From a very young age, we’ve often been asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”, at 5 years of age, we would answer “Astronaut”, at 9 years of age, we would answer “Vet”, at 14 years old, maybe we would say “Doctor”, but now as we are approaching our last years of being teenagers many of us simply say, “I don’t know”.
Author: Martina Grace Kennedy
We teenagers are constantly being put to the challenge in every aspect of our lives, whether it’s at school, at home, on social media or in our social life, we feel the constant pressure to live up to expectations or standards that sometimes are just too high. Being a teenager is hard enough as it is, by trying to understand who we are, what we like and what we want to do with our lives, but now it’s become even harder having to deal with inherited responsibilities and expectations.
These big expectations we have to deal with, are what I feel the majority of teenagers experience.
The people that expect the most of us are usually our parents. While yes, it is natural for them to want the best for us and have certain things that maybe they didn’t have, they cannot expect us to be perfect in everything. We did not choose to be put into this world, we did not choose to have to fix their mistakes, and we did not choose to have all these responsibilities. Even though they may want the best for us, it’s not fair that when we grow up, we are the ones having to fulfil their dreams and be responsible for their choices.
The biggest pressure we have to face every day is at school: academic pressure. At school we are forced to excel in everything, because nowadays if you want any type of job you need a degree; so we start to stress and get overwhelmed even just by the thought of college, and we start to ask ourselves: Am I good enough? Can I do it? If I fail, will I disappoint my family? Do I have the money for this? On top of these, today, getting good grades and having great test scores are usually not enough to get into a good university/college. They want us to be involved in many other extracurricular activities, for example: being good at a certain sport and winning competitions, being a volunteer, being in a niche club… I mean there is absolutely nothing wrong with being ambitious, but there is a certain point where trying to be the best in everything stops being about learning and trying to have fun, and becomes more just for the sake of doing it because it looks good on an application.
I believe social media plays a huge role in our stress, whenever we start scrolling or just looking at social media, it seems like everyone around us is winning in some big competition, like getting into their dream school, having an amazing relationship or starting a family. We feel that we cannot keep up and that we are just falling behind, social media makes us see what’s missing from our lives, when really we should just stop and admire everything that we do have. We start taking many things for granted, and we only realise that they’re missing when they get taken away from us.
We appreciate everything that we have more and more every day , because we know that in 15 to 20 years, give or take, we are going to be the ones who will have to try to fix the mistakes our parents and grandparents left for us. The biggest ones of all being: global warming, war impacts, mental health crises and many more. Every day we either see or experience something that was decided by the people above us. In theory, they are the people that should be protecting us and leading us to a better and safer future, but instead they prefer to cause chaos and divide us into thousands of groups, because according to them, we are all supposed to be “different” from each other. The people in power refuse to listen to us young people or let us express our opinions and ideas. For them, we are just too young to actually know anything about how the world works, too naive and oblivious to be able to have any experience or knowledge.
In my opinion, the biggest and hardest challenge we will have to face will be climate change/global warming. Since a lot of damage has already been done, not just our generation but also future generations are on the verge of witnessing a complete destruction of all ecosystems, and potentially severe consequences for humanity; that’s why younger generations will have to try their best to fix all these big messes that have been left for us, there is no time to waste, we need to act now if we want to try to save our futures.
For all these reasons, there are many consequences for us teenagers, mainly feeling burnout, overwhelmed and confused. We feel puzzled trying to understand if the future we are building for ourselves is really “What we want” or “What is expected of us”.
Are we doing all of this simply to please others or for our personal happiness and satisfaction? What if I truly just didn’t have an answer? Everyone always assumes we must have an answer to everything, but it’s not possible for us not to know what we want to do with our lives, but they need to start understanding that “I do not know” is a real and justifiable answer.
We shouldn’t have to carry all these responsibilities and expectations on our shoulders. We shouldn’t have to fix everything by ourselves. I believe a better future requires more and better cooperation between generations, not pressure.
