Being a 17-year-old, sometimes it feels like I’m slowly growing up in a world I didn’t sign up for, and honestly, half the time I’m just trying to make sense of what’s happening around me. I’m learning things I never asked to learn, dealing with fears I didn’t even know existed a few years ago. And it’s weird, because no one warned us that growing up would look like this-so global, so heavy, and so fast that you don’t even get a moment to understand what you’re supposed to feel about it.

I think what scares me most is how normal this all feels now. To know about Gaza and Ukraine and climate collapse before knowing what falling in love feels like. To scroll through tragedies during lunch breaks, to hear classmates casually analyse politics. And now here I am, at seventeen, lying awake at night, wondering if the planet will even feel livable when I’m old enough to call myself an adult. It feels like we skipped childhood and woke up in a collapsing world, already responsible for fixing everything, even though we’re still learning who we are.

And being Indian somehow makes all of this even more complicated. Because I grew up being told that life should be secure and sensible: medicine, engineering, a stable career, and a predictable future. But the internet taught me something completely different. It showed me kids my age building robots, winning global competitions, coding apps, and speaking at conferences. It made me feel like I was already behind before I even started. Every time I open LinkedIn, I see teenagers founding companies, and for a moment, I just sit there staring at my screen, feeling like I missed some secret instruction manual that everyone else seems to have. And then I remember that I haven’t even figured out who I want to be yet. But then I also feel helpless because even if I do care, what can I actually do? Repost something? Sign a petition? It feels embarrassingly small.

Sometimes I feel like I am two people: Indian inside the house and global the moment I’m online. My parents think the world functions the way it did when they were young, but I look at the news and realise it doesn’t. Their worries are so different from mine. They feared failure; I fear the future itself. They feared disappointing their parents; I fear not being prepared for a planet that might become unlivable. How do I explain to them “what do you want to be when you grow up?” doesn’t feel like a simple question anymore, because what if the world I grow up in is nothing like the one they imagine?

We are asked to be “world citizens”, to speak up, post, protest, sign petitions, defend human rights, fight inequality-and still sit for physics exams on Monday. Sometimes I read about climate change at night, and the next morning, I am solving integration as if the world isn’t literally melting. That duality feels insane.

How do you act normally in a collapsing world? How do you deal with AI, which you still don’t know is a friend or a foe? How do you be a child with the weight of an adult’s awareness?

There are days when I feel guilty for laughing, like happiness is irresponsible when the world is burning somewhere. There are moments when I feel guilty for studying peacefully, guilty for scrolling memes, guilty for dreaming about college abroad-because somewhere, someone is losing their home to floods or bombs or fires, and here I am thinking about entrance exams. It sounds unreasonable when I say it out loud, but inside my head, it feels painfully real.

And honestly, the worst part is how helpless I feel. I know things I can’t change. I care about things I can’t control. I worry about disasters I can’t prevent. I sign petitions that change nothing. I repost graphics that comfort no one. Awareness feels like this huge weight, but nobody taught us how to carry it. I didn’t ask to know this much about destruction before I fully understood creation. I didn’t ask to think about extinction before experiencing adulthood.

Some nights I lie awake, scrolling through the world like it’s a problem set I’m supposed to solve, and I get this sudden urge to shut everything down, to not know anything for a while, to just exist like a teenager without feeling responsible for the survival of the planet. I feel guilty even admitting that out loud, because caring is supposed to be noble. But caring hurts when you feel powerless. And it’s strange, but sometimes I am jealous of the past-of a time when teenagers could just be teenagers.

But then I wonder if being this aware also means we’re becoming a generation that feels more deeply, that refuses to turn away. Maybe we are learning empathy earlier than we should, responsibility earlier than we’re ready, consciousness heavier than our age. Maybe the world is forcing us to grow up too fast, but maybe it’s also shaping us into people who won’t repeat the same mistakes. I don’t know.

All I know is that sometimes I want to be a child again, just for a day, not someone who knows about collapsing glaciers and geopolitical conflicts and climate tipping points. Just someone who worried about exams and friendships, and school competitions. Someone whose world was small enough to understand and gentle enough to trust. But childhood went quietly, without warning, and life became global without permission… and now there’s no going back. 

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