This is life

I hate this sentence; it has been an excuse for organizations and individuals to delay fixing their systems. I refuse to believe that 8 billion individuals spend 7 decades of their life going through a system like it is portrayed to us. I refuse to believe that my parents got me into this world to fight a system like this. And I refuse to listen to the sentence “This is life”. Adults often tell us young individuals two things, one is “you’re to young”, and the other is “this is life”, but in my opinion adults are the last people who get to use these sentences on us.

Sure, you might know what 10th grade is like and you might know how social interaction and stress goes, but there’s so much you don’t know. Everyone goes through a phase where they want to be alone, they feel like rebelling against every part of the existing system, and a phase where you want to be with your friends more than your parents. Imagine this phase of your life, but you’re stuck at home. You do not know how it is to be deprived of the aspects that make teenage life what it is. I’ve never experienced high school, yet I am a part of it. Do you know how that feels?

You’ve always had your friends to get through 10th grade and other aspects of your life that might not have been that positive. But have you ever had to make friends online? People who you’ve never met in real life. Do you know how ambiguous online chatting is? It’s amazingly hard to maintain friendships online, and just one line can break your friendship forever. Yet, we still spend hours on social media, because we don’t have a choice.

When you were in 10th grade, you thought about friends, family, and school. You had dreams of what you wanted to do in college and later, so do we. But what you didn’t have is the subconscious thought that you won’t be able to live your life to the fullest. I want to become an environmental scientist and develop technologies for our planet, but by the time I’m capable, we’ve already crossed the point of no return. Why should I be left with the dilemma of whether the world is safe enough for me to bring a child or not? It is because of your laziness and acceptance of a broken system that has landed us here. You got so many choices that we can never think off. You can’t say we’re too young because we’ll never have the time to grow old. Sure, the rich will escape to mars on a taxi, what about the rest of us? You got to see the great barrier reef, we got to see floods and death.

So next time you want to say “this is life” don’t, because it’s not true.