[This post is excerpted from Why Smart Teens Hurt. To learn more, please take a look!]
Imagine that you had a very powerful flashlight but had no particular place to point it? What would you do? Well, you might hunt for a place to point it, but that would feel like a very artificial enterprise. What you would probably do is shrug, make sure the flashlight was shut off, and put it away. And wouldn’t everything seem a good bit darker and gloomier then?
Until a bright person’s mind is engaged in real work, he or she has no great way to make use of that intelligence or to apply that intelligence. She can train it on her high school history paper, creating a document that is ten times more comprehensive and thoughtful than it need be, but she will understand how basically silly that is, throwing herself into a mere high school paper.
So, she has two choices. One, she can apply herself to that paper, for the sake of the grade and the game and so as to have something to do, while shaking her head at the attention she is lavishing on such a trivial enterprise. That is, she can turn her bright flashlight on the Thirty Years War and write a dissertation. Or she can refuse to apply herself, write something minimally decent or even shoddy, and get grumpy with herself and with school and with life for presenting her with such an inadequate challenge. She can morosely keep her bright flashlight switched off, no happier with this option than with the first one.
Since it does not feel good to have that bright flashlight turned on with no appropriate place to aim it, she will likely turn it off and keep it off. She will then do the sorts of things that all people do nowadays to put their mind on pause: she will watch a show, surf the net, tumble into some social media rabbit hole, fantasize, or get into mischief. She knows that these activities do not hold great value except the value that she does not have worry about where to train her intelligence while doing them. Rather than trouble herself about what to think about, she opts for not thinking.
An adult immersed in a profession can train her bright flashlight on her real work. She can spend long hours and full days moving figurative painting forward or researching mysteries at the cellular level. Since a smart teen is not yet in her profession, likely doesn’t know what that real work is going to be, and may not have even a glimmer of what it will be, she is essentially bereft—and aware that she is bereft. She knows that “out there” people are writing novels and creating vaccines and that “where she is” she is just and exactly in high school. She knows this and sinks a little deeper into the sofa.
For parents
It would be natural if you were holding a certain hope in mind for your teen. It’s likely that you hope that he will do well at school, go off to college, enter a solid profession, and have a good life. At the same time, looking at your teen and seeing him struggling—seeing him angry, or friendless, or eccentric, or anxious, or weird, or sad—it would be natural if you were deeply worried about his chances of moving easily from milestone to milestone along some simple, happy path to adulthood. When you look at your child, you can feel your hopes crashing.
But it may be the case that what is essentially going on is that he has turned his bright flashlight off and that what he needs is a good reason to turn it on. Maybe you can provide him with that good reason by, say, pointing him in the direction of a vector calculus course offered at your local science museum and wondering aloud, “Maybe you’d like to learn the ins and outs of getting a rocket ship to Mars?” Or sending him the link to some summer expedition gearing up to find the missing link in Peru, with your amazing offer to pay his way. Or …
Of course, your teen may not take to this opportunity to encounter a little vector calculus. He may not be ready for hard work. He may not want to really challenge himself. He may not have the skill set necessary to make sense of the tasks put before him. He may be leading with irony and indifference and prefer to keep wearing those masks. He may be too demoralized to drag himself to the work or too disorganized to concentrate. In short, this gambit may not work. But it just might. It just might be the case that what your teen needs is the opportunity to shine his bright flashlight in the direction of something interesting. Wouldn’t setting up that opportunity be worth the gamble?
For teens
It is completely understandable if you feel that you currently have no particular place to apply your intelligence. A spelling bee? Hardly! Acing an exam? Who cares. The school debate team? Please! So, you are left shambling along, too disengaged for your own good, with a mind that may be racing but to no good purpose.
We have to watch out for that mind, mustn’t we? You can’t really just turn off your bright flashlight without risking your mind spinning off into fantasyland, or relentlessly pestering you with doubts and recriminations, or catching you up in some unproductive obsession. Turn that bright flashlight off and you may end up someplace unpleasant or dangerous. So, what might you do?
Find something that interests you and study it on your own. Immerse yourself. Read all the books of your favorite author. Journey with Newton as he lands on a new way to calculate pi. Trace the history of humankind by virtually touring the British Museum. Build your first online business. Digitally create a city of the future. Study history and learn for yourself what, if anything, can nip fascism in the bud. Really learn how a cell works. Turn on your bright flashlight and train it somewhere interesting. If you don’t, who knows what dark places your mind may take you.
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[This post is excerpted from Why Smart Teens Hurt. To learn more, please take a look!]
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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