To Toast or Not to Toast: When Did Cheersing Become Uncool?
Anne Hollister, the New York-based producer and actor at production company HappyBad Bungalow and a Millennial, was recently on a date with a 26-year-old Gen Z man. When the drinks arrived, Hollister didn’t even notice that she’d raised her glass for a ritualistic clink, though she did clock her date’s reaction.
“He was taken aback,” Hollister, 33, recalls. “Literally, he was like ‘Whoa!’ when I did that.”
She thought it might be a fluke until a few days later, when she went out to dinner with a friend and the friend’s daughter, who is 22. The daughter said she and her peers don’t really cheers except on special occasions. Needless to say, Hollister has lately been thinking twice about lifting her glass.
“Now I’m super self-conscious,” she says. “When people bring drinks, I wait for them to cheers.”
For many Millennials and their booze-loving forebears, to raise a glass to one’s companions is all but muscle memory the moment that first drink hits the table, regardless of occasion. To your health, birthday, or anniversary; to the end of a shift or another infernal week. To nothing at all, except being alive in this moment with a few good friends around. It might be verbally reinforced with “Cheers!” or “Salud!” or “Santé!” or sealed by locking eyes or knocking the base of the glass on the table. Absorbing its possible endangerment among future generations has some like Hollister reflecting on its deeper meaning.
“It’s almost a ritual, a practice, that acknowledges how special it is to come together and share a meal or a drink,” she says.
It’s well documented that younger generations are drinking less and, by extension, centering fewer social activities around alcohol. More Americans work from home more often and attend fewer happy hours. The ancient tradition of cheersing as a symbol of human connection has also been flattened by meme-ification in the internet age. First came the Boomerang cheers, a byproduct of the Instagram app that, upon reaching its novelty expiration date, was mostly written off as Millennial cringe. Then came the 2022 TikTok trend of toasting with food, seemingly the oozier and more cumbersome the better. (Loaded baked potato cheers, anyone?) So for those without a meaningful foothold in the tradition, what remains of the ritual?
From Toastmasters to Leisure Time
Toasting has its roots in ancient Greece. In fact, the act of raising a glass to another’s good fortune appeared even before the word itself, according to Paul Dickson, the author of an anthology on toasts. In Homer’s “Odyssey,” Ulysses drank to Achilles’ health, though the word was not actually used in the poem. It purportedly appeared in the 12th century, via the Middle English “tosten.” Other theories posit that the toast originated as a good-faith gesture to ensure a drink wasn’t spiked with poison, a common weapon of the Middle Ages. This is according to Dave Fulmer’s 1990 book, “A Gentleman’s Guide to Toasting.”
By the 17th and 18th centuries, toasting had become a formal social practice in European courts. Eventually, the position of toastmaster emerged as a sort of etiquette referee at significant social events, delivering and soliciting appropriate toasts depending on the occasion — to eventually be replicated or chaotically botched in the centuries of milestone celebrations to come.
“I’m usually the one initiating it with my age group, if I’m thinking about it. There’s a less ritualistic or obligatory nature to it. For whatever reason, we feel compelled to keep doing it, but a lot of times it’s an afterthought.”
Meanwhile, the cheers slowly wended its way into daily life, as a tangible transition out of the workday into leisure time and acknowledgement of life’s prosaic wins and losses (or a very British way to end a conversation). As the New York-based culture writer, editor, and author Eliza Dumais puts it, “It’s nice to have that ceremony that ushers you from one part of your day to the next.”
Per Dumais, also a Millennial at 31, one doesn’t have to cheers with alcohol to inject the moment with said ceremony or fanfare — superstitions be damned! Nor does one have to make a toast in order to cheers, though she often finds herself acknowledging some menial accomplishment in addition to the physical act of clinking — the end of a sh*t day or bundling in 20 layers to meet a friend for a drink on a frigid evening.
But therein lies the magic: in shining up the mundane. It’s why parents make a show of cheersing their glass with their toddler’s sippy cup to the latter’s delight. Glimpsing one such moment on a recent dinner out transported me to being 7 years old on Christmas Eve at my parents’ then-annual holiday party. Donning my favorite fluffy dress, I spied on the flush-faced adults in their finery topping off one another’s glasses with liquid I wasn’t old enough to drink, crying “Cheers!” with each clink of a glass. I wanted in.
Is ‘Cheers’ Losing Its Meaning?
Jane Godiner, a 24-year-old restaurant, food, and drink reporter at The Baltimore Sun, grew up in a drinks-toasting, Gen X family, which subscribes to such lore as it’s bad luck to cheers with water. (She doesn’t agree.) She, too, wonders if cheersing has lost some of its deeper meaning among her generation.
When she’s out with Gen Z friends, they do still clink glasses, “but I’m usually the one initiating it with my age group, if I’m thinking about it,” she says. “There’s a less ritualistic or obligatory nature to it. For whatever reason, we feel compelled to keep doing it, but a lot of times it’s an afterthought.”
