Life as An Adolescent
Life as a teen isn’t as easy as it may seem. Adults tend to think that this generation is lazy and that they don’t do anything. But wrong teens want to do things like travel or just have fun. Most teens, though, aren’t given that choice as we often take on responsibilities that aren’t even for us to handle but are forcefully given. You can ask most teens about our system, and they would say it doesn’t work for us, and I would argue that they're right. Mainly because the system doesn’t help us and mainly works against us, and I’m not even talking about the school system; I’m talking about the governmental system, foster care system, and corporate job system. So most of them work against us or tend to use us for their benefit as, I would say, 9/10, we’re set up to fail.
Teens aren’t happy; if anything, we’re more depressed than ever. Most teens try to fit into society, but society often pushes us back or ridicules us for being ourselves or showing who we are. We are often told to be ourselves or not to worry about what other people say, but we must because if we didn’t, we would be ostracized by other teens or adults. And we try to tell people about it. If anything, most of us are screaming for help, but no one listens or comes to lend aid to us. Our options are therapy, a suicide hotline, or random people online. We try to tell our parents, but they don’t understand what school is like nowadays and how much difference there is between 10-30 years. School is even changing. If a kid is being bullied or being beaten up and the victim stands up for themselves, the victim is blamed and punished for sticking up for themselves even if they had no choice but to fight back.
We’re told to trust the school system and that it's reliable. We can’t. The moment we try to talk to someone at this school, we get sent to a psych ward, or our parents get called and are told about it. That doesn’t help; sometimes, our parents are the problem, and sometimes we just want to go to somebody because we had a bad day, and it’s all we could think of. Teens are closed off from saying how they feel or reaching out to anyone because they're scared of people knowing, as not everything is kept secret. And most of the time, we go to somebody that person tells another and another until a teacher or principal knows, and they call someone, and they call your parents. Now you must explain to your parents how you feel or get sent to a mental hospital. This doesn’t help, it makes us feel abandoned, betrayed, lost of trust, but most of all, feel like we can’t go to anybody. The system is supposed to protect and be there for us, but all it’s done is make teens feel isolated and by themselves and cause more stress out amongst themselves than be united.
Most teens are too busy working on school, and that’s the only thing they do. Sometimes it’s all we do, and it’s a lot. Some teens spend 7 hours a day at school, some even more for sports or clubs. Which takes a big chunk of our day already, and when we get home, we have chores and housework to do that’s another 2-3 hours. We also have to focus on homework, which takes between 1-4 hours, depending on the work. So if you add all that up, we have a total of 10-14 hours of our day taken up and were supposed to get 8-12 hours of sleep for our brains to develop but were too busy even to get sleep sometimes because we also have to focus on our social life as humans are social species. This causes stress and wears our body and mind down as we progress through high school. There’s also planning what to do after high school and if we go to college or get a job or maybe a trade school, but we’re so busy making sure our grades don’t slip that we don’t even know what we want to do before it’s too late. We’re stuck with our parents, trying to figure out what we want to do and what we want to be in life. Or to even figure out who we are and what’s our ideals or morals which is a very important thing to know.
With all that I have said, I don’t blame adults, I don’t blame teachers, And I don’t blame other teens. We all have a role in which we played that has affected all of us negatively, and I don’t see that changing until teens say something about it and actually fight back against the system, as teachers and adults don’t have the power to take down the system they created as they also just follow along with it. I’m not saying they can’t help or do something about it, but teens think that the system that we are in is a prison that’s just set us up to be workers rather than people. School used to be a way to find oneself and understand the human race and culture. Now it’s working on work on work. We could easily fight back against the system, but most teens don’t know how or to be scared. As they would see, it affects them badly in the future, or we get silenced when any injustice happens to us. We have a voice; we can use our voice, but teens are against each other, so we can’t see that the very system that was created to protect us is only harming us. And until we change, teens will only get more depressed, angrier, and more isolated as they grow in stressed situations. Teens aren’t happy. We are begging to be free and grow as a person; someday, that will happen, but it will probably be too late as we no longer stand up for ourselves.