"Welcome to adulthood! 🤠 Everything fucking sucks and you'll lose all your friends and hobbies and have exactly 0 time left for ANYTHING positive! It all goes downhill from here on! Be glad you're still young because you'll never be happy again!" Ok how about we take a breath for a second instead of letting out our frustrations on kids alright. Like Jesus Christ am I the only one who wants to give children and teens some hope instead of painting this grim af future for them while acting like this is an inevitable thing that's gonna happen to them?
Like, you deserve to be healthy and happy and I'm sorry if you've been struggling and felt like you couldn't talk to anyone about it. I know you're trying to figure life out, too. But instead of channeling that into schadenfreude against people who mean no harm, how about you take a second to really think about how bad you've been feeling and what you can actively do to feel better. Because scaring others to get a 5 sec long kick out of it isn't gonna solve anything for anybody, and most likely, it's gonna make everything feel worse for you, too, in the long run.
Instead, let's do something for this community that we're all part of. I remember vowing to myself as a teen that I'd never talk like that, especially in front of kids and teens. And now I can say: I don't wish to. I prefer adulthood. I know this might be a shocking concept, at least since I've personally almost never heard another adult say this, but it's true. I'd never go back to a time when I was younger. I don't "wish I had my problems from childhood nowadays", because those still were actual damn problems I struggled with, and everything wasn't "better" back then. Am I absent of problems as an adult? No, of course not. Of course there are times where it feels like everything sucks. But that's part of every stage throughout life. Everyone is confronted with new issues that we learn to solve. And adulthood isn't an automatic synonym for a life where happiness isn't possible and where the world ends.
I'm writing this for kids and teenagers, because when I was that age I wished someone would've said something positive about the future for once, about adulthood which I'd inevitably grow into. And who knows, maybe an adult might see this and decide that they wanna give out a bit of hope, too. Happiness is possible (yes, even when everything feels hopeless right now). Your life doesn't end at 18, or 25, or 30, or 50, or whichever number you might have in mind. It's never too late to go after what you want, to build connections. Nobody can give you a blueprint of what your future will look like. You'll find out and create it along the way. And there are good meaning people in the world, people who wish to make you happy. You will be okay.
