hitting on strangers in bars and unless you’re cool/interesting/attractive/rich the chances of getting anything out of any particular interaction are low. Unless you’re very lucky you need to do this quite a lot.
You are breaking social protocol but you’re not living in a tribe or a village, you live in a modern anonymous city. Having hundreds of random strangers who do not communicate with each other think you were slightly odd until they forget you (it won’t take long) is a small cost for the opportunity to force grow a social circle.
Perhaps in “nightclubs”, which I’ve never been in, but from observation of the queues outside such places, nobody goes to such a place alone, whatever they then do inside.
I have gone to nightclubs alone. This is really unusual because if it goes wrong it’s depressing as hell and only practice makes it not go wrong, on average. But similar advice to the above re:bars applies. This is one of those areas where there’s a lot of good stuff in PUA that can be applied to areas other than picking up women.
Another reason related to 2 is simple convenience. Compared to someones house a bar likely has:
readier access to beverages and food that may be required while socialising.
A large enough area to sit the relevant number of people comortably.
And be in a mutually beneficial location. E.g. if my friends and I all live 10+ miles from the city centre in differing directions it would be very difficult for us all to congregate at ones house, but easier for us to all reach a centre point. Even more so if we are all in the same place for another reason (after work drinks).
“Drinks + talking to people = fun” has observably held true across cultures and time. The drink relaxes people and makes it easier to talk and easier to listen. YMMV of course.
I’d never understood how the whole bar-mating thing is supposed to work (among my fellow straight people, at least). I could never get it to work, probably because I never particularly wanted to. Am I the only one ?
You engage in conversation with people while you are both in a frame of mind where you are disposed to social interaction, you interact and based on that interaction either bond or don’t. What is it you don’t get?
To hang out with alcohol in large groups of acquaintances (often: groups of fellow graduate students, many of whom don’t know one another well enough to go to each others’ home)
Dancing
To meet someone, say from OKCupid, on neutral socially lubricated ground
80+% of the time, I’d guess it’s to meet or hang out with friends or acquaintances. Bars are this social space where it’s totally normal to sit and talk with people for an hour or two.
Depending on the bar, it’s usually a great place to get to know people out of your social circle. Being in the bar (and moderately to completely drunk) evens the social disparities and lets you get in touch with people you’ll never ever approach in other places. Plus, drunk people do funny things.
When I want to gather friends together and don’t feel like hosting, it’s usually going to be on an evening; that rules out a lot of options already. The only things that are ubiquitous and comparable to bars for those purposes are restaurants, but it’s a hassle asking everyone to have dinner at the same time, waiting for everyone to show up before ordering, etc. (Plus they’re more expensive, and I’m more likely to have a friend who can’t find anything there they’d like to eat.) So I default to bars.
Does going to a bar where you know the karaoke jockeys and the bartenders but no other patron count as “alone”? If so, I have made a few friends that way.
All of the above (if by “drunk” you mean ‘tipsy’—people who want to get hammered buy spirits in supermarkets because it’s much cheaper, and by “chill” you mean ‘hang out with friends’.) Plus, live music, karaoke, playing darts...
For me, usually some combination of dancing, alcohol buzz, socializing with friends and strangers, a novel atmosphere, meeting new people, hitting on strangers and watching sports with company or when my television doesn’t get the game I want to watch.
Why do people go to bars? Is it to find someone to mate with? Or to get drunk? Or just chill?
Disclaimer: these are only the reasons I go to bars. In no particular order.
To exploit alcohol deals—it’s sometimes possible to get alcohol at a bar cheaper than retail price (including tip and cover). Presumably it’s a loss leader for something else, or the bar is exploiting some sort of bulk discount.
I’ve observed plenty of mating/courting behavior at bars, but since the bars in my area are mostly not-gay bars, I don’t go to bars to find mates.
To enter a kind of disassociated, free-flowing mental state brought on by the right combination of dancing, inebriation, and music. It’s quite cathartic when the stars all line up correctly.
To sing karaoke and not feel self-conscious about it.
Where are you from? In both Ireland and Italy alcohol is at least as expensive in bars as in supermarkets, usually several times as expensive. (It is a lot cheaper in bars in Czech Republic, but I’ve never bought alcohol in supermarkets there so I don’t know whether it would be even cheaper.) It is not uncommon for people to drink alcohol with roommates before going out.
Why do people need to be drunk to enjoy singing karaoke?
