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Life's not so bad...
I thought I would retire (temporarily) from the excellent debate we are having about Islam right now. My mind is kind of fried from all the writing I've done between my speech class and here on the forums. So I thought I would write something a little more cheerful instead.
As a preface to this short essay I wrote, it should be known that a girl who attends my school recently committed suicide. I felt the most sympathy for her up until I heard that she had taken her own life. Now, I feel little towards her. But all the empathy I can muster for the friends and family she left behind. I will not elaborate on this now.
But it got me thinking about just how often I hear the tired rhetoric (and if you will pardon m French) "my life sucks....my life is shit...it can't get any worse..." I hear it mostly from girls, rarely if ever from a guy.
I have never applied any of these attributes to my own life. I always have felt it would be irresponsible. And had it not been for the near death of one of my good friends at a young age due to Cancer, perhaps I would empathize with people who say this. But my pity for this mentality is wearing thin. So naturally, I wrote an essay to organize my thoughts around the subject. It's bound to cheer anyone up. Though keep in mind it was orginally written to teenagers via a blog on Myspace.
As a preface to this short essay I wrote, it should be known that a girl who attends my school recently committed suicide. I felt the most sympathy for her up until I heard that she had taken her own life. Now, I feel little towards her. But all the empathy I can muster for the friends and family she left behind. I will not elaborate on this now.
But it got me thinking about just how often I hear the tired rhetoric (and if you will pardon m French) "my life sucks....my life is shit...it can't get any worse..." I hear it mostly from girls, rarely if ever from a guy.
I have never applied any of these attributes to my own life. I always have felt it would be irresponsible. And had it not been for the near death of one of my good friends at a young age due to Cancer, perhaps I would empathize with people who say this. But my pity for this mentality is wearing thin. So naturally, I wrote an essay to organize my thoughts around the subject. It's bound to cheer anyone up. Though keep in mind it was orginally written to teenagers via a blog on Myspace.
Anybody that goes to my school will probably understand what this following blog is in response to, but I just have a few things I'd just like to throw out there. It is not addressed to anyone in particular, but really just anyone who thinks it might apply.
Ask yourself, "Is my my life really that bad?" And don't answer that one too quickly. Hear me out even before you decide. It is not uncommon for me to hear the rhetoric of "just how tough kids have it these days." Really? I was not aware of something personally afflicting our generation that really separated us in the levels of hardship from our predecessors. Feel free to correct me. But I will not dwell on it that point long.
My challenge is to anyone who believes that their life "sucks...is a bitch...is shit...can't get worse" or what have you. The degrees of dissatisfaction may range from suckage to plain unbearableness. You decide for yourself.
However, I must narrow the pool of potential question answerers a little bit. The people whom I exclude from this line of questioning (as I don't want to come across as insincere or ignorant) are people who suffer from very diffiicult economic situations, abusive/negligent/split/deceased parents (or relatives, friends), or some debilitating/incurable disease. Of course it should be noted that the latter are typically most appreciative of life in general.
Anyways, if you do not at all into any of the above categories, I bid you to at least consider what I have to say. Although you may not like the sound of it, I am going to go out on a limb here and say that your life is pretty good right now. You have at least one or a few close friends that care about you? You have a house? A few decent meals a day? You are relatively heatlhy (as in no terrible afflictions right now)? You have no tangible, impending, physical crisis on your hands?
Ok, good. If you are still elgible and still think that your life is a bitch, I would ask you to consider any of the afflictions I mentioned earlier and imagine them in your self-described shithole of a life right now. If your life is so unbearable, just imagine what it would be like with cancer or the sudden death of a parent (provided you have any feelings for them to begin with of course). How about eviction? Bankruptcy? Sudden school transfer? (again provided you like anyone at your school)
Do you see where I am getting at? I could go on and on. The list of real injustices and atrocities that do not afflict you in the slightest cause for the surplus of human misery around the world each day. And I have not even begun to state the cultural horrors that none of us will ever have to face.
For instance, if you are a girl, you will never know the oppression stemming form the burqa veil in the Middle East. You will never have to endure the psychologically and physically traumatic horrors of genital mutilation experienced by someone like the brave Ayann Hirsi Ali in North Africa.
