Our Broken World: A series of ever-changing opinions

Don't Invalidate Yourself

     As humans, we have a tendency to invalidate our feelings. Yes, we are complex beings, and have developed a complicated web of everything ranging from mafias to support groups, but we still have the toxic way that we believe to be the best, sticking around from the beginning of time. Yes, we have gotten better about this, but we still blow things off as 'not a big deal', and even if it isn't, saying something like that and brushing a problem off, no matter how minor, can have outweighing negative effects in the future.

     As far as anybody can remember, humans have resisted talking about things, because in all honesty, most of us are wusses. We have been brought up to think that emotions are something to be steeled against, often leading to the invalidation of our own, even to ourselves. This also means that it has been working its way into our human and societal code for hundreds of years. Among other problems that arise with this, are that young kids, and often teenagers, are viewed as happy or ignorant, which, fair point, they may not know as much as the people who have graduated college with a doctorates, but still, the youth of the modern world are among those with the most active imaginations, some that have believed in their ideas having done major things to set up and run the future. After all, who will be inheriting the planet? The youth.

     Now, emotions are the only things that are invalidated in the modern world, because it also comes with a side dish of doubted ideas that are constantly being trampled all over and stamped down by the people who think that they already know everything there is to know about the world, even when they do not know how to record a voice message over a phone. This means that, with our early and developing brains and even though we are told from childhood to dream big, "work hard and you will achieve", we are still pressured to fill certain rolls and just fall into place. As a kid, people may say "I want to be president" or decide "I want to be a police officer when I grow up," only to be met with gaggles of "be realistic" and "good luck paying salary with that job." Even among peers of the same age, the story is pretty much the same; with youth who have already accepted the fact that not everyone can be special, saying something along the lines of "I just want to be able to pay rent."

     Well, great. But what does that mean for the future? Look at the past, who must have thought the same thing, and wonder if you really want to just be a mirror of the past generation. Do you expect change, or do you just want to survive? Sometimes, it seems, the only way to get anything done is to risk losing everything you either were born with or have already worked for under the influence of the majority group. Does this mean that only a certain kind of people are able to fight for change, or does it mean that anyone who fights for change is running a risk, and only a certain kind of people are willing to risk it?

     Believe it or not, this most recent generation of youth must be a game-changer, if we ever want to keep this world going. We as humans no longer have the luxury of simply ignoring all the problems that swarm around us like fruit flies to that old pear sitting in a dingy apartment building with thin walls. This is a here and now situation, and if we cannot manage to do this, what makes you think that the next generation will be any better? If we keep setting the example of complacency, are we just going to let the world keep dying around us and just accept the fact that everything and everyone will die eventually? Are we going to keep living like this, and just pretend everything is fine because we refuse to bring ourselves to think nothing of us? It's clear that there are 'groups' of people who no longer care about this world. They just accept the fact that they are ready to die, and are just fine leaving behind a broken and scarred world. So, it's up to the youth of this era to hold up a mirror to ourselves, and recognize that we, too, are real people. The very real people that need to fix this place.

     First, we need to validate ourselves as human beings. Validate our feelings, our ideas, and this includes our misplaced anger. Validate yourself. Validate others. Only then can we harbor our community garden of collective ideas.