They don’t but some people are self-conscious about standing in front of a crowd and performing. Alcohol fixes that.
I used to do amateur musical theatre, and one line I heard a lot was “oh, you’re so brave to get up in front of all those people!” It feels churlish to tell them I do it because I have narcissistic tendencies coupled with a craving for the approval of my peers.
How do you feel about job interviews?
I don’t much like them. The way I normally wear my hair codes as too casual so I have to do it differently, and they make me feel judged (not wrongly, of course). Neither really applies to karaoke :)
“Ah, it’s because I’m insecure in a different way.” Yep, I’ve been there!
Relevant HIMYM clip
Sometimes because they are bad at singing, so they need to be drunk to enjoy the sound of their own singing (compare listening to badly performed music).
I used to believe I was very bad at singing (mainly because my parents told me I was), but I sang karaoke (when drunk) a couple of times and noticed that people actually enjoyed me singing, so I started singing karaoke regularly, and I still do so. I’ve had a few people contacting me on Facebook and wanting to get to know me because they think I’m such an awesome singer—if three years ago someone had told me this would happen, I would never have believed them.
Good for you!
I on the other hand, believe I am very bad at singing because what I hear when I sing is horrible. I have fairly good (if untrained) musical hearing and love listening to others sing, so I think it’s likely I’m right about myself.
My parents have indeed always told me I sound horrible and have no musical talent and must never sing. But I think their actual influence was mostly in convincing me not to try to learn/practice to sing.
can be somewhat different from what others hear. Try recording yourself and listening back. (Though for some reason most people hate that, at least with non-singing speech—I think I once read about some study about that on Language Log.)
ETA: More anecdotal evidence that people might underestimate how good they are at singing:
A couple weeks ago I was in the bar where I usually sing karaoke on Mondays, and a girl (whom I knew by sight because her boyfriend studies in the same university department as me, but with whom I had never spoken before) was about to sing a song; the bartender asked her whether she would be OK with me accompanying her, she accepted and we started singing; but the song was much higher than my usual singing voice, so I had to strain my voice to sing in tune and I thought I sounded ridiculous, whereas she had a beautiful voice. (I could have used falsetto, or sung an octave lower, but I didn’t feel like experimenting while singing with someone I barely knew.) So I kept my mike further and further away from my mouth (noticing she looked disappointed) until after the end of the second verse I put the mike down and let the girl go on singing alone.
Today I ran into that girl by the coffee vending machines in my university, and she asked whether that night I had stopped singing because she was so bad I had trouble keeping in tune with her, and said that this means a lot to her, because she’s taking singing classes; when I explained her the actual reason I had stopped, she told me she thought I actually sounded fine. I said she sounded great too, and she said that she still had much work to do; then she asked me whether I was taking singing classes at [such-and-such school, which some of the guys at the bar were attending]. She seemed quite surprised when I told her I wasn’t.
I wonder whether some analogue of the Dunning–Kruger effect–impostor syndrome combination applies, whereby bad singers think they sing better than they actually do, and good singers think they sing worse than they actually do.
I don’t drink, don’t like trying to hold a conversation over loud music, and don’t like starting conversations with strangers if I don’t think we’ll have anything in common. Why the hell do I go to bars?
1) Everyone else is there. It’s a Schelling Point for non-specific social activity.
2) It’s public. There are a whole host of complicated hospitality / power dynamic / pragmatic considerations that come with inviting people to your home, or being invited to someone else’s. Bars take responsibility for all the trappings of hospitality.
3) It’s a ubiquitous venue. In an urban area you’ll always be able to find a bar in walking distance, whereas you can’t say the same for a park or a museum.
4) It’s a designated area for social interaction. If I did want to talk to a stranger, this is permitted in bars, whereas it’s prohibited in most other venues. (Your mileage may vary here; The UK is a lot more staid about these things than the rest of Europe and North America.)
To the point where I sometimes wonder whether the UK has “bars” at all, of the sort being talked about. Go into any pub in the UK, and it will be mostly full of people in small groups who already know each other and went there to talk to each other. In a few specialised environments (e.g. a university campus during the first few weeks of a new year) it may be more common for strangers to strike up new acquaintances in “bars”, but I’m not aware of anywhere where it’s a general custom. Perhaps in “nightclubs”, which I’ve never been in, but from observation of the queues outside such places, nobody goes to such a place alone, whatever they then do inside.
