What’s The Limit On Privacy? Is There One?

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Growing up in our society today as a young person is about the equivalent to being trapped in a five by five room with no windows or doors to escape from. I’m not saying that our society is some communist and psychotic time that we will never break away from, but if there is one thing every person who was once an adolescent during our society; it’s that the issue is control.

What do I mean by control?

Everybody is power-hungry. We are all starving animals needing to be free and needing to make the decisions for every single thing in our lives. We don’t want some bullshit “adult” trying to cut us down or tell us we can’t do that. Or even being told that our age determines our limits on what we can go out and do. Control is what created the generation of angry teens. Power they don’t have, is what created rebellious teens to go out and do whatever the fuck they want.

Is it true?

Think about the way young people lived their lives thirty years ago. There were tough times all the time, of course that’s a given, but it was never like the way life is in 2014. Opinions mattered. It wasn’t the government telling people what we can eat by taxing candy and soda. God forbid we get a fucking cavity or gain five pounds because last Thursday you didn’t feel like eating healthy. Thirty years ago there was no technology being monitored by the NSA to read people’s text messages or tapping into phone calls. Technology wasn’t around to even be tampered with. A young person didn’t feel trapped and wouldn’t worry about saying one wrong thing online and getting suspended from their school for it. There are even apps to track what people are doing on their fucking smart phones.

I don’t know if it’s the technology which created control issues in the world with the government and other higher-up officials, or if it’s just paranoia of the wars that finally caught up with us. But I’ll tell ya, when I was in high school I felt trapped, it wasn’t until college where I was an adult and people didn’t necessarily treat me like they needed to know what I was doing at all times. Life really does change when you’re out of the teeny-bopper phase; people look at you differently and talk to you differently. It’s the feeling of not being watched every single move, the responsibility, that makes one feel like they aren’t in some box the government holds them in until they graduate high school.

Man, what I would do to live decades ago when going to the store didn’t mean being scolded if you went to a friends’ house for 15 extra minutes. Understanding that teenagers are capable of living their life without being watched and that they will be okay is something all adults should realize.