The idea of joining the battle

I know it... something out there is cruel...

but what is it?

this short blog post will ask a lot of questions from the perspective of a naïve teen. if you want to listen to adults and/or think teens should be smart, be my guest and stop reading. true ones know what I’m on about.

if you’re anything like me, an essential aspect of adulting is acquiring the existential dread often associated with immature teenagers. media portrayals of this type are typically unfavorable in nature, often inflating the notion of adolescent incompetency with the express purpose of highlighting the need for an adult to keep their kids in check. comedy shows are the biggest exponent of this. so, while I cringe and laugh occasionally at 2000s teen drama and the girls from iCarly having the craziest crashouts over boys imaginable, the passing thought half-appears and I dismiss it, but eventually I must entertain it: what is the meaning of all this?

this question is important to ask because tv shows, anime, books, and even advertisements have been obscuring and dismissing it behind the veil of humour for far too long. if children are “suffering” so much, why are adults attempting to normalise it instead of addressing the root cause?

the only constant is angst#

being a teenager does not necessarily confer an angst-centric existence. angst is a quality, not a consequence.

the issue is that I’m pretty sure everyone experiences angst regardless, not to mention that it’s universally accepted that people of all ages above 12 experience existential dread at some point during the year, often during the cold and heartbreak-stricken month of February.

nevertheless, angst of the seemingly pointless variety is not limited to teenagers, so why is it a teenage thing? researchers seem to know the answer: teenagers are undergoing some pretty crazy transformations in their lives, and they just can’t come to terms with it. nothing to be ashamed of—just change. this explanation seems to imply that adults have come to terms with the shit in the world, but I honestly don’t think they have.

adults certainly seem to know their shebang, but do they really, or are they masking? I’m 18, so I’m entering adulthood, but sometimes I wonder how my parents did all of this, you know? are they so normal because there was not option? were they traumatised into acting “normal”? do they, deep inside, still have a sprinkle of that “teen” angst?

there are little snippets of conversation I have with grown adults that seem to point towards “yes.” angst is the consequence of the sudden awareness of consequences and the wider societal affect. how can being an adult (who, arguably, are even more aware than teens) somehow make angst laughable?

tvtropes has a name for an adjacent (but fundamentally opposite) phenomenon: Age Appropriate Angst. they give the following insightful statement:

Broadly speaking, viewers have more sympathy for young characters. We expect children to have an emotional response to everything, and so we expect them to experience the emotion more acutely. “Staying true to yourself” is more important to young characters than “maintain your dignity at all times”, so it’s acceptable — even appropriate — for children to burst out into tears in situations where adults would get a funny look for doing the same.

the mere existence of empathy for the angst means that adults relate to it at a core level. they don’t get rid of the angst, but something happens to the conscious process that makes the angst not so apparent.

dear reader, what do you think it is?

Inside, the table bends under the weight of things that shouldn’t be heavy. Cups, crumbs, stains — they are fossils of moments you can’t quite remember living. The air smells of you, but older. Something has been here longer than you have. It’s watching through the doorframe.