Arjun Khemani

A teenager’s rant on the problem with the normal teenager.

When a child becomes a teenager, all of a sudden he’s into the “real world” now. And I feel that’s a really gloomy imaginative world to be in.

In the last years of high school, everybody becomes extremely serious about their career and what they’re going to do in life. They literally write examinations as if their life depends on it (and it actually does, they think).

Earlier when you would ask kids what they want to be when they grow up they’d say all sorts of things. They’d come up with new answers each week. Professional football player, a world famous actor, an astronaut, a police officer, a teacher, a doctor, a pilot, a dancer, Spider-Man, Batman, singer, artist, video gamer, filmmaker, YouTuber, “I don’t know”—would be some of their cheerful responses.

For teenagers, quite rarely do adults ask them what they want to be when they grow up. They usually ask, “Okay, what are you planning to pursue after completing school?” And the bleak response comes, “I’m going to be applying for a 4 year long engineering course in x university and after that I’ll be doing an MBA.”

It’s quite boring to be a teenager having a conversation with a normal teenager. Essentially, what they do all day is gossip about their friend liking so and so girl or so and so boy. And after exhausting that topic, they go about squandering time in other fruitless discussions.

And quite a lot of teenagers spend an average of over 4 hours on Instagram in a single day. And if you think they do anything productive there, you’re almost certainly wrong.

It’s not the teenager’s fault. All children are greatly influenced by social pressure and the force of authority. Both affect their way of thinking. Some of us think our way out of that though (because of other, more nonconventional influences).

It’s just a little disappointing to see who were once such curious, incredible children turn out into programmed robots in what their fantasy tells them is the “real world”.