For a guy, providing you live in a semi-enlightened country, you will never be forcefully sent to fight in a foreign war whose cause you don't believe in. You will most likely not be tried and beheaded for an imaginary crime like blasphemy. It is highly unlikely that you will ever be imprisoned by an authoritarian government and tortured simply because your politics or religion differed from the status quo.
I'm sure you all are beginning to understand my point here. Because the truth of the matter is, there are most likely millions, if not billions of people who would trade places with your or I on any day. Not just in the poorest of poor areas of the world, but even here in America. A person undergoing chemotherapy or someone who knows they only have a few months to live perhaps? Try going to sleep with that on your mind!
As you might be able to deduce, I am not a phony, feel good, 'tomorrow's sun will shine the brighter' kind of person. Because for all I know, your life might not ever get better. It might be this way forever and it will undoubtedly get worse some day. But then again, you might not wake up tomorrow, and the sun may never shine brighter, or rise again for that matter.
Ponder that one because life's not so bad.
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Comments
I'm not gonna argue with you on this one, but...
Life for the youth of today is TOO INTENSE. Almost all of the time during the schoolyear is structured and the intensity of it all wears the young person down. Plus, this computer age keeps so many records that mistakes seem to be magnified to the extent that they almost appear as fatal flaws.
When I was coming up kids could just be kids and there wasn't so much STRESS because you just didn't HAVE TO CARE about things so much. You could care if you liked, but still things were not so stressful.
True, things are rarely as bad as they seem, but the stakes are so high for the youth of today that a lot of anxiety and worry can cloud the horizon.
Thanks for sharing...
I have given more thought on the subject recently when it was brought up to me the other day.
I take it you are referring to peer pressure, no? Or maybe just pressure in general. It's just, that as a teenager myself, I refuse to accept it as an excuse from other teens. If you (referring to teens) feel pressured into doing something you are opposed to, then simply don't do it. It's really not as difficult as you might imagine. Do you have intellect? A conscience? Then what's the problem? You really have problems if you can't make decisions for yourself and are constantly in the control of your peers or "superiors."
There are things in my past that my peers pressured me into doing. If I chose to go along with it, it was because I actually wanted to. If I refused, it was because my better judgment got the best of me and I simply said, 'No.'
My philosophy on this came from my old, retired music teacher of all places. When I expressed my eagerness to join an anti-drug, teen support group that aims to "have fun without drugs," he was not enthused in the slightest. He challenged the the purpose of such an institution saying that it would lack effectiveness and that he had abstained nearly his entire life from smoking and drinking without such a group. He also said that the only anti-drug that can be employed effectively is a strength of will and the ability to say either yes or no. It was really that simple.
I didn't believe him at first. But 4 years later, all his predictions came true. Needless to say, I never joined the group because I was troubled by the hypocritical nature of its leadership (they all smoked and drank!) I'm glad I didn't because I really love smoking Hookah on the weekends now without a troubled conscience. Choosing to do so was all a matter of will power. Yes or no.
Anyway, perhaps I have gone off track here. This girl who took her life I can only imagine was under what she perceived as immense peer pressure. That seems to almost always be the reason for these incidents in the younger generation.
I can't argue for or against your statement about my generation being the most difficult as I have nothing else to compare it to. But I can say that the majority of my peers who claim that life is such an impossible, dramatic, tragedy in which the world is against them, are simply self-absorbed and could probably use a genuine tragedy to sort them out.
If there truly is too much pressure in a teen's life, it is up to that teen to know their limits and act accordingly. I have not been afraid in my life to tell my parents when any combination or work/school/music was too much and that something had to go. I think the root of the problem is not so much the amount of pressure, but instead teenagers' overall lack of initiative to solve a problem on their own.
Problem-solvers are really special folks, regardless of what generation they may spring from.
One thing I've observed about myself over the years (as certain ungraceful things have happened) is that many of my mistakes or awkward social performances really emanated from lack of prior exposure or practice. In other words, I just didn't know how to act.
Realizing this fact has helped me understand the behaviour of other people and to overlook their shortcomings and to love them. People quite often just don't know what to do or how to do it. If this can be excused in an older adult (And I say it often should.), why should the young, themselves relatively inexperienced, be so hard on their peers?
Good to hear your thoughts on this...