My Search for Happiness

Happiness. It's this thing we're all told we can get if we just work hard and follow our dreams. It's the end goal for life. Money, fame, love—it all links back to happiness. But it's all bullshit.

My name is Sophie Walters. I'm 18, and I'm already sick of trying to make myself happy. Don't get me wrong, I still have goals in mind, like a career path I'm attempting to follow, and hobbies I'm trying to keep up, but at the end of the day, I'm not even sure if anything will make me happy. If I'll ever be happy. Because there are days where nothing can stop me, where I feel like I'm on top of the world, but there are also days where I couldn't care less and I just feel like giving up, even if I haven't experienced any setback.

There's this show I like to watch on Netflix, and it talks about this stuff a lot, and when I watch it, I almost always find myself questioning my life and all the choices I've made up until that point. Because, you see, there isn't this one singular thing I want to do with my life. Heck, my brain seems to think I want to give everything a try; I want to work in a museum, be a writer, an animator, bake cakes, I don't know, and when I think of these things and what my life would be like if I picked one and pursued it, I feel somewhat relaxed. Then reality kicks in and reminds me that nothing in life is that easy, and that, if I don't just man up and settle for something now, I'm going to struggle. A lot.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that my life is a mess. I want to study and go to university, but I'm a terrible student, and most of the time struggle to concentrate on the work. I want to just say goodbye to academia altogether and work full-time in retail or something, but I know if I do I'll change my mind within a few years. People talk about mid-life crises all the time, and the whole "what have I done with my life?" issue is portrayed a lot, but what not a lot of people think about is "what should I do with my life?", because as a teenager, you're stuck. You're forced to go through education, which then forces you to choose a single career path that you'll seemingly follow for the rest of your life so they can help you prepare for it, but life's not like that. I mean, let's face it, who can honestly look back at themselves when they were a teenager and say that they honestly knew what they wanted to do for the next however many years, and that they knew they would never change their minds? Because teenagers don't know what they want, if anything they're the worst people to make huge, life altering decisions.

Ramblings aside, I think teenagers like me need more time to decide what we want to do with our lives. Hell, we barely know who we are. We need to explore ourselves and the world before settling down, and we can't do that stuck in a classroom solving equations all day.

Oh God, did I just take inspiration from the theme of the Bee Movie?