If you’re a teenager you may well be quite unhappy. And unhappiness promotes apathy, despair, disempowerment, cynicism and scorn – all the opposites of what will aid you to reach your goals and achieve your dreams. On the road to your better place these emotions and attitudes are the speed bumps, nails and potholes.
This article is for those who feel that they were happy or at least neutral/indifferent children but are now unhappy teenagers. If you happen to be an adult you may still find this somewhat helpful, and failing that at least interesting.
Right, let’s get my credentials out of the way. I, Richard Johnson, am a teenager (just about), and as such, do not have a degree in psychology. So in your eyes that may make me more of an expert on how teenagers think than an eminent fifty-year-old shrink or it may make me the opposite.
Either way, do hear me out, because I’m not going to refer to any studies, quote any stats, discuss any theories or dabble in anything else which is beyond the station of the layman.
Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. Faulty alarm clocks and colds in the winter. Brown paper packages tied up with string. These aren’t a few of my favourite things.
So you’ve gone from being happy or indifferent to being unhappy. Consider the external areas, the areas of life, which are linked with your level of happiness: money, illness, sleep, diet etc.
In those areas are indefinite numbers of things which affect your well-being – from how reliable your alarm clock is to theft. Think of them all as distinct from one another within their distinct categories.
Some by themselves matter and some by themselves don’t. Pretty much all of them can change in how much they matter. The importance of some depend largely on circumstances, the importance of others depend largely on the sort of person you are and so on and so on.
This external life stuff that influences your general level of happiness is a complicated beast. So, what do we know?
Well, these things have to change for your happiness level to shift. If they remain constant and you remain constant then you’ll stay at the same level. What’s more, the shift is a major thing, whether it’s instantaneous or gradual, so for it to happen there must be a lot of change.
Examples:
You get influenza = one thing (physical health) changes a lot
You get cancer = two things (physical health and anxiety) change a lot
You move to another street in the same town = lots and lots of things (work load, discomfort with the unfamiliar, deadline pressure, money etc) change a little
Each of the above is such a major change in the external that it’s likely to shift you to unhappiness for varying lengths of time. If you get the flu you’ll be unhappy for perhaps the duration of the illness. When moving to another street you may be generally unhappy each day during the move and in the period before you’re settled into your new home.
So, if your shift to unhappiness is due to this external stuff it must mean one important thing must have changed a lot, or many things must have changed a little or many things must have changed a lot. See what I’m saying? One or two little changes won’t shift your level of general happiness.
None of this is rocket science, I know, and I did say it would be layman stuff. But it’s important to think of it all in these terms for the next section.
Crayon drawings and watercolour paintings
I’m going to make a few assumptions about what your life was like when you were a child.
When you were five you went to school for six or seven hours a day (nine until three or four) and when you got home you probably watched TV, maybe played a video game, read a book, saw your friends, that sort of thing. Mum, dad or some other guardian made you dinner (hopefully). You did some more recreation, and then you went to bed. Weekends were the same thing minus school. You had twelve weeks or more of holiday time per year.
Now that you’re a teenager, and about ten years have passed, what’s changed? You have a later bedtime, more homework, exams and possibly a girlfriend or boyfriend. Maybe you go clubbing. Maybe you do drugs.
Feel free to disagree with me but I’m guessing that superficial differences aside your life hasn’t really changed from when you were five. Weird, no?
There are exceptions: if your parents divorced in the last ten years then that’s a big difference in your life, but if that’s the case are you unhappy because of that specifically? If you are, then that’s not the source of teenage unhappiness and you don’t need this article to tell what’s making you unhappy. But I’m guessing if you’re unhappy generally then that divorce is, at least, not the only thing that you believe is at fault.
It’s all you, baby
So, if you’ve concluded that, yes, your life as an xyzteen-year-old really is basically the same as it was when you were five (and that you were happy back then) then why are you unhappy?
Because you’ve changed a lot. Stating the obvious, yes, but what isn’t so obvious is that you are the source of your unhappiness. It’s a biological thing: hormones, rapid development in cognitive faculties etc. And if you’ve been trying to become happy again you’ve almost certainly been trying to change that which is the same that it always was – that which is not the problem.
Personal Destruction for Teens
Let’s run through a list of things a teenager attempts to do because he/she believes it will make him/her happy:
Regularly drink alcohol
Smoke cigarettes
Lose his/her virginity
Wear radically different clothes
Get tattoos
Bunk off lessons
Take illegal substances
Have enough money to spend on the legal and/or illegal drugs above (the source of this money will be a part-time job)
Unless you had a very unusual childhood I’m guessing you never did any of these things back then. Yet you were happy. See the logical fallacy in the common adolescent chain of thought. Unhappy teenagers try, consciously or not, to regain the happiness of childhood by doing a load of stuff they didn’t do as children.
This idea – that behaving differently to how you usually do will make you happy – can make sense, but not in the case of being a teen. If you are unhappy the above listed crap will not shift you back up to neutral or happy. This is because it’s all intended to satisfy unhealthy self-created motives. You may have all of these motives or none of them, but I think it’s likely you have at least one or two.
