Rebellion Is the Youth’s Favorite Drug

The Emergency Room

With each ticking second on the clock, a human life is brought into this world, unscathed by everything good and bad that is yet to come.

Nevertheless, if you were to walk the hallways of a hospital at any given moment, you would feel the entire spectrum of emotions that make up what we call the human experience: fear, grief, longing, excitement, joy, and everything in between.

However, the closer you get to the birthing center, the louder a new emotion presents itself among its peers, and that is anticipation.

“What will become of you?” A question echoed silently, time and time again, through countless nursery windows.

Senses of Adolescence

Reckless, wild, irresponsible, dumb, and unpredictable. All these words are used to describe what is known as one of the most turbulent and important phases of human life: adolescence. It is a time when one gets to develop autonomy, gain a sense of self, and discover who they are and what they want to be. Yet, more often than not, adolescents are met with acts of condescension, and each pair of eyes they meet looks back with patronizing pupils. Stares that scar skin and shatter innocent dreams.

In the court of misfits, autonomy is considered a crime by those who never got to experience it for themselves. False claims are thrown back and forth, never settling on one side for too long. The youth claim to be misunderstood, and the world tells them that they don’t know better. The real answer lies in plain sight, yet no one acknowledges it.

A life given is a life to explore and unravel, not a life destined to become mundane and gather dust on the shelf of what is “deemed to be appropriate.”

One should explore life in the way one sees fit, and self-expression is the first to knock on that door, whether through art, music, fashion, or whatever seems to be the right fit for the individual.

Being told to follow inexplicable rules imposed by a society built on psychological fraud, designed to generate profit and tip the scales in its favor every time, is what we should all stand against. Not the other way around. Certainly not to reap all crops that taste different.

The Forbidden Fruit

In a 2015 study published in Child Development, titled “Rebels With a Cause? Adolescent Defiance From the Perspective of Reactance Theory and Self-Determination Theory,” psychologists Van Petegem and colleagues closely inspected the origins of adolescent rebellion, with a clear emphasis on how a controlling parent can lead to a child who defies rules.

Now, to stay on course, there is one important element of this research to shed light on, and that is the why.

Why do teenagers rebel?

It is a question so subjective to individual experience that it cannot be answered simply. However, clues can be found and traced back to a very common place: parenting and authority figures.

The study examines the structure of a controlling parenting style and how it can actually give birth to rebellion during adolescence.

Psychological Reactance Theory (PRT) is a theory developed by American social psychologist Jack W. Brehm in 1966. It states that when one’s personal freedom is threatened or restricted, that restriction often backfires and creates an urge to rebel, causing a boomerang effect.

That puts both parties in jeopardy, for one is rebelling with a cause and the other is enforcing without listening, ultimately creating a language in which fluency is impossible.

This theory doesn’t apply only to parenting; it can be applied to any hierarchical dynamic in which one person is under the authority of another. This can involve educational authority figures, such as teachers and high school principals; workplace authority figures, such as a boss who makes comments about the music you’re listening to; or simply a societal norm that is enforced without justification.

Rebellion is never without a cause. Rebellion is a safety net created to protect the most valuable asset a human can have: identity.

Pixels of Injustice

Whether it is your daily news channel or a new controversial movie you’re going to see on your day off, rebellion has been portrayed through camera lenses and written about in ink since the dawn of media creation. More often than not, you will find it portrayed in a negative light.

Anarchy, violence, or ignorance. Media portrayals of adolescent rebellion almost always call these three concepts home. The antagonist who dresses a certain way and plays their music a bit too loudly at home. All of these portrayals add nothing but fuel to a useless fire.

They subconsciously program you to narrow down what you deem acceptable and disrupt your situational comfort meter, only to be rendered useless in the end.

If you take a closer look, self-expression tends to be mistaken for rebellion far too often. That point is crucial to understanding the framework of rebellion and how it actually operates in our lives.

To rebel is to test the infrastructure of what it means to be original and true to oneself.

Ouroboros on Display

Since the dawn of time, society has taught us to reject all that is unfamiliar and outside the norm. That is, to fear anything that moves against the current, regardless of what value it may hold or what help it can provide, and to never question what is at stake in that equation.

However, if one chooses to take that path, it all leads back to one simple outcome: living in ignorance above all else. Ignorance of cultures, beliefs, and notions, and utter blindness to the most essential parts of the human condition.

Even in rebellion, life never leaves irony behind. If you look at how rebellion has been treated, you will find the most humorous joke: those who resent rebellion tend to wear its garments in the end, for they rebel against rebellion.

Now, with the picture painted clearly, an ouroboros is put on display to fuel a debt that will forever remain unsettled.

Until the end of time, the youth’s favorite drug will always be rebellion.