Is this what we want?

    I remember when I turned seventeen. I suppose you could say I started to grow up. Or more accurately, felt myself growing more detached from my environment. My friends. My family. Everything. They say that there comes an age where you start to "discover yourself". A time where you are "figuring out" who you are. I'm sure that many people would say that they have spent their whole lives trying to do so. I dare say it will be the same for me.

     To be perfectly honest, I don't necessarily think this was my "age of self discovery", but rather the age of discovering the world that we live in. It is a wonderful gift, to be human. But why is it that hardly anybody wants that gift any more? Why is it that all I see are people dedicating their entire lives to one career, having to get that university scholarship,  needing to graduate with honours? Feeling as though they must the best, better than anyone else. But then, tell me, what is the best? Why does it matter if he has a university degree, and she has a college diploma? Who is to say that your grades dictate the person that you are? Everyone is in constant competition with one another, desperate to squeeze their way up to the top of the hierarchy. Instead of wandering, there is only getting. Instead of process, there is only product. Creativity has faded and in it's place comes drugs and alcohol. That void that was once filled with imagination and madness won't come out on it's own any more. Nobody wants to dream. They want to have. The only things that are there are the things that are in front of them, and the only dreams they have happen in their sleep. Why does it feel like humanity has been replaced with robots? What sort of human can feel fulfilled by going to the same job, day after day until they begin to deteriorate? Perhaps those lines on the calendar start to show up on to the face after so many years.

     It makes me sad. It makes me sad to watch this world go by me every day. It is as if I am witnessing it, but I'm not really there. Like watching a movie, or reading a book.

     Perhaps I did begin to find myself at seventeen. I found that what everyone else was doing, that, I didn't want at all.