What it feels like being a teenager today
By: Olivia Söderberg
Tags: Gen Z, Finding Yourself, Teens, Learning, Understanding

I could say that I’m a professional teenager at this point because I have been a teen for a couple of years and I’ve learned a few things on the way. Of course being a teenager feels different from teen to teen but almost everyone could agree that being a teen is hard.

One of the hardest things about being a teen is the feeling to fit in. Being a teen makes you care so much what other people think of you so that you forget the things that is the most important to you. That is not just me, the social part in a teenage brain is in a different area than a full grown adult. This makes us teenagers care more about what every body thinks of us. That is why we can feel like adults doesn’t understand us, for example when the adults think we are overreacting over something but in our brain we think it’s really important. That makes us feel misunderstood and the adults need to understand that our brain doesn’t work the exact way as their does. The adults expect us to act like them but in fact it’s impossible because they have a more developed brain and they most likely have more experience than us.

The adults don’t think we notice that they are looking down at us. For example you can go to the store and accidentally trip or knock something down and then you always get at least one adult staring at you or rolling their eyes. I feel like as a teen we need to watch everything we do because once we let go and do mistakes there’s always got to be at least one adult looking down at us. It’s hard because I feel like the adults forget that they also made mistakes as teenagers and they only see the mistakes we do. But they also need to know that it’s important to make mistake so we can learn and become better human beings.

I think being a teenager and trying to fit in has been a problem for every generation when they were a teen. I’m not compering to other generations how hard their teen life was but I think every generation as teens comes with it’s own problems. One thing that is very important today to the teens to “fit in” is to constantly be active on social media platforms. Many adults think that we are using our phone to much or wasting our life on being on social media, but what they don’t understand is that this is a part of our life, if they were born in our generation they would also be on their phone a lot. We need to keep up with everything and there is so much, you need to keep up and see everybody posts etc, to feel included in conversations. It’s also really stressful, for example if you forget to open someone text you are all the sudden ghosting them, meaning you ignore them on purpose, which most of the time you don’t. Then if you accidentally ghost someone they might ghost you back and then you end up with even more stress because you feel like you’re not fitting in.

And let’s not forget as a teen we compare our self to others as no other age group. That makes it also really stressful to be on social media, for example there are so many beauty ideals that makes you feel worthless and you just can’t understand the fact the everybody is amazing in their own incredible way including yourself. Also seeing people doing the things you always wanted to do makes you feel like your wasting your life even though you are just a teen.