The Mystery of a Universal Process

I can describe my teenage years as painful and full of unfounded anger against everything. I felt terribly lonely, as no one could possibly understand me and my point of view. Thought, I think teen angst is not part of the coming of age process, it is a result. Teens are experiencing new ideas about the world and are acquiring knowledge, which will eventually create anger in reaction to the realization of the society’s madness and the place they have in it.

In the last year of high school, there’s a course called “Contemporary world” where we learn about all the inequality in the world, such as environment, power, conflicts… It is a veritable shock as we understand that the world we though was peaceful and serene, is actually full of insanity. The normal respond of all shocked human being is angst. We experience a growing exasperation about our surroundings. We understand this abstract feeling only few years after, when we come to realize that nothing was worth being angry and that the only thing to do is to accept this idiotic society. In the video “Imagine” by A Perfect Circle, the world is depicted as a total disaster, where everything is black or white. As a teen, is is very much what we think of society; the world is either very bad of very good. And there is a very irritating feeling that we are powerless against those insanities. We are just watching the world burn. 

The fear of parents towards their teen’s angst is also very unfounded. My mother bought many books about how to understand and take care of teenagers, such as “Ados: Mode d’emploi”. How come parents forget so quickly about their own teenage years? There is some sort of unknown process that happens when a person enters adulthood, where they gain knowledge and experience which makes them accept society. Instead of fighting against the many inequality in the world, they live their routines and eat gluten-free meals, because TV says it’s better for them. There’s less questioning and more acceptance going in their minds. And yes, it is a veritable shock when their teenager starts crying because of environment problems or educational crisis. The coming of age process generates frustrations about newly acquired knowledge and growing up means that the frustrations slowly faints as the person learns to accept them. 

I think anger is a normal process that teens experience during their development, since it’s in reactions to their understanding of the world. The problem is the way people see teen angst. Society has given a very negative connotation to that period of a child’s development and it scares parents around the world, even if every one has been trough the same process.