Did you feel that you were immortal as a teenager?
I certainly didn’t! I was the cautious driver, didn’t smoke, drink, or do drugs, because I pictured having to deal with negative consequences. (I wish that I had done the same with overeating…) Some of my friends and relatives were the same way; they didn’t drive like the laws of physics didn’t apply to them, and didn’t want to mess themselves up with drinking and drugs.
How common is that “I am an invincible teenager” phenomenon, in your opinion?
I don’t think that most teenagers actively think “I am immortal”, they just don’t think about tomorrow very much. Or show good judgement in many instances, especially behind the wheel of a car, and their insurance rates reflect that.
I remember thinking “In the year 2000 I’ll be 33 years old. Thats a long time from now.” I certainly didn’t think about death. Now that I’m the age that some of my cousins dropped dead I certainly do. I didn’t shy away from the idea. I didn’t think I was immortal. But it did not feel immediate to me.
Right. In a broader sense they’re very bad at evaluating risk, which includes a limited understanding of the consequences of their actions and a hard time putting the brakes on behavior that could get them hurt or killed. There’s supposed to be a neurological basis for this: according to at least some studies, the structures in your brain that help you avoid really risky behavior aren’t fully developed in your teens. And I say that as someone who was also pretty risk-averse as a teenager and didn’t drink or get high- although we still did plenty of dumb stuff.
I think it is not so much immortality. They know they will someday die, they just don’t think about the time between being just like they are now, and being dead. They don’t factor in the idea that they are going to have to keep living in the same body and using the same brain for about 5-6 times longer than they have currently been alive.
Therefore things like smoking, UV exposure, drugs, alcohol, etc. that have long term consequences don’t phase them. It is so far in the future they can’t concieve of it, and it never dawns on them that they could someday be that old fucker dragging around the oxygen tank and drooling on himself.
It’s not that they don’t expect to die, just that they don’t expect to grow old.
Yeah, nobody has hooked up the old cause and effect circuit in most teens. Some people never get it hooked up. I thought of myself as pretty risk-averse and would never have described myself as doing anything really dangerous, but I look back on my mid-teens to mid-twenties and think, holy cow! Was I really that stupid and unaware? My circuit didn’t connect until age 27 or 28, and I can only say it was good fortune that I suffered no great lasting effects from my actions in the previous 10-12 years.
This is pretty much my view on it, too. I believe the awareness of mortality is reserved for the 20-30 range. Even so, I have known 40-year-olds with no filter whatsoever. It’s less an age thing than a self-image thing. One of them used to say things like, “I’m just passing through so don’t slow me down.” Best I know he’s still around and in his 60’s. Candle burning brightly at both ends.
To me, I felt, and still feel, as though I am immortal. Not in the sense that I won’t die…but in the sense that I am the center of my universe. I don’t mean that in the literal sense, and I am truly not that selfish. But I feel I was put here for some purpose and when I die that purpose will have been fulfilled. That doesn’t mean I did risky pointless things. I realized that I could throw away that …I hesitate to call it destiny…lets say…potential?
When I was younger, the phrase “the rest of my life” signified some distant horizon, with a road winding toward it . . . and the farther I got on the road, the more distant the horizon. That was true until my 50th birthday. All of a sudden, “the rest of my life” ended at a fixed horizon. I didn’t know how far away it was, but it was no longer an abstraction.
It didn’t help that I was diagnosed as diabetic on my 50th birthday. Like “Happy birthday, you’re diabetic.”
Another component of the immortality feeling is that many teenagers have yet to face the death of loved ones, especially those their own age. When I say “many” I don’t mean “all” because wars, gangs, diseases and other things that can bring mortality to mind do happen to some kids and some are younger than teenagers.
Losing loved ones, even celebrities one might idolize, can knock some sense into the more sensitive types. The thread title may work as a generalization, but there are many exceptions to keep it from being a rule. My opinion anyway.
I don’t think ANYBODY regards himself or herself as immortal. It’s just that, when you’re young, the moment of your death FEELS like it’s a long way off.
I’m 52, and never thought at all about things like death or retirement until a few years ago. It’s not that I thought I’d be working or living forever- it’s just that retirement and death SEEMED like an eternity away. They no longer do. That’s why I actually READ the statements I get about my 401k plan and life insurance policy now (for decades, I didn’t even look at them).
What’s interesting to me is that I have observed that in many instances, a teenager will undergo the death of a peer, usually due to something like drunken driving, and for a little while, they may think twice about engaging in risky behavior because of what happened to good old Timmie. But enough time goes by, that memory has quickly faded and they are right back in the thick of doing dumb shit and not batting an eye at it.
My thought process as a teen didn’t include an “if” statement. I literally jumped off buildings, jumped from a moving vehicle once and other dangerous acts, and my only thoughts at the time were “okay, when you hit the ground, you’ll need to…” There was never a “of course, if you miss, you realize you’ll die” in there.
I see the crime scenes for some of these acts now and most of the time, I realize “eh, that wasn’t so high/far.” Others, I wonder how the hell I survived.
One other point to toss in: why do you think draft age is so low? And if not getting drafted, why do young people want to go to battle – or at least the military?
It’s an age-old riddle: what if they only drafted old farts over 50?
I imagine kids reared in a safe, happy home who are lucky enough to avoid dealing with any classmate/young relative deaths would be more likely to think of the world as a safe place where bad things won’t happen to them. On the other hand, I was always the overcautious scaredy-cat. I often felt unsafe at home as a child, due to one alcoholic abusive parent and one passive parent. I also dealt with the death of a classmate when I was in 7th grade, and again in 10th grade.
Or hell, maybe this is all post-hoc rationalization. I may still have been a cautious kid regardless of my life experiences. It’s just a theory.