Throughout my middle school and freshman years, I have witnessed many students express that they want to kill themselves. Most of the times, they mean it in a joking way, and the others around them chime in about how much they can relate. Combined with an unhealthy amount of self pity, this attitude can be very degrading.
A lot of times when a student says that they want to die, they are just following an ongoing trend. Just like the emo scene from the early 2000’s, being depressed is an aesthetic. Many people will try to act sad or empty just to fit a certain vibe and be popular among friends. Whether or not they are actually struggling with something, previous generations have never voiced their depression as much as Gen Z. I have heard many blame it on stress, but I do not think that is the case. In our time, one can still live in a privileged and safe area with opportunity regardless of whether they went to a good college. However in my immigrant parent’s generation, they needed to get into a top college in order to escape their developing country and find jobs in America. Like me, the vast majority of my school has parents that came from an Asian country. Our parents had much more riding on their education, therefore stress should not play a part in our obsession with depression.
I think the problem is that we are too sheltered, and have never needed to experience any hardships in our comfortable life. That is not necessarily a bad thing, since we will get used to the real world soon enough, but maturing high school and middle school students sometimes can’t handle obstacles that previous generations were accustomed to encountering. However, I do not think that our parents should blame us for being “soft”, because they were the ones who put us here.