Joel Osteen once said “You are going to go through tough times – that’s life. But I say, ‘nothing happens to you, it happens for you.’ See the positive in negative events.” I was taught to be tough when I was a kid, and to learn from my mistakes. I cannot even begin to explain how many times I have watched something bad happen in a person’s life and they totally give up on everything they have worked for. Most of today’s society is definitely not what it used to be.

Today, the worst pain most teenagers feel is having their heart “broken” by another person. Yes, everybody is going to have a bad day. Eventually, yes there are going to be ups and downs in everybody’s lives, but is the constant complaining, bickering, and whining really worth the energy? Is doing drugs, self-mutilating, and giving up the correct answer? Hopefully, most of society would disagree. However, most respond with, “Yes,” followed by, “You do not know what I have been through.” These people display today’s generation. The Majority of these people do not even know what they have been through, themselves.  In other words, there is somebody on this Earth that is going through twice the pain and hardship these people are going through. What happened? How did we become such a mentally soft society? I’ve noticed three main reasons:

• Lack of Responsibility: What I have noticed around NFHS is that some parents raise their kids in eternal comfort, meaning they get almost everything they ask for and are rarely told “no.” Comfort is not necessarily a bad thing until a person is addicted to comfort. Especially when they are taken out of their comfort zone, and they begin to shut down. From what I have noticed, these people are prone to giving up when they do not get their way.
• Hidden Messages in Every Word Spoken- I often find myself drowning in hidden “signs” and “messages.” In everyday conversations since when did “I am fine.” turn into “I am most certainly not fine”? The issue is that most people do not say what they really feel, and they expect every other human being to read people’s minds and fix all of their problems for them.
• Poor Leadership- In the eyes of some, leadership is not constantly screaming into the ears of their subordinates from sun-up to sun-down. Yes, one must assert their dominance to become a great leader, but constantly remaining in a “Code Red” state of mind is never anyone’s ideal learning environment.

Overall, we can do a lot to improve our American ways of life. We can raise our behavioral standards to keep moving forward, not backward.