Assumptions on Young Turbulence and its Perpetuation

Turbulence in the hormonal late teens and early twenties is considered a very much expected part of life on this planet. Perhaps the state itself isn’t even recognized nor considered turbulence given its extreme commonality — like water to fish, oxygen to mammals, etc.

But where does it originate? Is it the expected trajectory that society has carved out for the youth, this hyper-competitive, anxiety-inducing pressure for early excellence that drives them into this state? Or maybe its the human tendency to over-rely on their youthful elasticity, a rubberband-like resilience enabling the stretching of one’s capacity to tenfold its original state, that results in the neglect of healthy and stable life habits? Perhaps the hardly acknowledged fact that a human’s prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain responsible for discernment, planning, and risk-aversion) does not fully develop until the mid to late twenties? I assume it’s a combination of all of the above, and then some more from social media, parenting, and other extraneous factors.

And yet, it’s been proven that humans are creatures of habit. Spend enough time in a certain state, and once we leave it, we tend to always come crawling back to it as a kind of home — an immense comfort in predictability, no matter how toxic the circumstance. Maybe this is why many of us find prolonged states of quiet and stillness extremely discomforting. The silence becomes deafening. We grow restless. We pace around and clean the house twice. Until finally, we throw ourselves back into the sweet embrace of turbulence; of those intense feelings of the high highs and the low lows, of keeping ourselves busy, stretched thin. Because peace is not a state we have given ourselves time to grow accustomed to. How strange is that?

This lack of recognition of the water is what perpetuates the turbulence — from youth into adulthood, straight into the foundational cornerstones of the home that paints the reality of the generations to come. Perhaps we can start by recognizing turbulence as a state that should be temporary — not permanent.