Maveah Griffith – February 04, 2025
At the ripe age of 14, students in the United States are thrust into a world where they are placed under the pressure of deciding the rest of their lives. As soon as a teenager enters high school, they are bombarded with adults warning them about college, asking what they want to do with their lives all before these students can even legally drive. Personally, I have known what I wanted my career to be since I was 15. But something all of these endless spiels and “talking to’s” I have received did not equip me with skills necessary to answer a question I and many of my peers have long held:
Do I chase my dreams or conform to the ¨realistic route¨ I am guaranteed to make an ample amount of money in?
Many adults I have spoken to have voiced regret in their decision to veer away from the career they wanted in favor of one that they did out of necessity. In my earlier teenage years, I firmly believed that if you work hard you will be successful in whatever career you pick. That’s why I never really understood why the saying “Passion doesn’t pay the bills” existed, because won’t you “make it” if you just work hard enough? I believe there is an endemic, not only in the United States but around the world, of people being force fed too much pessimism. Now that I’m older, I do understand why people would veer to a guaranteed high paying field. The more I’ve grown, however, the more the seeds of doubt are stemming in my mind, wondering if it’s a smart idea to pursue my dream (journalism) at all.
But deep down, I have consistently told myself that I’d rather try and fail than not try at all.
The Pressures Young People Face in Career Choices
I’m sure anyone who does not have a dream to work in a STEM field, or law, has heard how hard it could be to actually land in the career you want. It can get exhausting to listen to people continuously talk about the difficulty of actually making it to where you want to go, whether that’s due to an oversaturated work force or simply luck being a big factor in your field. But I want to encourage people in this position to at least try. You will never know if you can make it if you do not try.
If I’m going to have to be miserable for the rest of my life working in a field I don’t enjoy just to get by, I’d like to have the comfort of knowing that I at least tried instead of throwing in the towel before even starting. But not everybody has a mindset like mine. There are many people who are deathly afraid of failure, especially 14 year olds whose frontal lobe hasn’t even neared completion. This idea of financial success over enjoyment has been force-fed to yet another generation of young people. Killing dreams before they even start – and yes, I’m aware that sugarcoating everything isn’t all that great either, but there is a difference between realistic advice and straight up pessimism.
Sometimes the careers we love do not enable us to live comfortably. This is an important point to drive home to young people. An equally important thing, however, is allowing them to decide if it’s worth the risk. It is completely unfair to entirely shut down aspirations simply because the field might not be guaranteed or is low paying; doing so blocks a multitude of roads on the path of decision-making. Another unfortunate thing affecting many young people today is the fact that they might have to consider the implications of politics when making such decisions.
With the removal of DEI policies under the current administration, and potential threat of restrictions in certain fields (such as the media :) – young people today have the added pressure of having to worry about politics making it either hard or nearly impossible for them to achieve their goals. This adds further pressure on all, but especially BIPOC and queer youth, in their decision-making with regard to their futures. As I said in my last blog post, I and my peers have had to deal with the current administration longer than we haven’t – and I cannot explain how exhausting it has been. I often wonder what it was like before the extreme weaponization of politics.
Let Young People Decide Their Future
So, when guiding young people, enlighten them yes. Weigh the pros and cons of what their field looks like and gives in return, but allow young people to make their own decisions. Your pessimism is not helping; go back to the fancy rules of kindergarten – if you’ve got nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all. Just like negative information can skew your view of a person, constant negative information can completely erode young people’s decision making when it comes to their futures.
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