Procrastination Labs

The Old Time Rosy-Eyed Blues

So I’ve seen a lot of posts on Facebook lately that effectively say “Everything sucks right now, why can’t I just be a kid again?” It’s easy to sympathize: life is complicated, but when you were a kid your parents took care of all that stuff. Plus, there’s a pretty massive group of people who will tell you at the first opportunity that ” These are the best years of your life, kiddo.” Well guess what.

That’s a LIE.

Now, I’m not saying that good ol’ uncle Jimbob is lying to you to make you feel like dirt. No, he’s lying to himself, and so is everyone else that thinks like him. We humans tend to suck at perceiving time. We can’t see into the future, because we’re not magic. We see the worst in ourselves at the present, because it looms over us like the Sword of Damocles. The past, however is the worst. When we look into the past, we tend to put on our handy-dandy rose-colored glasses and only see the best things. I look back and I can see some pretty amazing things: my first baseball game, when I first saw fireworks, playing with legos at a library with a bunch of other kids. But if I slip those glasses off, I can see a few times in my life that were living hells. I’ll spare the details, but suffice it to say that you could not pay me to do high school again.

The thing is, when people say stuff like “I wish I could go back to X”, they’re forgetting about all the bad that went along with it. Adults like to think of high school because they didn’t have to pay bills, or work a steady job, but they forget how little freedom they had. Teens like to think about their early childhoods because there were no (or fewer) grades, less drama, et cetera, but they forget how many new experiences their age and maturity have brought them.

So what does this huge wall of text boil down to? Relax, kids of the world, it really does get better.

NOTE THE FIRST: If you or a loved one are experiencing depression, thoughts of suicide, or just need to talk, head on over to befrienders.org.