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Libbie Curtis
Mr. Lundstrom
January 9th, 2016
HELA 10, 3rd Period

Fear of Societal Pressure vs. Fear of Death

The years between ages ten and eighteen are overall a period of change
that is enforced as a positive time, but in actuality, is laced with loss and negative
emotions. These negative emotions chip at away at the unscathed block that is us
as a whole- our personality, our body, our looks, our emotional state, even our
thought process -resulting in the end product being an adult while also being the
version of you that will take on the adult world head on. However, as
unfortunate as this is, not everyone make it through this trying process for a
variety of reasons. After all huge chunks of that block can be broken off within a
matter of months, weeks, even days, by events that take place in our everyday
lives. Emotions play a critical role in this, stress in particular.
This is why I have
deduced that- within the past few years particularly - the fear of societal pressure
has started to outweigh the fear of death.
Some may puzzle over this theory for in
the past humans have been shown to preserve no matter the consequences, but
desensitisation, pressure, and other elements have started to push people past the
boundaries of fear of death, choosing to instead fear the societal pressure that
they wake up every day with even more.

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To kickstart this whole paper Im going to be particularly blunt. I am going

to approach subjects that are shielded away, tucked away in a dusty box, and
overall most people find uncomfortable to talk about. Sugar coating words and
actions are not my style, in fact, it is easier for me to read something raw and real
then some sugary word vomit that has been deprived of its original purpose. One
of those subjects Im going to talk about is suicide, the act of killing yourself for
whatever reason you may feel justifies the action. I am in no way going to
desensitise this topic- and Im not doing this because I have no connection with
suicide, Im doing it because I am very passionate about this topic -because I
believe that people deserve the truth. Thats all there is to it. The reason why I am
bringing up suicide is because this plays a huge roll in the topic I choose, after all
what does suicide bring? Death. Death is something that has brought fear with it
throughout centuries of mankind. There is something haunting about death that
has made humans strive to find a way to live as long as humanly possible (and
even a few cases in which others have tried to find a way to become immortal).
There are a few reasons as to why we as a species would fear death. Genetic
coding, elaborate tales told to children as night creeps up, but the most
prominent reason is because of one simple truth; death is death. Its the end. It
doesnt matter what your religious beliefs are, once youre dead thats the end of
the road. Death is final and there is something about finality that we as humans
dont like. In fact, most despise it. Then within the past twenty years suicide rates
started shooting up, the act of someone killing themselves became common

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knowledge as more and more people started committing to the act. In fact
suicides happen more often than people think.
Every two hours and eleven minutes, a person under the age of
twenty-five completes suicide. (American Association of Suicidology, 27).
Today the leading cause of adolescent death is accidents (car crashes,
firearm misconducts, etc.) but then the question arises, how many of those same
teenagers who got into accidents were actually suicide attempts, or even the
completion of suicide? After all there have been a few studies of high school
students to see if they truly feel the urge to kill themselves.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Youth Risk Behavior
Surveillance survey in 2001 found that nineteen percent of high school students
had seriously considered attempting suicide; fifteen percent had made plans, and
nine percent attempted suicide. (Michael S. Jellinek, 24).
What the majority of humans do not comprehend is just exactly what
would drive another person to decided to end it all. That is where the roles of
societal pressure come in. Societal pressure cover a wide range of subjects and
also executors: peer pressure, speaking in public, expectations from various
people (parents, teacher, society and peers), role models that make what you
should look like seem impossible to achieve and overall what you have been told
you have to do since birth. (Case in point, college. You are told you need to go to
college no matter what.) Societal pressure holds much more power than most
think it does; its the faceless figure pulling at all the strings behind the scenes,

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guiding the brainwashed marionette dolls that are picture perfect citizens into
doing what it wishes. The bonds that you make with people influence your life
and turn into a form of societal pressure at times.
You and your relationships are bound together, each shaping the other in
an interactive and undetermined manner. When your relationships are mutually
enhancing,
happiness
abounds. When the relationships are one-sided, with an
uneven distribution of power, or when people psychologically maim and harm
one another, thats where you find despondency, (Arthur Dobrin D.S.W, 1).
Whether you have good relationships with your peers or horrible bonds, it
all shapes who you are and adds to the overall burden given. If you have good
relationships people start to expect even more from you. Oh, you got one
hundred percent on the test again? You must be smart, I bet you get 100 on
everything. (I may be over exaggerating but its to get my point across.) The better
you do, the more people will expect of you, the more pressure is put onto your
shoulders, and the more you start to feel the weight of the constant expectation to
do well. On the flip end of the spectrum is when you have not-so-grand bonds
with people. The less bonds you have with people, the less likely you are to be
manipulated by societal pressures right? Wrong. Anything negative has a bigger
impact than a positive bond, no matter the circumstances. After all once
something negative has touched a person- even if it recedes -that person will, and
always will be, tainted slightly by that negative. Surprisingly families can be the
main cause of negative pressure.