Alex Hahn, a 28-year-old server at the French bistro Creepies in Chicago, agrees that it’s less about intention when he’s raising a glass with fellow Gen Zers, though the practice is still commonplace.
“Also there’s lots of ‘wooing,’” he adds. “Like the ‘woo’ has replaced saying ‘cheers’ explicitly. I have no idea when it started, but it’s definitely a Gen Z thing.”
It’s possible that the performative nature of social media has divorced the cheers from its deeper intent, or worse, made the thing feel antiquated and cringe. Trends move so fast on the apps that they often become dated just as quickly. Staying ahead means laughing at the absurdity of, say, staging a perfect food cheers.
Because Godiner does a lot of video for The Sun, the cheers often shows up in cold opens or B-roll footage as her playful nod to the audience — holding up a drink at a hot new restaurant, for instance.
“There’s this tongue-in-cheek, performative aspect, like ‘hee hee, we’re doing cheers,’” she says. “It never feels disparaging, though it’s not necessarily taken as a serious activity. It feels a little suggestive that it is antiquated to us.”
Could it be that Millennials, the last guardians of the sanctity of cheers, are aging out? Indeed, Hollister recalls at one point her Gen Z date called her cheers attempt “quaint.” (No, they haven’t gone out again.) When she posed the question of whether young people cheers anymore on her TikTok and Instagram last month, “a lot of people were saying it’s because the kids don’t have Boomerang anymore.”
The app, which turns one-second photo bursts into a looping, back-and-forth video, debuted a decade ago on Instagram. Over time, the Boomerang cheers became associated with Millennials as the favorite, if increasingly twee, way to convey the camaraderie of a #girlstrip or the romance of #datenight on socials. With each repetition on socials — no doubt sealed with a cheers emoji in the caption — it seemed as if it was proving itself ever more out of touch.
“It’s nice to have that ceremony that ushers you from one part of your day to the next.”
Instagram folded the functionality into Reels and Stories in 2022, around the same time the food cheers started trending on FoodTok. Lately, cheersing with food and drink seems to crop up more often in highlight-reel form on socials, perhaps to inject some excitement and please the algorithm. Meanwhile, the Boomerang faded further into the annals of mockable things old(er) people sometimes do in public. Will the cheers follow suit?
“[The cheers] is so fundamentally human and culturally attuned that it feels deeply unfathomable to me that anyone would not have that impulse,” Dumais says. “But that’s what everyone who’s ever aged out of anything feels like — that it’s impossible until someone on TikTok is rolling their eyes about it.”
Learned Intention
No shade to Hollister’s date, but dismissing the cheers as “quaint” could relate to his discomfort with connection. It’s hard to quantify the magnitude of loss of physical connection the pandemic wreaked on everyone, particularly young adults in college or starting their careers. The isolating move to screens reflected fewer hours in an office, out with friends and on dates — and more loneliness as a result. Cheers to you, audience who spends intimate time with me but doesn’t really know me.
“I think our generation has been able to live offline and live online,” says Alyssa Nelson, a 36-year-old travel and lifestyle writer and content creator in Charlotte, N.C. “A lot of the younger generation views what is online as their real life.”
In some ways, the cheers is antithetical to the internet, and not just because it’s kind of boring to watch. It’s hard to be present and make eye contact if you’re more focused on a photo opp with a drink or oozing pizza slice in hand. Indeed, Godiner recalls times when she raised a glass to her companion only to be met with a frantic “Wait!” as they whipped out their phone. “It just takes you right out of the moment.”
“There’s this tongue-in-cheek, performative aspect, like ‘hee hee, we’re doing cheers. It never feels disparaging, though it’s not necessarily taken as a serious activity. It feels a little suggestive that it is antiquated to us.”
The ritual appears to be alive and well in the hospitality industry, where closing at the end of the night and cracking open a shift drink alongside the comrades with whom you’ve been in the trenches feels especially deserving of a cheers.
“In hospitality, it’s more centered around food and drink specifically,” says Dumais, whose boyfriend owns a restaurant. “But I do think cheers is such a hallmark of ‘we’ve served and we did this together.’”
Indeed, intention and eye contact anchor the practice for Hahn when he’s in the company of restaurant and winemaker friends. He’s internalized it such that he is fairly certain he comes on a little strong when he’s out with peers outside of hospitality.
“Cheersing feels like a quick nonverbal way to communicate something like, ‘Hey, I love you, I’m happy to share this with you,’” he says. “When I bring that energy to non-industry friends it feels like I’m being really intense. Probably because of the eye contact.”
At least they’re feeling his meaning. The same can’t be said for cheersing on the apps, though maybe that’s not where the practice needs to live in order to survive. By the end of our conversation, Hollister vows to drop her insecurity and do her part to keep the ritual alive as intended.
“I work from home; I’m on my computer, on Zooms and looking at my phone all day long,” she says. “When I have the privilege of going out with friends or on a date, I wanna celebrate that and be in the moment.”
She might even cheers when round two arrives.
The article To Toast or Not to Toast: When Did Cheersing Become Uncool? appeared first on VinePair.