The challenges of being a youth in the 21st century

The 21^st century is an era constructed with technology as its concrete and information as its streetlights. It is a city where its dwellers thrive on speed, dine in instant gratification with convenience as their finest wine. Youths are the portion of dwellers that are caught up between the wandering years of 15 and 24, the years of chewed on pens and dog-eared pages.

  We are brought up to believe that school is our responsibility, that no matter how numbers and equations strangle us to our last breath, we are supposed to “be strong” and solve them in minutes. We are taught that “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” but our questions to those of the ruling class are always diminished. We are educated to accept that the retention of data is what dictates the intelligence of a person, that wisdom consists of the distinctions scrawled on a piece of rolled up papyrus and the position of a person’s name on the Dean’s list. We are given the duty to be ‘proper students’, albeit the definition of propriety is always to conform without question. We are taught that we could only speak out our opinions if they are appropriate, and that the unorthodox few will be silenced for their speech.

  We are brought up to believe that education is the bridge to a better life, but we were never warned that said “better life” comes with a subtext of millions of debt chaining us around our ankles. When we finally struggle through the years of confined minds and monitored conduct, we again find ourselves in an entanglement of taxation and college debts, where the recalled knowledge of ‘F=ma’ did nothing to assist us out of this abominable labyrinth. We are taught that certain professions are superior over others, that we should choose our degrees not according to our preferences but to fit us into rigid workspaces. By the age of 20 we were told that thousands of graduates are unemployed after their tertiary education, and sometimes we look at our friends and find the uncanny resemblance of real life and the Game of Thrones, where success can only be achieved by building your throne with the carcasses of the ones who were left behind. 

  We are brought up to believe that we must marry by the age of 30, have children by 33 and live in a house with white picket fences by 35. We live in the shadow of imposed values by the generation of the war, where they try to fit us into these ideal designs of life just because they never had the chance to live it. We are pushed into these prototypes of existence that they dreamt for themselves, and we are bound to the code of conduct that they drew for themselves. When we attempt to wrestle free from the tendrils of these supposed optimality, we are labelled as ungrateful rebels and lost lambs. We are confined in transparent boxes in this age of freedom, with no way to outlive the judgement of the old.

  We are brought up to believe that we are the blessed generation, the generation where liberty breathes just by our ears and independence is wrapped in a box with a bow for us. We are constantly reminded of the tales of our ancestors’ sufferings, how their blood spilled and formed rivers that led to the development of the ocean of freedom we swim in today. Little did they know that we are just bewildered minds trapped between the awkward ages of innocence and maturity, and we were never the cause of the gore splattered against asphalt that happened all the years ago. We are always lectured that we have everything served on the platter for us, and hence we should do better than all the generations of the past. Little did they know that we are too young to shoulder the expectations that were scribbled using the blood of our ancestors, and all of us are mere mortals that have no idea if we would drop off the grid by just a snap of the fingers. We need to walk our years of adolescence with anticipations shoved down our throats, and sometimes when we decide to snap the fingers ourselves, the adults would wonder what set off our triggers. Little did they know it was them who fed the demons in us, and the demons just decided to consume us.

  We are brought up to believe that the ones who hold the wealth of the nation are the successful ones in life, that self-worth are determined by well-tailored suits and too expensive cars. We are brought up to believe that money is something too important to lose, and those that did not strive for more are the lazy and unmotivated. We are suited with superficiality as our armour, and sometimes we run too fast in the travel of life in search of money that we forget why we started travelling in the first place. We are misguided by greed, and often we can never answer why we need so much money in the first place.

  We are brought up to believe that the information we need are just by the swipe of our fingers, but we are never warned that the simple motion of our digits will bring us deception and fraudulence. We are bombarded by the sheer amount of metadata, and by the age of 14 we are adept in filtering lies that were fed to us via the blinking lights of our modem. When we were 18, we were told that politics are a game of lies and broken promises, when the only broken promise that a teen should know is how a father forgot to buy his birthday gift. There is no buffer between childhood and adulthood, and with the stream of information we let our innocence slip from our grasps into a cruel game of barter for knowledge.

  We are brought up to believe that convenience is the quality of life. We find ourselves arms deep in scraps of material floating in the internet, and are conditioned to skim through the dull descriptions to skip right to the climax of the piece. We are spoiled with the wonders of instant gratification, thus we will never grow to appreciate the bittersweet taste of anticipation. We are rushed through the rapid current of globalisation, exposed to a multitude of negative behaviours that were made right just because a large number of the population were behaving the same way. We are so dependent on our digital gadgets to the extent that if we are dropped off the boat of technology, we would drown in the sea of time, helpless with all the hours and minutes to spare. We are hooked up with the strongest drug are always seeking for the next fix. We are easily distracted, with determination and willpower now illustrated by how long we can go without indulging ourselves with our smartphones and laptops.

  The 21^st century is a city where blessings and curses intertwine, where temptations sing the song of the sirens to the lost lambs between the ages of 15 to 24. Only the strongest lambs will save themselves from the honey-laced seduction while the weak-willed succumb in the arms of sin. However, the lambs will still fight to break the cage that confines them, in search for true freedom and maybe just a whiff of clean, peaceful air.