“Our Generation” – Reflecting on the #PowerOfYouth
At a time of heightened division, more than ever we need young people to be active citizens. They aren’t just the leaders of tomorrow. Young people have the energy, skills and ideas to improve society and our environment today. #PowerOfYouth day recognises this and our writer, Tumi Jaji gives their view:
Being born into a generation where everything is constantly changing and everything has changed. From having a phone the size of some tablets, to a brick phone with a massive charger and now to a touch screen – who would say that a century ago they would see a girl wearing a crop top and shorts and boys as young as the age of 15-16 never being part of a war, yep… things have changed… a lot.
We are truly and freely able to speak our minds and be whatever we aspire to be. If you wanted to dedicate your life to looking into plants and leaves, then you can, as we have free will.
Not everyone gets it easy and not every child across the world has something to look forward to when they wake up but I believe that with everything that our generation has accomplished we are heading a step in the right direction to make sure that all children have a future to look forward to because we can achieve the unthinkable when we put our minds to it.
As a teenager in today’s society, we don’t acknowledge that we take things for granted and we have allowed a lot of things to slide for example-
- Knife crime has increased through the roof and carrying a knife has become a way of life.
- Saying how bad we want to get somewhere but not putting the effort in yet judging others for their success.
- Increased drug use across all young people is seen as something calming and being a wall to block our mental health problems.
- Relationships are taken as a joke and remain more about lust than building a special connection with someone.
- Friendships have become meaningless. Who can say that they still have a close friendship with someone from nursery?
I’ve just listed five things wrong with our generation, these have life changing effects on all of us but we still continue to make reckless decisions based on how we are feeling in that very moment because you know its not going to benefit you in the long run. Why not go out and do great things and every single criticism thrown at you should not be taken to offence but used to mould and build ourselves. How many times have you heard the stories of people who’s teachers told them they couldn’t achieve anything and yet they smashed it? Be that person.
The beautiful thing about our generation is that we are young hustlers, striving and reaching for the best, knowing that nobody but ourselves will make us reach cloud 9, whatever we do today not only affects our tomorrow, it affects every body else, too. We can solve some of the worlds biggest problems like child hunger and period poverty – there are already young people setting up projects to support these.
As a generation we crave such lavish lifestyles that our long term dreams are always on our minds, we crave to make our loved ones proud, we crave to make ourselves proud and last but not least we crave to say “I made it!”
Article by Tumi Jaji