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Humans cannot exist without families, whatever the formfrom extended

to nuclear, from polygamous to monogamousbut at the same time
families often maim, harm, hurt and damage. Because of the close contact,
the unspoken bonds, and the intuiting of others feelings, the family is often
a place where individual differences are
least
tolerated.
(Dobrin 1).
Now to tie this all together is not that hard, you just connect the dots. When
enough pressure is added- not mention all the horrible things going around social
media, how teens feel like they need to act or be a certain way, and all the mental
damage that can happen within a few years -cracks start to form. Enough cracks
appear some are certain to connect, spread and make the damage deeper.
As a result of stress, 40% of teens report feeling irritable or angry; 36%
nervous or anxious. A third says stress makes them feel overwhelmed, depressed
or sad, (Sharon Jayson, 1).
If the damage becomes deep enough it becomes inevitable that people
start looking for a solution to fix it, as it is human nature, however not all
solutions are that favorable. It can become horrible enough that adolescents start
to view death as the only way out, the final step to make it all go away. After an
abundance of irrational feelings equals to taking irrational measures to stop said
feelings.
"If you look at teen suicide statistics, stress is one of the things that leads to
suicide attempts," (Kristen Race, 1).

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Now that doesn't mean the right way to solve everything is by

committing suicide. After all isnt this generation turning into a bunch of
desensitized, coddled, parent-protected, cry any time something remotely hard
happens, bunch of sisses? The generations of today are becoming weaker than
before, buckling under any sort of actual interaction from the real world. Our
parents storm to teachers rooms to fix
our
grades, yell at others to get
our
messes
fixed, its obvious that our hands are held from the moment were born to when
we graduate high school. (Although it has also become common for parents to
hold our hands through college as well, whats up with that?) So its not really a
surprise that adolescents cave under any amount of pressure added to our
fragile shoulders.
Ha! What a load of bullcrap. It doesnt matter that our generations are
more coddled, did anyone ever stop to consider that the older generations have
left behind a multitude of problems that could easily spell economic disaster,
environmental recline (trees being chopped down, oceans full of gunk, the
atmosphere clouded with pollution), and- everyones favorite -wars? If that
doesnt stress you out just by thinking about it, well I think you need to reread
that sentence. Our world is in a constant state of decline, more humans are being
produced which equates to more space being taken up. Now the newer
generations have to find ways to fix
hundreds
of years of work in a matter of one
hundred or less. That amount of stress nagging in the back of someones mind

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every day, for years, can easily make anyone start to think darker thoughts. Of
course this is just barely scratching the surface.
Add social pressures from school (wearing the right clothes, making sure
you look half way decent, managing [raging] hormones, double- even triple
-thinking every sentence you say to make sure it doesnt sound stupid, trying to
be yourself even though in actuality being yourself is
a lot
harder than youd
think it would be considering assemblies occur telling you this...), pressure from
immediate, and sometimes extended, family (college [duh], getting good grades,
doing good in sports, doing all your homework, encouraging you towards quite a
few scholarships [while this is a good kind of pressure because theyre trying to
help you get a good future secured, it also becomes annoying rather quickly and
also grinds on already frayed nerves], and all that jazz.), and mix that all into a
grand bowl: dont forget to add homework you usually dont understand, body
imaging (I admit this is more for girls, but hey, guys get it too plus being
surrounded by pictures of perfect humans that are in all actuality
photoshopped), a good dose of parental guidance, and you have the best recipe
for disaster mankind has ever created.
Overall these two subjects can be closely intertwined without many
realizing it; and it shows that pressure can easily push someone to make a
momentous decision that is, more likely than not, the worse choice one could
make- even if it seems like the right choice at the time. This problem will only
grow- choosing the end instead of persevering through tough times -unless it is

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directly addressed. Societal pressure will continue to increase in strength,

becoming in time a more formidable shadow than the abyss that is death.

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Works Cited

Opposing Viewpoints.
Suicide.
Missouri: Gale Cengage Learning, 2008.
Print.
Dobrin, Arthur, D.S.W. "The Astonishing Power of Social Pressure."
Psychology Today
. N.p., 14 Apr. 2014. Web. 13 Jan. 2016.
<
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/am-i-right/201404/the-astonishing-powe
r-social-pressure
>
Jayson, Sharon. "Teens Feeling Stressed, and Many Not Managing It Well."
USA Today
. Gannett, 11 Feb. 2014. Web. 14 Jan. 2016.
<
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/02/11/stress-teens-psychologic
al/5266739/
>