The best character in Sex and the City appears for one episode, and then immediately dies. Her name is Lexi Featherston – a loud, brash former It Girl from Carrie Bradshaw’s 1980s socialite days. She’s hedonistic and frustrated by the party scene around her that has become, she thinks, boring. She delivers a speech declaring New York “over”. “O-V-E-R. Over. No one’s fun any more. Whatever happened to fun? God I’m so bored, I could die.” Then she does just that, falling 18 storeys out the window to her untimely and unfortunately very funny death (the episode is called “Splat!”).
I think of Lexi often, because I know how she feels. The character is someone you’re supposed to laugh at, not with, but I have adopted her as a kind of role model. Frequently I find myself at a Christmas party surrounded by saccharine vape smoke and cans of Lucky Saint and think of Lexi, hanging out of a window, brandishing her cigarette. Someone demurely passes on a delicious circling canape and disappears into an Uber at 9.30pm and I think: she’s right! No one’s fun any more!
Or at least, nobody’s festively hedonistic any more. Everyone is drinking less, partying less, smoking less, going out less. This is not just how I feel, it’s a fact. Almost half (48%) of 18 to 34-year-olds are planning to drink less this Christmas, and the same percentage of gen-Z don’t plan on drinking at all. The main reason, admittedly, is cost – or “drinkflation”.
It’s hard to justify many, many pints of Christmassy Guinness while shivering outside the pub with colleagues you don’t really know or like when the Christmassy Guinness in question is more than £7. The only people immune to cutting back for this reason are baby boomers. At the age where they’re securely ensconced in senior executive positions, with their pensions looming and triple locked, most over-60s are planning to drink the same as they always had – which is loads, obviously.
But it’s not just cost that’s killing off festive debauchery. After all, being in debt and hungover for the entirety of December before the cosmic joke of having to pay your tax bill by 31 January is an annual tradition. Just like the tradition of gorging yourself, Roman emperor-style, and punishing the parts of your liver that can hopefully regenerate, before torturously depriving yourself throughout the most miserable month of the year.
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This used to be the thing you were peer-pressured to do. This was the way to celebrate the birth of Jesus, by being cajoled into alcohol poisoning and carb hangovers via a chorus of “but it’s Christmas!” This is why the worst gym in your vicinity is packed to the rafters the first week of the new year despite the fact there are used plasters on the treadmills. This is why you think “Dry January” and “doing a three-day juice cleanse for £195” are sensible life choices.
As Vogue describes: ‘You won’t let yourself go over Christmas. Instead, you’ll do all you can to hit your goals before 2026.’ Fun!
It’s a bleak prospect, but what’s bleaker is this: some people are already living this way in December. They’re already, to borrow a term from my gen-Z successors, “locked in”. The Great Lock In is upon us, encouraging rigorous self-discipline. It’s been upon us, in fact, since 1 September. The Great Lock In, as it’s known online, is an alternative to December debauchery for the “clean girl” generation. For younger millennials and gen-Z, asceticism and wellness is more appealing than binge-purge cycles.
While the rules aren’t set in stone, most people following the “lock in” mantra adhere to similar directives. Three months. Six workouts a week, 10,000 steps a day, a 5am wake-up call and – obviously – a total ban on booze. As Vogue describes it: “You won’t ‘let yourself go’ in the Christmas period. Instead, you’ll do all you can to hit your goals – physical, financial, intellectual – before 2026, so as to enter the new year buffer, richer, and better than everyone else.” Fun!
Actually, it sounds a little lonely. As Marge Simpson once wisely said: “You don’t win friends with salad.” You might enter the new year better than everyone else by every metric, but I’m not sure that’s what Christmas is about. Yes, if you totally avoid all temptation and social interactions, you will be thinner and less skint. But you will not only be inoculating yourself from the siren song of corruption; you’ll be isolating yourself. Perhaps my biggest problem with “locking in” is that it appears to be a deeply Protestant attitude towards Christmas, when I see Christmas as a deeply Catholic-coded holiday. It’s not about being frigid, individualistic and measured. It’s about being overindulgent and gauche and then feeling guilty about it.
I feel about the Great Lock In the same way I feel about other challenges: 75 Hard (a 75-day detox in which you work out for 90 minutes a day, drink a gallon of water daily, read 10 pages of a book and take a photo of yourself every morning for “accountability”); 75 Soft (same thing but less hardcore, in that you only have to drink three litres of water a day and work out for 45 minutes six days a week); Winter Arc (10,000 steps, seven to eight hours of sleep, no screens after 9pm, “clean eating”). They are fine if they’re about actual self-improvement, but I’m increasingly convinced they’re just about glamourising suffering.
Or rather that they’re repackaging asceticism for the benefit of the social media grid. They’re less to do with self-care than they are a form of virtue-signalling. By all means hibernate in December rather than January. Imperiously refuse to follow your co-workers into a tiny cubicle to sniff paracetamol cut with speed. Drink a green juice every morning and read 10 pages of Jordan Peterson every night. Spend your pint money on aerial pilates. Start January beautiful and rich rather than plastered across a sidewalk in noughties New York. But ask yourself: whatever happened to fun?
Illustration by David Foldvari