Why Teenagers Are Always Pissed Off

I don't know why, but whenever we think back on what it was like to be a teenager, we always seem to remember that "we were such little assholes," and "we were pissed off at the world," (unless we're liars, in which case, we say, "I never acted like that when I was your age!"), but you know what we never seem to remember.  We never seem to remember WHY we were so angry.  For some reason, around the time we turn thirty, we retcon all our teenage memories into seeing ourselves as being completely irrational.  We blame ourselves, or we blame hormonal changes.  We even take a sort of pride in "look how much I've matured, because I'm not like that anymore."  Honestly, I think we're just roleplaying into the popular 20th-Century myth that young people always grow up to turn into their parents.  We say things like, "The older I get, the more I realize my parents were right about everything."  Bullshit!  Your parents weren't geniuses.  They were just repeating all the same garbage that their parents said to them.  And besides, if we never acknowledge where our parents were wrong, and how we can grow beyond them, then how the hell are we ever supposed to progress as a society?  You want to know the real reason why teenagers are always pissed off?  Because they should be!

First, let's look at the issue of personal space.  If you brought home a cat or a hamster, you'd want to make sure they have access to places to hide.  You know it would cause them extreme stress not to have a safe space into which to retreat from the world.  And yet, we can't seem to understand why teenagers get so pissed off when you enter their room uninvited or constantly knock on their bedroom door to bother them.  It's because human being need a personal safe space too!  Imagine this.  Imagine you just rented an apartment, and your new landlord decided that because he owns the building, he can just pop in whenever he wants to.  No invitation, no reason, no police officer holding a search warrant.  You could be out for the day, watching a video, playing a game, sleeping, jerking off, studying, creating art, emotionally decompressing while staring at the wall, whatever.  You wouldn't like it very much if you were constantly being interrupted by someone who felt they had the "right" to keep bothering you.  Why should the rules be any different for teenagers?

Second, teenagers, like most people, don't like being talked down to.  They're at the age where they're just beginning to attempt to act like adults, and it's a little hard to do so when you're constantly being reminded that you're just a kid.  If you're a mother, you probably thinks it's cute and sweet to excuse yourself by saying things like, "you'll always be my baby," and "mothers are supposed to be this way."  Well, it's not at cute as you think.  It's disrespectful.  Imagine anyone other than a parent saying this.  Imagine your boss or your best friend or a stranger on the street telling you that you're a "baby" in their eyes.  How un-cute does that sound?

Furthermore, nobody likes to be mansplained to, which is essentially what most adults do to teenagers.  If a teenager does attempt to contribute to the conversation in a mature and meaningful way, most adults tend to be very dismissive, as if whatever you're saying couldn't possibly have value coming from someone so young and inexperienced.  Picture this.  Imagine a same-age coworker has just made a suggestion, but the suggestion has certain flaws which make it impractical or whatever.  How to you respond?  Do you point out the fact that your coworker couldn't possible know what he's talking about, and then exclude him from the rest of the discussion?  Do you make him feel stupid for not knowing what a bad idea he just had?  No, you probably acknowledge his suggestion, offering constructive criticism and weighing the pros and cons of the idea, and maybe even finding a way to refine the idea into something actually workable.  Why don't we give the same respect to teenagers?

Third, and somewhat the opposite of the previous issue, is when adults raise their expectations of teenagers to the same level as they would have for an experienced adult.  Then, when the teenager screws up, as one does when one is given too much responsibility and too little preparation time, the adults express anger and disappointment with the results.  Going back to the workplace for comparison, imagine the supervisor has a job that needs to be done, and there are several experienced workers, and one new guy.  What does the supervisor, in any sensibly-run workplace, do?  He always gives the job to the most experienced worker, and tells the new guy to watch and see how the job is done.  Every time!  What he does NOT do, is put the new guy on a job by himself and hope he just automatically knows what he's doing.

It's easy to assume that certain tasks which we've been doing for years and years just comes naturally.  Things like defensive driving, tactful conflict resolution, time-management, prioritization, maintaining a tidy living space, eating a healthy diet, etc. are all things learned over time.  They don't come naturally.  What's the point of saying "clean your room," if you never showed them how to clean a room?  What's the point of telling them "don't eat too much junk food," if you never defined how much is too much?  If being a grown-up is a job, then teenagers are the new hires, and why the hell would you expect the new hires to know anything if you never show them?  Not tell.  Show!

Fourth, teenagers are at the age when they're just starting to take a serious interest in the world around them.  They're starting to understand political and social and economic issues for the very first time, and considering the state that the world is in most of the time, this can be shocking and overwhelming.  Then they look at the adults of the world, who seem to be either contributing to the problem or ignoring it altogether, just going about their tiny lives as if everything is fine, and they can't understand it.  They wonder how you can be so cavalier about living in a world that sucks so badly.  What they haven't figured out yet, and what you have never told them, is that you, as the adult, can't emotionally handle the state of the world, and this denial is your defense mechanism.  You want to change the subject, when what you should really be doing is showing them that you do care about the world, but you're just as powerless as they are to do anything about it, and so you've fallen into a sort of Camus-esque positive absurdism.  You've accepted that the world sucks, and that you can't do anything about it.  But here's the thing.  THEY haven't had time to accept it yet, and it's crazy to already expect them to.

