Our teachers have often warned us about peer pressure. They would ask us, “Would you jump off a cliff just because your friend did?” Some of us have experienced peer pressure from our friends, encouraging us to do something that makesus feel uncomfortable. However, almost all students have likely experienced peer pressure from not our ‘peers’ but the adults in our lives. As we have grown older, teenagers have realized that money is significant in life and that wealth can almost entirely dictate the quality of our futures. The epicenter of our income lies in our education, and we are told that we must get good grades to have a good life. Teenagers are easily influenced, and many of us have been affected by these statements into believing that we must decide on our future career path in high school. We are all still children, teenagers technically, but we are still children and as the years left in high school decrease, it feels as if there’s a ticking time bomb waiting for us to make these arduous decisions for our future. When surveying 40 Quartz Hill High juniors and seniors, 70% agreed that they already know what they want their career to be when they’re older, and 72% agreed that their idea of ‘success’ in life is a wealthy life rather than a ‘happy’ life. Many students also agreed that money does indeed buy happiness because that’s what we’ve been taught to believe.
The adults in our lives have impressed their ideals on us that we must choose our career at a young age, choose a career that’s well respected, and most importantly, choose a career with high pay. Many high schoolers have already decided what they want to be in the future, but as humans, especially teenagers, we constantly change our minds with new ideas and discoveries. How can we be sure that one day in the future we won’t realize that we actually hate our job and that we wish we followed our true dreams? Many adults have been working their careers for over 40 years, and they dread every day that they wake up in the morning to go to a job that they hate for eight hours, but it pays well, so it’s ‘fine.’ Of course, it’s not our parent’s or teacher’s fault entirely; it’s how our society is programmed, and they just happen to be the ambassadors of that program. But why warn us about the dangers of peer pressure when they are the ones inflicting the most pressure on us of all? Why do our lives have to follow the guide that our adults did, which they complain about yet confine us to? Why should our lives be engulfed with stress and boredom just because we chose a job that we were told has good pay? And why should our decisions as children determine our futures?
