2023 was supposed to be the year we got serious again. Post-Covid “revenge spending” on vacations and other things denied by the pandemic would level off. We’d supposedly gotten our travel ya-yas out in 2022, when rage over flight delays rippled around the world. Amid recession fears, we’d go back to the office.
Well, never mind all that. Instead, 2023 turned into the year when we wanted more — more fun, more travel and more entertainment. It’s the year we wanted to gather with our loved ones and our friends, both old and new.
It was the year of the party.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to discover that even many of our 2023 political scandals had touches of joie de vivre about them.
I’m sure you’ve got your stories about when you knew something was different about 2023. I’ve certainly got mine. There was the day in March I saw a man stop two women on a New York City street corner and ask them for directions to a bar — and within a moment all three were heading off there together. Or maybe it was the time a friend invited me to a Fourth of July weekend gathering in another city and I decided to fly in for it — only to discover so many of us had traveled from hundreds of miles away for her house party that the hostess rented a suite of hotel rooms for us.
So many people journeyed — often in groups — across the country to see Taylor Swift in cities such as Los Angeles, New York and Chicago that the Eras Tour acted as a mini economic stimulus for hotels and restaurants in every city she visited. Beyoncé had the same impact when she opened her Renaissance tour in Stockholm in May: Swedish economists claimed her show contributed to the country’s higher-than-expected inflation that month.
There was certainly a “girls just wanna have fun” aspect to the revelry — “Barbie” was the year’s highest-grossing movie, with women around the world getting together and attending screenings dressed in the doll’s signature pink. But there was something more, too. After years of being told to isolate, we wanted to immerse ourselves in mobs of people. Minus communities, we sought to create new ones. The top 100 concert tours grossed more than $9 billion in 2023, up nearly 50% from 2022. College football sales went bonkers, too. Super Bowl tickets hit a record high.
True, Americans dined out slightly less than in 2022, but we so wanted to experience a good time that Bon Appétit proclaimed “overwhelming funhouse” — “a wave of over-the-top, wonderfully overwhelming restaurants” — to be one of the restaurant trends of the year. Outdoor dining — initially a pandemic adaptation — continued to bring the party into the streets, with restaurants ignoring local regulations and blaring music outdoors till the wee hours. New York City’s downtown party neighborhoods — the East Village, the West Village and the Lower East Side — saw more foot traffic on weekends in 2023 than they did in 2019.
Tourism boomed. (So, too, alas, did bad behavior by tourists.) People couldn’t get enough of beaches from Los Cabos to Florida. Greece’s epic heat wave deterred almost no one — the country set a record for tourism in 2023. But winter didn’t discourage people, either — the chilly Lapland region of Finland had more tourists than ever before, too. Destination weddings grew more popular with hosts and guests alike, playing out over several days, creating yet another community linked by celebration.
The Roaring Twenties followed the Spanish flu pandemic, and the ferment of the 1960s was also preceded by a major flu epidemic. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to discover that even many of our 2023 political scandals had touches of joie de vivre about them. If members of Congress thought expelling serial fabulist George Santos would keep him down, they were sadly mistaken. Santos promptly turned to Cameo, where he exceeded his annual congressional salary in a matter of days. In fact, Joe Biden’s most popular initiative, by far, was a proposal to crack down on the junk fees outfits like Ticketmaster attached to tickets. Otherwise, we often didn’t want to know. Traffic to news sites plunged over the year. When a pro-Palestinian march recently attempted to put a stop to Christmas carolers in New York City’s Washington Square Park, the singers responded not by arguing or going away but by raising their voices — in song. “We weren’t going to let them make this their night,” a caroler told the New York Post. Our party-hearty year shouldn’t come as a surprise, says Nicholas Christakis, a professor of sociology at Yale University and the author of a book about how the coronavirus changed our way of life. The Roaring Twenties followed the Spanish flu pandemic, and the ferment of the 1960s was also preceded by a major flu epidemic. Emerging from the shadow of death, we seek to embrace life. “It’s normal human behavior. People like to rejoice — a ‘thank God I’m alive’ kind of reaction — after an earthquake, after a war, after a pandemic, after a disaster,” he says. Christakis told me he expects the festivities to continue into next year and maybe even 2025. So when we lift a glass this weekend to toast the New Year, let’s toast to more celebrations and fun. Party on.
Helaine Olen
Helaine R. Olen is the author of "Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry" and a co-author of "The Index Card: Why Personal Finance Doesn't Have to Be Complicated." She has been a columnist for The Washington Post and Slate, and her work has also appeared in numerous other publications, including The New York Times and The Atlantic. 
