This article is from the Students United News Network (SUNN) and provided by the first citywide student-led newspaper in the USA, the Nashville SUNN (NashvilleSUNN.com).
A few weeks ago, I attended a dinner party hosted by a friend of mine from high school. The guest list consisted mostly of people I’d known for years, but also included a few newcomers collected from our scattered college lives. As we cleared our dinner plates and prepared to help ourselves to dessert, I jokingly proposed that we all make toasts – we did, and raised our glasses to friendship, to community and to the graciousness of our host.
I have only a very vague memory of what was said during the toasts. What I remember much more acutely is how it felt to share the moment
with friends new and old. What began as a humorous exercise quickly took on greater emotional depth. Piecing together a small speech on the fly pushed each of us to take a close look at our lives at that exact moment. Unsurprisingly, we found plenty to be grateful for.
Since that night, I’ve made an effort to incorporate toasts into my life as often as possible. While most Gen Zers may associate toasts more with ‘90s rom-coms and stuffy grandparents than our own social lives, we have a lot to gain from incorporating them into our routines. They can help us slow down our frenetic lives and find meaning in an ordinary Tuesday night.
Toasts may seem old-fashioned, but their value endures
Toasts haven’t necessarily fallen out of social favor, but they do, to many young people, seem more like a holdover from our parents’ or grandparents’ generations than a practice to make our own.
Sharing a drink as an act of celebration is an ancient gesture. Feasting rituals involving wine appear in ancient texts like Homer’s “Odyssey,” and versions of the word “toast” emerged as early as the 12th century.
More recently, toasts have become a hallmark of formal celebrations, particularly weddings. Presentations in such settings are usually scripted and practiced in advance to promise clean delivery before a large audience.
Waning enthusiasm for a ritualized “Cheers!” may also owe, in part, to Gen Z’s reduced alcohol consumption. It’s old news that Gen Zers are drinking less than members of previous generations did at our age. As a natural result of this decline, young people are also participating in fewer alcohol-centered social activities. But there’s no reason the drinks in the glasses that rise in a toast need to be alcoholic. A toast shared over morning matcha lattes is no less meaningful than one preceding a fancy dinner.
A simple ritual that encourages reflection and connection
Toasts – even and especially casual ones – create opportunities to push, momentarily, against the swift current of everyday life. Sharing a toast is a chance to press pause and practice mindful reflection alongside friends, family or even complete strangers. It might celebrate a major accomplishment or mark a meaningful change. In other cases, though, it can simply allow you to orient yourself within a busy day or week.
Perhaps even more importantly, a toast is a casual, low-stakes opportunity to practice speaking confidently and coherently without much time to prepare. That’s a skill that Gen Z struggles with, but serves people across career paths and social situations.
You don’t need a special occasion to raise a glass
The process of preparing a toast need not be intense. If writing and rehearsing a short speech sounds stiff to you, I challenge you to present a toast off-the-cuff the next time you meet up with your friends. It can be as short as a few words or as long as a few minutes.
Even if you do drink, trying a non-alcoholic, earlier-in-the-day toast could allow you to expand the speech’s thematic bandwidth. A breakfast or lunch toast could be used to set goals or declare intentions rather than to acknowledge goalposts already reached.
While mastering the structure of the traditional toast is certainly an accomplishment, your public speaking skills may benefit even more from a constantly changing approach that pushes you to develop fresh speeches each time rather than falling into familiar patterns.
So the next time you share a drink with a friend, be it coffee, water, champagne or whatever else, tip your glasses (or cups, or mugs) together and punctuate the motion with a few words about what this person, this interaction, this day or week means to you. Your toast doesn’t need to be long, or flowery, or even particularly well thought out. As long as it’s meant authentically and spoken clearly, the benefits will soon begin to reap themselves.
Kate Rodriguez is the senior student editor and writer at the SUNN Post. In addition to writing stories, she selects student work for syndication, connects with students to solicit commissions and helps guide pieces through the editorial process. She is a junior at Yale University studying English and creative writing and is originally from Bethesda, Maryland.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Let's bring back the toast | Opinion
