The Most Beautiful Moment in Life: Youth

By Heartscape Intern, Chia Yu

“Suddenly it's December and you're not 17 anymore. And you haven't been 17 for a very long time, but sometimes you need to remind yourself.”

― Margaux I Paul

The first time I saw that quote, it stuck in my head for a long time. It reminded me of when adults would always say that they wanted to be 18 forever. I remember wondering why they would choose to go through the growing up years again. But maybe I understand it better now, and maybe growing up isn’t all that fun.

Introduction: Expectations VS Reality

The period of youth seems to be romanticised in the media — 2am hangouts, late night suppers, finding your passion, adventures, falling in love — the usual Slice of Life things. But it doesn’t take long for reality to set in, especially in today’s economy and climate.

"The sense of reality that hits me. Why am I still here while others are running ahead”

– BTS, Intro: The Most Beautiful Moment in Life

Expectations. Deadlines. Money. 

“What do you want to do when you grow up?” 

“Don’t you think you should do something more realistic?” 

“You should think more about your future.”

It feels like a never-ending cycle: The stifling reality of not knowing what we’re doing with our lives, and everyone being at our heels about it. The implicit social comparison with our peers who often do not look like they’re struggling as much as they say they are. But, are we sure that this cycle ends?

As we start creeping into our 20s, the fact that never-ending schoolwork and all-nighters to finish essays would eventually turn into endless bills and work assignments seems to sink in. Is this really what I want to do for the rest of my life?

Much research is being done these days on youth mental health, and a spotlight has been placed on some reasons why youths are becoming increasingly drained and disillusioned (Stubbing et al., 2025). Financial concerns, uncertainty about the future due to threats like Climate Change, War, and the ever-present one of rising cost of living seem to contribute to this phenomenon. It doesn’t help that everyone around us seems to think that we are falling below expectations. And so, it’s no surprise that many of us feel weighed down before we’ve even had the chance to find our footing. Perhaps it's time we stop seeing the struggles of youth as personal failings and recognize them for what they are: a reflection of a world that is asking too much, too soon.

Act 1: Better Than

“The media and adults say, ‘sell us out like stocks’, saying that we are weak-minded. Why do they kill us before we even try”

– BTS, Dope

One of the heaviest burdens youth carry is the feeling that their struggles are not being taken seriously by those who came before them. This sense of being dismissed before one even begins often comes disguised as tough love or nostalgic comparison, manifesting in tired refrains like:

“Why are you using mental health as an excuse?”

“Back in my day, we had it way harder.”

“You just need to suck it up and try harder.”

It’s the old “kids these days” argument, and it does more than just make us roll our eyes. This tired phrase creates a harmful cycle of invalidating the struggles of young people. When adults dismiss a young person's anxiety as laziness, they are essentially telling us that the very real pressures we face aren't valid. This lack of empathy can leave us feeling isolated. Being told our problems aren't real also makes us less likely to open up to people who should be a source of support. Interestingly, the phrase creates a totally unfair comparison. Older generations often romanticize their own pasts, forgetting their own struggles while judging us by standards that simply don’t apply anymore (Bishop, 2022).

Perhaps the increased connectivity also amplifies comparisons that we make between our lives and those that we see online, as well as comparisons others make between us and everyone else. Research has shown that engaging in social comparison can invoke feelings of inferiority and jealousy and hence has various negative impacts on one’s mental health (Arigo et al., 2024). For example, scrolling through the profile of someone who seems to have stacked internships all the time could leave us wondering if we are falling behind, and seeing someone who hangs out with their friends all the time could highlight the feeling of loneliness that we feel. But social media rarely reflects the whole truth, right? So we shouldn’t feel like we’re the only ones suffering from the stifling feeling of being alone, right?

But, growing up is meant to be lonely, right?

“Could someone like me, who’s like an isolated island, shine brightly as well?”

– BTS, Whalien 52

When faced with a world that seems to invalidate your struggles while simultaneously demanding perfection, the natural response is not to conform, but to push back. This isn't mere teenage angst; it's a necessary act of self-preservation. Trapped between the judgment of older generations and the curated perfection of peers, the only path forward is to carve out a space that is entirely one's own.

