Commentary Middle Aged at 16 By Rabita Aziz (March 6, 2003)

Middle aged at 16? You’re probably wondering: What is she talking about? But I think I have a point. We students really are middle aged at 15 or 16, even at 14. People say that a person is middle aged when they are in their 30’s and 40’s. When most people are that age, they live a boring routine. They wake up in the morning, swallow their breakfasts fast, so they don’t get to work late.

Although they hurry and condense their usual routine in the morning, they still arrive late at work sometimes. When they arrive late, they have to endure their bosses yelling at them. After a few times late to work, they might have their salaries reduced. Then, all throughout the day, they have to try to stay awake, and do their boring little jobs well. They also have to put up with not only their irritating bosses, but with infuriating co-workers as well. At five o’clock, they are supposed to leave work, but they have so much more work to do, they usually stay and finish the work until much later than the usual closing time.

They then come home, and have to put up with rebellious teens and demanding children, all the while thinking about how they’re going to pay the water and electricity bills, and calculate how much money they have left in their bank accounts to pay all the other expenses. Later on, after a hard and long day, they collapse into bed and become a corpse for only five or six hours. Then the monotonous schedule starts once again. 

Sound familiar? This routine of a middle aged adult sounds like the days of just about every high school student. We get up in the morning, and it’s hard to get up on time, since we were probably up late doing homework or studying for a test. We get ready in record time, and inhale breakfast. Actually, we’re lucky if we have time for breakfast. We then race to school, and many people still end up late, many due to traffic, just like our parents! 

After a few times being tardy, we get Saturday school, just like our parents probably get dollars slashed from their salaries. We then walk down the hallway to class, and cringe at the thought of our morning teachers yelling at us for being late, which they of course do when you disturb their class by coming in late. For the rest of the day, we have to endure unfair teachers and obnoxious students, and try to stay awake during class while the teacher is standing in the front of the room and giving us notes.

After school, many of us have commitments, such as sports or clubs. We then come home, and suffer chastisement from our parents for the many things that we do wrong. We also have to do endless hours of grueling homework, (and, of course, everything has to be perfect to get a good grade) while thinking about the upcoming test or game, and thinking about the pile of homework we still have to do. We then also collapse into a sometimes restless slumber for five or six hours, and start the routine again in the morning. 

I know that an adult’s life is more stressful than a teenager’s life. There’s no argument there. But if you think about it, our lives are very similar. Since childhood, we have had a schedule. Not only in our society, but in just about every other society in the world, people have humdrum schedules that they do not like. Is this the purpose of life? To work our butts off in school to get into a good college, then to work like crazy there to get a good job, then to work like crazy once again to make money and live a "nice" life? Sadly, it seems that this is the purpose of life. Alas, we have to live such monotonous lives to survive in the world today. I wish that we didn’t have to follow such a routine, but not following one is out of the question.