Fifth, teenagers' lives revolve, more than anything else, around high school.  And this is an important thing to know:  High school sucks!  We treat the modern western education system as if it were normal, but it's a relatively new concept.  High schools, as we know them today, didn't really exist until about the 19th Century, and didn't become common until well into the 20th Century.  Before that, most schools were to teach little kids basic reading and writing, after which, they'd go back to work on the family farm, or become an apprentice to a craftsman, or if they were from a wealthy family, get a private tutor to prepare them for a university education.  They'd be spending most of their time around adults, learning how to act like adults.  In high school, however, you're basically taking a bunch of people sorted by age and sticking them in a building together for most of their time, creating an artificial social environment completely unlike the outside world.  (Is it any wonder so many sixteen-year-old boys think it's "mature" to act just like a seventeen-year-old-boy?)  On top of that, the schools themselves focus way too much on school tradition and conformity, and not enough on actual preparation for life.  What's the point of the pep rally?  Why spend more time learning a very niche topic like trigonometry than learning something as practical as industrial arts or home economics?  What's with the dress codes and uniforms?  And what's with that weird learning schedule:  A gym class in the middle of the day, breaking up lessons in one topic with lessons in different topics, those three months off in the summer to prevent the poor kids from outperforming the rich kids while their families are on tropical vacations.  That ridiculous grading system.  The obsession with school dances.  And in the inner cities, the prison-like searches and shakedowns.  It's like someone threw every possible bad idea into one big bowl, and high school was the result!  And teenagers are supposed to be judged primarily on their adherence to all this bullshit?  Why wouldn't they be pissed off?  I'd be disappointed to have a kid in school who WASN'T a rebel!

Sixth, teenagers hate, and rightly so, when adults try to "relate" to them.  From a teen's perspective, they're inexperienced human beings trying to figure out how to function in a grown-up world that doesn't respect them.  But to the marketing gurus of the media, teenage life is all about one thing:  Fashion!  Every generation has that batch of hip slangs and latest clothing and music trends that adults, for some reason, think defines a generation, and that the teens themselves just cringe as the thought of.  (I'm dating myself here as a Gen-Xer, but I remember being a teen and seeing the "cool" adult with a pair of sunglasses, saying things like, "I'm a rad dude," and then turning his chair around backwards, and just thinking to myself, "Seriously????")  The media creates a mythology where teenagers are all about being part of the group by acting, talking, and dressing a certain way.  The real pain in the ass is that you can't even get out of it.  The advertiser says, "You want to wear the blue jacket, because all the cool kids wear the blue jackets."  You say, "Fuck you, I'll wear the green jacket just to show you that I'm not stupid enough to wear what you tell me to wear."  The next day, the same advertiser says, "All the cool kids are wearing the green jacket!"  And then you're like, "Ughhhhhhhhh, I can't win!"  They put you in a box, you break out of the box, and they just change the box so that you're still in a box.  You can't escape the narrative.

Seventh, let's talk about sex.  Has there ever been a truly honest form of sex education directed at young people?  Certainly none that I've seen.  When you're a teenager, you're at the age when you're starting to deal with the emotions of relationship issues, and except for basic biology, nobody seems to want to tell you anything about how to deal with this.  Adults cringe and stammer through the attempt.  Porn is bullshit.  Rom-coms are bullshit but in a different way.  And your friends, especially the ones who pretend to know what they're talking about, don't know any more than you do.  Hell, most of the sex-ed teachers in school aren't even trained in teaching sex-ed.  They're just whoever was available.  (Did you know you're not supposed to put oil-based lube on a latex condom?  I'll bet the football coach forgot to mention that.)

Also, keep in mind that all these things I'm describing herein are just the baseline.  Now imagine a REAL problem thrown on top of all this other bullshit.  Maybe a death in the family, an addiction, abuse, disease, an existential or religious crisis, or maybe something simpler than that, maybe you just had a falling out with your best friend, or your crush turned you down.  How the hell are you supposed to deal with real shit, if you're constantly being forced into the same old box, and having all your problems dismissed as just "teen angst?"

And finally, the biggest problem that teenagers have to deal with.  Teenagers are terribly inexperienced at expressing complex emotions.  And why wouldn't they be?  They have no conscious memory of the first five years of their lives, and the next six or seven years were probably spent watching cartoons or something.  Most teenagers have only been dealing with their own deeper emotions for about five or six years.  Add to that the difficulty in regulating expression without a fully-formed prefrontal cortex.  So what happens when your parents, teachers, therapists, or whoever asks you "what's the problem?"  Well, you don't know what the problem is, and even if you have a vague idea, you probably wouldn't be able to put it into words.  I'm reminded of the Harlan Ellison short story "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream."  That's basically what it feels like to be a teenager.  It means dealing with everything I just listed above, and then, NOT KNOWING HOW TO EXPRESS HOW YOU FEEL ABOUT IT!  Is it any wonder that teenagers always feel like nobody gets them?  Why they get so frustrated when their parents or teachers don't seem to understand why they're angry?  Why they so obsessively latch onto the first person who kind of sort of understand what they're going through?  Why they rely so heavily on symbolic gestures to express themselves?  Why they give such nothing answers when asked what's wrong?  Why they need so much alone time when they're upset, instead of talking through their problems like adults?  Or why they spend so much time "distracting" themselves with brainrot content, or worse, chemicals?  They want to be heard.  They want to be understood.  They want empathy.  They want validation.  And what do they get instead?  "Oh, you're just going through a phase."

Yes.  It is a phase.  But it's not the teenagers' phase.  It's the phase of the way we relate to (or fail to relate to) teenagers.  And it makes no sense.  Because we all went through the same phase, one way or another, and somehow, in defiance of all sanity or logic, have managed to forget the sources of the frustration, and remember only the bad attitude.  Maybe we all need to remember what it was like before we did the thing we refer to as "growing up."