Talking to strangers in pubs happens more in Australia. But I’ve seen people just talk to each other in specialist pubs in the UK, e.g. goth pubs or metal pubs. Subcultural bonding provides some assumable group membership.
doesn’t imply “no-one ever meets anyone new”, though it’s not obvious from outside observation.
doesn’t imply that they’re not interested in meeting new people; indeed, it is easier to meet new people when you’re not alone (social proof i.e. he’s not enough of a weirdo as to not have any friends, having a wingman reduces anxiety, etc.). Also, logistics (if there’s several of you, you can share a taxi which is cheaper than taking one alone, or if someone has a car they can be the designated driver, etc.)
It’s not the general custom in bars but you can do it. It just requires a thick skin and some not all that high level of social skills. You start a conversation about some random bollocks with someone and if they don’t tell you (politely or not) to piss off, you keep going for five to fifteen minutes, say “It was nice meeting you, you want to hang out sometime?” or if the bar is busy enough you go off and repeat the process on some other people and return to the first person later. It is very, very like hitting on strangers in bars and unless you’re cool/interesting/attractive/rich the chances of getting anything out of any particular interaction are low. Unless you’re very lucky you need to do this quite a lot.
You are breaking social protocol but you’re not living in a tribe or a village, you live in a modern anonymous city. Having hundreds of random strangers who do not communicate with each other think you were slightly odd until they forget you (it won’t take long) is a small cost for the opportunity to force grow a social circle.
I have gone to nightclubs alone. This is really unusual because if it goes wrong it’s depressing as hell and only practice makes it not go wrong, on average. But similar advice to the above re:bars applies. This is one of those areas where there’s a lot of good stuff in PUA that can be applied to areas other than picking up women.
Another reason related to 2 is simple convenience. Compared to someones house a bar likely has:
readier access to beverages and food that may be required while socialising.
A large enough area to sit the relevant number of people comortably.
And be in a mutually beneficial location. E.g. if my friends and I all live 10+ miles from the city centre in differing directions it would be very difficult for us all to congregate at ones house, but easier for us to all reach a centre point. Even more so if we are all in the same place for another reason (after work drinks).
I go to bars to:
Hit on girls.
Dance.
Drink and hang out with friends.
“Drinks + talking to people = fun” has observably held true across cultures and time. The drink relaxes people and makes it easier to talk and easier to listen. YMMV of course.
I’d never understood how the whole bar-mating thing is supposed to work (among my fellow straight people, at least). I could never get it to work, probably because I never particularly wanted to. Am I the only one ?
people closer to the center of the bell curve are easier to match with one another, thus random combinations are more likely to yield success.
You engage in conversation with people while you are both in a frame of mind where you are disposed to social interaction, you interact and based on that interaction either bond or don’t. What is it you don’t get?
Reasons I go to bars:
To hang out with alcohol in large groups of acquaintances (often: groups of fellow graduate students, many of whom don’t know one another well enough to go to each others’ home)
Dancing
To meet someone, say from OKCupid, on neutral socially lubricated ground
80+% of the time, I’d guess it’s to meet or hang out with friends or acquaintances. Bars are this social space where it’s totally normal to sit and talk with people for an hour or two.
Depending on the bar, it’s usually a great place to get to know people out of your social circle. Being in the bar (and moderately to completely drunk) evens the social disparities and lets you get in touch with people you’ll never ever approach in other places. Plus, drunk people do funny things.
When I want to gather friends together and don’t feel like hosting, it’s usually going to be on an evening; that rules out a lot of options already. The only things that are ubiquitous and comparable to bars for those purposes are restaurants, but it’s a hassle asking everyone to have dinner at the same time, waiting for everyone to show up before ordering, etc. (Plus they’re more expensive, and I’m more likely to have a friend who can’t find anything there they’d like to eat.) So I default to bars.
I have had someone tell me they would go out drinking alone to make friends.
Do you know if it worked?
It worked. (works?)
Does going to a bar where you know the karaoke jockeys and the bartenders but no other patron count as “alone”? If so, I have made a few friends that way.
All of the above (if by “drunk” you mean ‘tipsy’—people who want to get hammered buy spirits in supermarkets because it’s much cheaper, and by “chill” you mean ‘hang out with friends’.) Plus, live music, karaoke, playing darts...
For me, usually some combination of dancing, alcohol buzz, socializing with friends and strangers, a novel atmosphere, meeting new people, hitting on strangers and watching sports with company or when my television doesn’t get the game I want to watch.