During our teenage years this question is posed by every adult in our lives. It brings pressure, anxiety and the feeling of failure, because a lot of us don’t know the answer.
We all have different interests and hobbies making it seem nearly impossible to decide on one for a career path. Amongst our peers it feels like a competition on who will succeed, often causing a lot of kids to abandon their dreams for a more practical job. More often than not, the victims of this, tend to be those that want to pursue any type of creative job. They get pushed down and told that their job is unrealistic and that they should abandon their happiness in exchange for something stable.
There’s also pressure from schools constantly being posed the question of what you want to do next, it feels suffocating in a way. The idea of setting your future in stone is so daunting it feels like if you choose wrong your life is ruined. If you choose to be happy and get a job that interests you, people will make you feel like your life is ruined. It feels like there’s no winning.
For kids that might have been born not well off or from immigrant parents there’s a different kind of pressure not one where you’ve failed yourself but one where it feels like you’ve put everyone’s work and crushed it with your hand. It’s painful knowing that all these people are counting on or looking at you. So we spend less time exploring our interests and more time living in fear of making the wrong move.
However the reality of the situation is that most adults don’t have their lives figured out either, in fact because of these pressures most adults end up with jobs that they are unhappy with. Not only that people change too and with that careers can as well, it’s unrealistic to expect a teen to decide something that will impact the rest of their lives when most adults haven’t figured out theirs.
You spent too much time throwing all these questions at them instead of giving them time to think.
Kossy Akaeze
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