Stars can't shine without darkness

Today I would like to talk about the article on the Suicide Clusters at Palo Alto High Schools. Some people are surprised about the higher amounts of distress and pressure that kids suffer from in this area. While reading the article, I realized that a lot of the main aspects are also noticeable in Barcelona (where I’m from). People may think “How can they be stressed when they have everything they need? It does not make sense! They provide them everything they could ask for, so why should they be upset?”. The facts of having a very good environment and being surrounded by wealthy people creates a very high standard of living. Furthermore, knowing that your parents and your family succeeded automatically makes you want to succeed too. Being raised around people who achieved their goals and earned a decent amount of money makes you think that their situation is usual. However when you get to high school you realize that life is not all about shining stars. On the contrary, now you have to work hard to achieve your “social status requirements”. This is when pressure comes into play. The kids are so used to have everything they want that when they have to work hard to continue having them they find themselves overwhelmed. Some of them get stuck on the situation and identify themselves as failure. They think they are not obtaining what their social status requires, although they are probably in a better position than kids with lower academic expectations.

So, in response to those people who don’t understand why sometimes wealthy kids can also be upset and distressed: Sometimes as better is your social status, higher are your expectations. Everyone suffers from some type of pressure and mostly during adolescence, because it’s when you start depending on yourself. But although the pressure, the stress and the pain something can cause, it does not mean that you have “failed” and even less that you have to kill yourself, like those kids in the Silicon Valley. As the quote says: “Stars can’t shine without darkness”, right?