Why New Year’s Eve is actually the best night of the year to go out

As more and more young people swap a big night out for Netflix, scrolling and slinking off to bed before midnight, Helen Coffey argues in favour of celebrating the most divisive night of the year

Forget Netflix and chill: Make 2026 the year you go out for New Year's Eve (Getty/iStock)

Oh, I’m not fussed about New Year’s Eve. I never do anything, I’ll probably be in bed by 11pm!”

While I’d begrudgingly tolerate such words from my septuagenarian mother, these days it’s just as likely to be a twenty-something who is giving me the world-weary “I can’t be doing with New Year’s” schtick.

The sentiment is sadly no longer the preserve of retirees. In fact, professing one’s hatred of NYE seems to be a new kind of status symbol for young people – as if there could be nothing more eyeroll than honouring another trip around the sun by gathering a gang of hellraisers, grabbing a bottle and going “out out” to seize the night.

Brits are now twice as likely to spend 31 December watching Netflix or scrolling social media than at a party, according to a poll of 1,000 adults by Sunny, a not-for-profit tackling loneliness and disconnection. Some 40 per cent of those surveyed said they’d prefer to “celebrate” with various screens than by leaving the house; 22 per cent aimed to slink off to bed before midnight. When did everyone get so, well, boring?

A separate survey of 2,000 Brits by OriGym found that fewer than one in five people aged 18-29 are planning to head out on 31 December, totalling just 1.8 million people. That’s half the number of partygoers in the Nineties, when more than 50 per cent of young people (3.9 million) hit bars and clubs to see in the New Year. If the “go big or go home” mantra holds true, many Gen Zs are firmly choosing the latter.

I’m not sure why this should make me, a millennial, so sad – but it does. Maybe because I’m a New Year’s Eve convert, an evangelist keen for as many people as humanly possible to experience the joy of a truly great NYE. It’s a night where, if approached with the right energy and mindset, anything is possible. Plans shapeshift mid-evening, new acquaintances picked up along the way take on the guise of friends for one night only as everyone gets dipped in a kind of shimmering magic – transformed by champagne bubbles and the untapped promise of a new number on the calendar. Clean. Fresh. Untainted.

It wasn’t always like this. I, too, experienced the inevitable “New Year’s Eve is crap” about-turn after university. It was the most expensive night to go out and everyone I knew was skint – far from an ideal combination. “Jaded” was the most apt description for my attitude after a succession of sensationally anticlimactic New Year’s on the trot, topped off by the time I spent the stroke of midnight stuck deep underground on the Central Line. A friend had suggested we leave the relative comfort of her shared flat in the East End, where a modestly enjoyable house party had been well underway, to catch the fireworks in central London. Suffice to say we made a mess of the timings and when we emerged, by now sober and sombre, the show was well and truly over (and three night buses home awaited).

New Year's Eve has its own kind of magic if you approach it with the right attitude (Getty/iStock)

In my late twenties, I rediscovered a modicum of fun by setting expectations low and only ever agreeing to go to events at people’s houses within walking distance of my own – intimate dinner parties or games nights where, should the vibe be right, sofas might be pushed against the wall to create a small but serviceable dancefloor for the final hour.

But something changed after the pandemic. Following a heinous lockdown NYE with an ex where I got so drunk on gin-based cocktails that I gave myself mild alcohol poisoning, I felt an urgency to bury that terrible night beneath better, happier, shinier memories. I was compelled to do my level best to have a good time. If I failed, at least I’d tried.

The decision coincided with a move out of London. That first year in a new town, I was invited to a lock-in at a local bar that extended into an after-party in someone’s kitchen. The night passed in a blur of pure hedonism; there were shots and dancing and temporary DJ decks set up on the kitchen counter. I stumbled home at 4am, tights laddered and eyeliner smudged, feeling exhausted but exhilaratingly alive.

I felt an urgency to bury that terrible night beneath better, happier, shinier memories

The year that followed was spent in a similar vein (and further enlivened by a snog with a stranger), while 2024 saw me and an old friend tearing up the dancefloor in an honest-to-goodness London nightclub, surrounded by bright young things in their finery. We sipped bougie cocktails and had increasingly slurred conversations about how 2025 was “totally going to be our year” and got chatted up by a twentysomething who told us he worked at Buckingham Palace. By 3am, we’d made friends with the lovely girls on the bus home and were complimenting their outfits; by 3.30am, we were in our PJs and congratulating each other on starting the year in style. This was the energy we were determined to take forward: fun, exciting, brimming with potential.

I’ll be doing similar this year and already can’t wait. We’ve picked up extra recruits along the way, too, as friends who’ve historically been blasé about the whole affair have found themselves lured in by our rave reviews of the Big Night Out.

New Year isn’t something to be endured or dreaded – it is what you make it. And though planning and expecting nothing means you’re guaranteed to avoid disappointment, it also means you’re guaranteed to avoid all the unexpected chaos that makes life worth living: new connections, laughing till your sides ache, kissing a stranger when the countdown stops.

Netflix and TikTok will still be there on 1 January. But the chance to do something different and start 2026 with a bang? That’ll be gone forever.