Act 2: The “Bad” Kids

This drive to push back is what leads many youths into a stage of seeming rebellion. The many expectations bearing down on these youths make it easy to see why they might turn to being “rebellious”. The age of adolescence is described by Erik Erikson as the stage of identity formation (Block, 2011) where they are struggling to find their “why” – their reason for being, and who they want to be.

Furthermore, youths don’t like to be put in a box. The very essence of this life stage suggests that they want to explore and that they want to experience the world and everything it has to give them. This could propel them to “defy authority” as they engage in the normal process of seeking autonomy and defining themselves outside of the identity and roles society is trying to put them in.

“Live as you like, your life is yours anyway.”

– BTS, Fire

However, this pursuit of freedom and self-definition is not without its costs as doing so could naturally lead to bouts of uncertainty. At the ripe age of late teens, nobody actually knows what they’re doing. Yet at the same time, you have well-intentioned adults talking to you, and giving you life advice for a life that you are not even sure you want to have. But, they do know better, right? These are all their lived experiences after all.

It seems then that most of the youth are people trapped in the cycle of choosing between what they should be doing by society’s standards – something that could secure a “good life” – and what they really want to be doing.

But with all that is bad, why do we still find ourselves longing to be 18 again?

Interlude: Growing Pains

Realistically, the era of uncertainty and finding your way in life does not automatically end once you cross your 21st birthday. Celebrating your 21st birthday and the “start of” being an adult does not magically erase all the problems you’re struggling with. 

The fact is, we know that already. We know that life doesn’t just “get easier”. In fact, it only gets harder from here. Gone is the blocked-out 2 months of summer fun when school’s out, replaced by day after day of piling work that never seems to end. 

And when life seems to drag on with the monotonous weight of adult responsibilities, it is no wonder we look back and feel a sharp pang of nostalgia. But we aren't longing for a time that was "trouble-free" — we've established it was anything but. We are longing for a time when the struggles felt different, when the stakes were about becoming rather than just maintaining.

The question, then, is not just why we look back, but what exactly we are looking for. With all the pain, the pressure, and the disillusionment, what is it about this "Most Beautiful Moment" that we yearn for, even after we've survived it?

Conclusion: Young Forever

Maybe, we long for youth not because it was the time we were most alive. It was the chaos of the in-between, the moment of purest potential. The suffocating expectations, the anxious comparisons, and the pressure to choose a path forced us to wrestle with the biggest questions of our lives: Who am I? What do I value? The beauty, then, isn’t found in the idealized midnight cycles or long walks in the dead of the night, but in the grit of the struggle itself, in those moments of "defiance" and "uncertainty" where we fought to define ourselves before the world could do it for us.

The transition from the freedom of adolescence to the permanence of adulthood is inevitably painful. But perhaps The Most Beautiful Moment in Life is not a destination of perfect happiness, but the messy process of finding ourselves and where we wish to be. It is the time when the future is still unwritten, and the "growing pains" are simply the sound of an identity being forged. We look back and long for it because we were building the person we are now, even when we didn't know how. We were learning to shine brightly, even as isolated islands.

This is the true beauty of youth: the moment you realize that even if you don't know what you want to do for the rest of your life, you are finally ready to live the next moment on your own terms.

And while time never comes back, who’s to say that youth can’t be lived again?

“Amid a shower of flower petals, we wander and run through this maze.

Forever, we are young.

Even if we fall, get injured, or hurt.

We run endlessly, towards our dream.”

– BTS, Outro: Forever Young

References

Arigo, D., Bercovitz, I., Lapitan, E., & Gular, S. (2024). Social comparison and mental health. Current Treatment Options in Psychiatry, 11(2), 17–33. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40501-024-00313-0

Bishop, K. (2022, February 25). Are younger generations truly weaker than older ones? https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220218-are-younger-generations-truly-weaker-than-older-ones

Block, M. (2011). Identity versus role confusion. In Springer eBooks (pp. 785–786). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-79061-9_1447

Stubbing, J., Gibson, K., Bardsley, A., & Gluckman, P. (2025). “We’re living in a world that wasn’t built for us”: A qualitative exploration of young New Zealander’s perspectives on socio-ecological determinants of declining youth mental health. BMC Public Health, 25(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-025-22618-2