Teenagers; oh, how complicated and intense that word is. Some fear its very mention and others devote their lives towards creating art to understand our complex behaviours.
As a word that means youth, juvenile and adolescence, these are also the years that supposedly shape a person’s entire life.
Even though numerous young adult novels and coming of age films portray a teenager’s life to be aesthetically pleasing and mysterious, the reality is very much different.
The Generational Gap
Our parents were born in a completely different century from us. They lived entirely different lifestyles and faced different problems. Every teenager, at one point in their life, has felt misunderstood by the very people, their parents, who were the reason they exist.
Most parents reject the peculiar issues we face, commenting offhandedly that they never had these problems during their time. This, unfortunately, creates a barrier between the parent and the kid, giving birth to the misunderstood teenager who feels that they are alone in this world.
The Curse of Social Media
There are endless possibilities that come with using social media positively. However, it can be just as daunting as it is engaging. The rectangular devices that are mere molecules are always connected to our skin and we run to them for every little need. They have created a wall between the real world and the digital world. The addiction to technology is all consuming.
This is a photo that I took on the metro. The photo depicts people sitting in a line, all on their phones. This spoke to me because I thought of the past when people did not have phones; how did they pass their time during their everyday commute? And what impact can these changes have on the different generations and the way they grow up? By having something to distract us from reality constantly, social media becomes an escape for us. The anxiety that rushes in our bodies if our phones die or if we forget our earphones at home only shows that the devices that were invented to work as a helping hand for humans, now works as a indispensable crutch. Taking a moment to appreciate the world around us and looking at a baby sleeping soundly on public transport rather than scrolling through meaningless feeds on our phones might help bring us back to the simpler, and perhaps more peaceful, times.
I wish that I could be like the cool kids
Our generation has become used to portraying everything as laden with sunshine and rainbows. Everything is picture perfect. If someone else appears to look and live better than us, we think of ourselves as less competent than them.
“Did you hear that she got into an ivy league school?”
“Every person in their group got into the top ranking schools, they are all so smart.”
“I applied to the top 3 London schools and got in.”
These are all sentences that we hear around us. Some smile because they are the ones getting into all these schools but some put on a fake smile because they know that they could never match up.
Before we are barely adults, society in this ever growing world forces us to essentially plan out our entire lives. The places, the type of people, the jobs, the type of work, the subjects and everything else has to be completely locked in before we are out of school. If all of the 8 billion people in the world knew what their entire lives looked like before they have even lived half of it, all of us would be living in Iron Man’s house. However, we have to work, we have to think and we have to reflect to find out what our hearts call out for. But since most people around us all seem like they have it all figured out, it only forces everyone else to put their lives on the fourth gear.
We have to take a deep breath and understand that it will all work out in one way or another. That is, only when we are ready to face the real world and ourselves, and not for anyone else.
