Kids today, man. Kids today.

Okay, I admit it: Tumblr is a blogging service highly populated by teens.  The median age of users is probably sixteen, maybe seventeen.   And I don’t discount the opinions of teenagers — I started blogging a decade ago, when I was fourteen.  It was much harder to find a community of teenagers online at that point, beyond your own high school social network on MySpace.  I ended up making friends in the blogosphere with women several years older me, who became like mentors and big sisters.  It was an incredibly positive experience, but there were limits to how much of my life they could really understand from their perspective.  I would have been thrilled to find a place like Tumblr, and I think it’s great that teenagers today have such an easy way to network and develop friendships with people far beyond their hometowns.

But then I see stuff like this, and I want to bang my head against a wall.  Maybe it’s just a cultural artifact of modern adolescence — the obsession with self-destructive behavior, valuing negative experiences higher than a lack of experience, turning self-esteem issues into an ideology — but it’s depressing as fuck to see when you’re beyond that stage in life.  Every time I see something like it cross my Tumblr dashboard I find myself wanting to intervene and offer sage advice.  But how do you try to tell the 14,700+ people who reblogged this that, you know, if you find a partner who takes your love for granted, do not go through hell just to keep that relationship going?  How do you communicate that being in a relationship with someone who does not value you is the biggest waste of time and energy imaginable?  Or that approaching relationships like this is pretty much the least sexy thing a person can do?

You can’t, of course.  Maybe those are lessons that only time and experience can teach.  Lord knows I had some pretty messed up ideas about the world when I was younger — and I’m certain that five years from now I’ll look back on my early twenties and be rolling my eyes at what I thought I knew.  But it’s still troubling to see this kind of thing, and it strikes me as strange that I even have that opportunity.  In the pre-internet world adults had few roads into the lives of teenagers, but these days you can just pull up a chair and scroll through every aspect of the adolescent experience.  Lucky us?