While he goes a bit far in framing ’80s dance parties as a path to God, Mark Judge makes a great point, here:

Going out was a long ride uninterrupted by texts, which didn’t exist, or phone calls, because phone booths were hard to find. The experience formed a kind of meditation. The professional world was not just lost for an hour of yoga or pilates, but completely abandoned for a lengthy, restorative journey. It often changed you. As Mohaghegh observes in Night, “Night brings revolution against the archetypal. It overthrows the dominant hierarchies and universal myths in favor of the beautiful diary of the masquerade or the bonfire. It is where one fathoms otherwise, the time-space of the visionary, the imaginary, the unreal, the unknown, the elsewhere, the outside, and the emergent. It is where one builds machinations of radical thought…those droplets of mad and dangerous consciousness.”

The movies back in our youth drove the point home.  Whether Dazed and Confused, Weird Science, or dozens and dozens of other hits of the time, we cultivated a sense of adventure, as if anything could happen.  You disconnected from ordinary life, and sometimes the sun came up on a world transformed.

Of course the movies exaggerated, and we should have no illusion that attempting to prove them right caused some in our generation a fair bit of pain and harm, but too much of that sense of possibility seems to have been lost.