People Are Questioning Why Millennials Refuse To Attend Their High School Reunions — 'Do They Think They're Too Good To Go?'
A high school reunion? In these times? In this economy?
miodrag ignjatovic | Getty Images Signature | Canva Pro Ah, high school, there's nothing like it! Football games, school dances, Homecoming Queen, the Prom — they're the best years of your life. If you're extremely, EXTREMELY lucky.
For others among us, it's a thing we have to survive until we can get the absolute everloving [redacted] out of our hometown and never look back. And for some, it's somewhere in between.
Either way, if a handful of recent Reddit posts are any indication, when it comes to millennials, high school isn't exactly a thing people are looking back on all that fondly — and they certainly aren't itching to go back for their reunions. And some are questioning why.
People are wondering why millennials don't go to their high school reunions.
High school reunions have recently been a hot-button topic on the r/Millennials subReddit — not to share the good times and fond memories, but instead to pointedly refuse to go. Judging from other corners of social media and the internet, people on Reddit are definitely not alone in this.
There are stories everywhere of people who have firmly decided to skip theirs, but perhaps none quite so jarring as one Redditor who just recently went to their 10-year reunion.
"Despite having a 500+ graduating class and close to 200 people signing up on Facebook," they wrote in their Reddit post. "Only 4 people showed up." Uhhh… YIKES. "To be honest, I didn’t expect much from my reunion," they went on to say. "Even if it was just to say hi to people and take a group picture, I was still disappointed."
And it left them wondering what exactly the deal is. "Do people think they are too good to go to their reunion?" he wondered. "Did people have a bad high school experience and are just resentful?"
Judging from the various chatter about it on the internet, the answers to those are "the opposite, actually" and "yes, for sure," plus a whole lot of other sign-of-the-time reasons that really do make it seem like this longstanding American tradition is going the way of the Do-Do.
Many millennials aren't going to their high school reunions because they're so worn down by their economic struggles.
In 2023, Canadian writer Emily Latimer went viral for asking the obvious question in a piece for the Canadian website The Walrus: "Is The High School Reunion Dead?"
In it, she contends that "when you’re 27 and living with your parents, it seems a little too soon to exchange achievements," and it's hard to imagine that's not a sentiment plaguing many younger millennials — if not the older ones too.
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In a USA Today poll, 74% of Millennials said they feel "financially behind," and they're drowning in debt at unprecedented rates — with similarly never-before-seen rates of delinquency to go along with it. Who feels like schmoozing when you feel that behind the eight ball?
But perhaps it's a lot simpler than that. Going to a high school reunion is nearly always just plain expensive, and a lot of people don't feel like making the expenditure. "Having limited days off and money," one Redditor said, "I would rather spend it doing almost anything else."
Many people do not remember high school fondly, and have no desire to reminisce about it.
That whole preferring to spend the time and money any other way sentiment applies to a different kind of millennial blowing off their reunion: People who didn't particularly enjoy high school.
"Their relentless bullying broke me," one Redditor wrote of their classmates. "So why would I, or any of my fellow victims of school bullies, ever want to see these people again?" And this is something of a universal experience — it's basically the entire premise of the quintessential movie on the subject, "Romy & Michele's High School Reunion."
There have always been people who were bullied in high school, of course. But there's reason to believe that for millennials, especially those on the younger side, this experience was on a whole other level than even Romy, Michele, and Heather Mooney's torturous experience because of one simple game-changer: the internet and social media.
A 2015 survey of more than 4,700 teens revealed that most felt online or cyberbullying was far more damaging than in-person bullying. Some within the mental health field agree, in part because online bullying is round-the-clock, inescapable, and totally anonymous.
Even one Redditor who was a bully cited this as why they didn't want to go to their reunion. "A lot of my behavior and the behavior deemed acceptable by my peers at the time (racist jokes, sexist jokes…) became evidently grotesque as I grew up and matured," they wrote. "I don’t want to go to my high school reunion and pretend like that shadow isn’t there."
But for most millennials, it all came down to one thing — why do we even need reunions when we have social media?
By far, the most common reason millennials — and many of those older, for that matter — seem to cite for not wanting to be bothered with their high school reunions? They already know everything they could ever want or need to know about their classmates because of social media.
I'm a Xennial — too young to be Gen X, too old to be millennial — so my experience isn't exactly the same. But my 10-year high school reunion came right when Facebook was first opened up to non-students, and it played a crucial role in getting me to say, "LOL, I am absolutely not going to that."
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For me, I refused to go to my 10-year — and then again when my 20-year came around — for a mixture of all of the above reasons. But what really cemented me blowing it off was the Facebook deep-dive I did on my classmates. It was thrilling to see some of the popular kids had gone bald and gotten fat, of course, but for the most part it was all pretty... well, boring.
My life wasn't nearly as upscale as theirs, but it was anything but conventional. I'd come out of the closet, moved to New York, and was working (albeit for peanuts) in media and entertainment. By the time I scrolled to the fifth iteration of the mean, bullying, overachieving high school IT girl or guy who'd just become an accountant and never left our suburb, my interest in attending this thing had evaporated.
And it made me feel like I had nothing to prove. I'd gotten out of that town and had a far more interesting life, so what did I care? Even my fellow closet-case high school crush was now out and married to the man of his dreams, so if I couldn't even pull him aside to make out while the hottest hits of 1997 played, then what was even the point?!
As one Redditor put it, "I have no interest in attending mine because I still keep in touch with most of the people I care about." And that makes it infinitely easier to detach from the ones you don't — which is most of your class if you're honest.
Sometimes the past is just better left in the past. Reunion, schmeunion (unless I someday end up like Sandy Frink in "Romy & Michele's High School Reunion" and can arrive in a helicopter).
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.