Lets Us Thrive, Not Just Survive
What do I find important? What do I want? Loaded questions like these lead to answers less often than they do to further questions. If you asked me this a year ago my answer would probably have been completely different. And if you asked me the year before that, it would have been, again, completely different. As a young person I think your wants and needs change so rapidly it can be hard to keep track of it all without feeling completely overwhelmed. Sometimes you will be sitting alone, and it will feel as though you have been hit with a tonne of bricks. However it's not bricks coming down on you, it's the realisation of… who am I? And what do I even want?
I moved to Manchester for a year when I was 18. I fell in love when I was 19, spent 20 travelling and found a trade at 21. Now I am 22 and I have come to the realisation that my pursuit of happiness has not come to its resting point yet. The only thing that can bring me there is me, myself, and I. But the point I want to make here is it is so much harder for us young people now. We are forced to think about things twenty-year-olds have never had to worry themselves with before. We are living through a PANDEMIC, and I can only imagine the worries we will face when sorting through the ruins that it leaves behind. But on the plus side, perhaps we won’t even notice - since our prospects were already so much more diluted than those of our parents.
Why have we let a good life become so difficult to obtain? We might never own a home without killing ourselves working. Shouldn't such things be standard? Who set the bar so high? TIC Finance (2020) writes that a typical late-twenties household in the 1980s could save for an average-sized mortgage in three years. They also write that it would take 19 years now. This is the reality us young people must face, a reality we are faced with often enough. And in my opinion, ‘often enough’ is much too often. ‘Often enough’ is all it can take to become tired to the point of exasperation when thinking about our future. Isn't it ridiculous that exasperated is how we feel when thinking about our lives? Isn't it actually sad?
After some real consideration, what’s important to me as a young person became clear - crystal: I want to be able to look at the future and not feel so hopeless, to look into a future and see an environment in which myself and the people around me can thrive. I want to look at my future and look at the world, sitting the two side by side as though they were in the palms of my hands, and I want to see how my future is thriving from, bouncing off, being uplifted by, what this world has to offer.
We are all aiming for our own little version of happiness, whatever shape or form it comes in. It varies from one person to the next, but in essence it looks the same. We may all want and need different things. We may have something that we find much more important than our friend next to us. But there is a common denominator between us all - we just want things to feel as though they’ll be alright.