“Just as some people are addicted to work, some are addicted to fun; both groups are equally unhappy.”
— Paulo Coelho, The Zahir
Growing up means learning what life is. When you’re little, you have a set of ideals, standards, criteria, plans, outlooks, and you think that you have to sit around and wait for them to happen to you and then life will work. But life isn’t that way, for anybody; you can’t fall in love with a standard, you have to fall in love with a person. You can’t live in criteria, you have to live your life. You can’t wait for your plans to materialize because they may never materialize the way you think they will. You can’t wait to watch your ideals and standards walk up to you because you can’t know what’s yours until you have it. I always say, always take the first chance in case you don’t get a second one, but growing up means you have to hold onto what you have when you have it because what you have that’s yours- and all the ideals and criteria you have set in your head, those aren’t yours because they haven’t happened to you.
As children, we have hopes and dreams. But hopes and dreams are not sufficient to survive in this world. To understand the world better, children have to let the world in, in their grooming minds. Somewhere in that process, the true ambition of a person that they developed as a child gets lost before the age of 9. Now they establish their dreams around the fact that their dreams aren’t sufficient; they have to be such dreams that the world can accept easily. Then the teen years come and that is when the real trouble starts. As a teenager, you begin to understand the lives of adults, horizons of your mind widen. The majority of teenagers can’t handle the pressure of a big, big world before them. So, their minds accept a different reality; one that is built by touches of laughter of their friends, one in which they are determined to make friends and be social more than anything else, one where they have to be quirky and funny to fit in, one where their life is criticized by which profession they choose and how well they handle their relations.
Then comes the other group whose intelligent quotient is higher than the former group. They realize the world’s reality sooner that the world is a dark place. But, alas, they realize only half the truth and don’t yet know how to identify themselves in this world. Their minds are not mature enough to handle the truth and this group soon finds themselves in several mental health disorders such as anxiety, stress, depression, ADHD, ODD, etc. They build their personality in a way that is sufficient enough for them to just exist. Their minds don’t have enough energy left to build a personality that can be more social. Then they look upon the former group and consider them as normal people. In their pursuit to become more normal, they lose themselves often in depression.
Some things are common in both groups, the majority of them don’t know how they are feeling most of the time nor do they know that their minds are at a risk. That’s where the addictions come in. Some of them are addicted to nicotine and Tabaco but these addictions aren’t the cause of concern. The real concern arises when they start doing drugs or more commonly put is “substance use”. They usually start from cannabis to be simply called “charsi” so that they can joke about it and what other things can they talk about instead of jokes. As their capacity for pleasure so does the variety of drugs they use. It starts from cannabis and goes onto cocaine, meth (ICE), or LSD. The former group uses drugs due to peer pressure and the latter one uses to simply know what peer pressure is.
When asked why they use drugs? The answer is quite simple to them: It’s all part of “Self-medication”. According to research, teenagers have a 50% higher chance of getting an addiction to substance use than adults. But what can we say when it is all part of so-called “Self-medication”. If anyone asks me why youth is so addicted to substance use, I reply that it is due to a lack of belief in something; whether it’s belief in a religion or themselves, I often find the two related. And a mentally ill mind cannot believe in something and therefore cannot make rational decisions. Some of them later come to realize why they are not making rational decisions and try to better themselves. But that is a very small number. Most of them carry on like this; they run behind lost ambitions and peace of mind. They all want to look normal so they are all chasing a peaceful life. But they are not catching their breath to think and plan on what they are doing. And so forever, they remain restless.
Written By:
Sohaib Ali Afzal
