Today marks my 20th year on this earth. Within that time, I would say that I have experienced quite a bit. I have travelled on my own to Canada, Spain, Italy, Costa Rica, Greece, England and Denmark. I have stayed in various hostels and apartments, meeting and making friends with people from all over the world from an incredible spectrum of cultural, economic and religious backgrounds. Through living with and observing so many people of our generation all around the world, I have noticed an aspect of ourselves that I cannot seem to shake. We--as a generation--do not seem interested in knowing ourselves.
I am not an expert in human psychology by any means, I am simply a girl with a travel journal who loves to people watch. Yet this thought, this encompassing theme, has become apparent to me more often than not and it frightens me.
Our generation creates personas for ourselves through social media. We create what we want other people's views of us to be through images, slang, followers, and clever captions. Yet, when it comes to portraying ourselves in person we tend to portray ourselves in a stereotypical way--we use the same slang, the same ticks and the same quirks as those around us for some unknown reason. Perhaps this is due to a fear of being different...but to be entirely honest, I don't know what it is...I often catch myself doing this and I cannot find the root of it.
People get themselves in relationships and friendships out of these personas that we create for ourselves and I have often found that when these people are alone, they have no idea who they are. In the United States especially, we never take the time to slow down and figure out not only who we are, but what we want from our lives. This leads people to break ups, divorces, and fall outs. For most of their lives, they adopt the personas and desires that they created out of a need to fit in with society. People seek the security of being "successful" in their societies. Which, in American culture, is getting educated, getting married, working a well-paid desk job, and having kids. For most, there comes a point in their lives where they finally realize that they have been going through the motions. Too many individuals have not had heart racing, blood pumping, adrenaline rush experiences. Most refer to the eye opening moment as a mid life crisis...this is sad because most think of a mid life crisis as a phase. It is not and should not be just a phase.
We need to turn off our phones and turn off our computers to take a moment and realize who we are and what we want without the world shoving ideas in our faces 24/7.
Don't wake up 40 years from now and wish you had your life back. Don't allow yourself to feel forced to be someone that you are not, just to fit in.
This is a battle that we each need to fight every day. Otherwise, we may wake up one day and not recognize the world around us...or even how we got there.