Peer Pressure:
Contrary to popular belief you’re probably the one who makes peer pressure – not your peers. If you’re not going to be harassed, physically harmed or socially ostracised for not doing any of the items on the above list then your peers are not the ones creating any real pressure. How many times have your friends encouraged you to do things you didn’t want to do? They want you to go see a film you don’t want you to see, go on this scary-looking rollercoaster, try this bizarre food, date this undesirable person, watch this stupid TV show. When these things happen we say our friends are encouraging us. That’s all. But when there are drugs, sex or general law-breaking involved it’s called peer pressure. Mm, yeah, that makes total sense.
Your desire to fit in is, well, your desire. Fulfilling this desire, which you’ll probably label peer pressure because it makes you feel as if you aren’t to blame, isn’t going to make you happier. That’s because you aren’t changing – not at any biological level – you’re just spending your time doing the stupid things your friends are doing.
If you face real harm for not conforming then it’s a different matter, but if you don’t then you’re the creator of ‘need’ to conform.
Escapism:
The most commonly used vices for this motive are surely alcohol and drugs.
You try to escape from the world, thinking it to be the source of your unhappiness.
Too bad it isn’t. And even if it were, how are these sorts of substances ever going to be an effective escape from anything? The high has to end and the inebriation has to subside – and then you’re right back in the world and back with the source from which you were running: you.
Rebellion:
The environment in which you were so happy as a child now strikes you as oppressive, unjust, fascist and hypocritical. Your parents are controlling and ignorant and your teachers are the same. No-one understands you. Everything you were taught was so important means nothing.
This is all too exaggerated to be accurate but you really believe it - so, what do you do about all of this? Do you turn to psychology, sociology and philosophy to better clarify your stance? Do you read some character novels and do some soul-searching? Do you decide on changes in your everyday life, in your community or in your society that you wish to make, and work towards making them happen?
No, you just break the rules (such breakages are likely to include the items in the list) and whine about how unfair the world is. I call this rebellion, because that’s what a teenager with this motive thinks of it as, but it’s really just delinquency. Teenage rebellion can be about the search for identity, delinquency is just breaking the rules because you’re in a mood. This motive is the worst because the world actually will start turning against you if you hold it long enough.
If you get caught taking acid and you’re caught by, say, a parent you’ll probably get a reaction that depends on your motive.
If you were doing it to fit in with a group they may be somewhat sympathetic, if you were doing it to escape from your unhappiness they should also be sympathetic. But if you were doing it just because you knew that they didn’t want you to – well, you can imagine how that would go down.
Curiosity:
Unlike the others this isn’t a bad motive. With this one you try out getting drunk or smoking cannabis or whatever just to see what it’s like – it’s not about peer pressure, it’s about experimentation. And there’s nothing really wrong with this. It’s not definitely unequivocally a good thing to experiment in your teenage years, granted, but at the same time it’s hardly what the tabloids make it out to be. Just don’t expect it to make you happy. As stated earlier, your childhood happiness wasn’t down to binge drinking and sex: you’re not going to get that happiness back through that kind of thing.
Hold the fort
My dose of teenage unhappiness was between 15 and 16 and half years old. I had the usual teen problems between 14 and 19 but I only had an eighteen month period of being consistently and generally unhappy.
I never had any official diagnosis but looking back on it I can see it was obviously hormonal. I applied the content of this article to that period of my life and, sure enough, there had not been sufficient external change to have caused this downturn in my base emotional state. I sort of knew that at the time, though not too well, and yet I believed that if I did x external thing or y external thing I’d be happy. I just needed to have a relationship, I just needed to get laid, I just needed to try drugs, to get drunk, to go clubbing, to have clear skin and so on.
I didn’t do any of those things though. I continued on with life as normal while being unhappy – with an added feeling of being pathetic because I wasn’t ‘living it up’.
And because I didn’t do any of those things when that period ended, when the unhappiness subsided and I started feeling neutral by default, I had a decent amount of progress to show for that year and a half. My life was still well on track.
I believed back then that when my teenage years were over I’d look back on them and wish I’d been wilder – that at 15 and 16 I was wasting my time by not going off the rails. I’m going to be twenty in less than two months and my regret today is that I wasn’t more productive in that period, not less. I could have been fluent in Japanese by now if I’d been more productive. If I’d been wild during that time I probably wouldn’t even be doing joint honours with Japanese today at university.
So my advice as an almost post-teenager is just to hold the fort, to keep it together, to not doing anything that as a child you wouldn’t have even considered doing – because none of that stuff will help.
You can always try stuff out when school is finished and you’re in entry-level employment or university (as I’ve done with drinking and clubbing) and find that it really wasn’t worth your time after all.
I regret that I’m not as close to my better place today as I could have been. That I didn’t get drunk during my school years, that I’ve never tried any drugs, that I’ve never been to an all-weekend party – I can’t say any of those things bother me today.
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