It’s called adolescence. Rebellion as a way of life and the invention of the perfect teenager

If one wishes to explore the meaning of adolescence, one must look to its ancient Latin roots, which referred to the concept of ‘one who is being nourished’ or ‘one who is growing’ from the verb ad-alere, which essentially means ‘to grow’. In reality, in the Roman world, little attention was paid to definitions, as the prelude to adulthood was already a phase of educational preparation for the individual’s future destiny, naturally within a rigidly organised society, whether by caste, family, or status as a slave or freedman.

At the beginning of the last century, in 1904, the American G. Stanley Hall published the first scientific treatise on the subject, entitled Adolescence, defining this stage as a period of “storm and stress”. Meanwhile, 20th-century psychoanalysis, thanks to scholars such as Anna Freud and Erik Erikson, helped to shape developmental psychology, analysing adolescence as a crucial stage in the formation of identity. That said, no one in this world can fail to experience, in the course of their life, a memory linked to that particular age which begins between the ages of eight and fourteen and ends, conventionally, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, despite neuroscientific studies indicating that the maturation of the human brain is not complete until around the age of twenty-five, involving a process of ‘pruning’, whereby nature, over millions of years of evolution, has ensured that a certain number of nerve cells are pruned away.

This process begins earlier in girls than in boys. This observation is supported by the fact that boys typically lag behind by at least two years, whereas girls enter puberty relatively early. However, adolescence, as a distinct phase in every individual’s life, encompasses a complex and structured dimension. Essentially, adolescence presents itself as a dynamic concept, constantly evolving, as highlighted by Alexa C. Curtis in an article for the Journal of Adolescent and Family Health; it is best understood by considering its three specific dimensions: the biological, the psychological and, finally, the socio-cultural.

Naturally, in every country and region, with its own culture and respective values, these aspects vary, stemming directly from the local context, beliefs and the rules recognised by that specific group. Consider, for example, a girl from the Horn of Africa, Sierra Leone, Mali, Yemen, Malaysia, Sudan or Guinea who has undergone the most extreme form of female genital mutilation – involving the partial or total removal of the external genitalia and the suturing or narrowing of the vaginal opening: This girl, I believe, will never go and wreak havoc on a boulevard in Paris or ransack a shop in Milan to steal a pair of designer shoes. Nor will a teenager from Tokyo who sells her own underwear—unwashed for a week, strictly vacuum-sealed—to fetishist admirers who would have made Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for "The House of the Sleeping Beauties," turn pale. Everything is, of course, relative. Yet adolescence, with its accompanying display of gestures, smegma, beliefs, group masturbation and the desire to belong to the prevailing fashion of the moment, nevertheless represents a break with the previous generation.

The conflict between parents and children seems to be as old as the hills. No one who has ever been a teenager has ever identified with their parent, except in dysfunctional families lacking any historical dynamic. Rebellion is a way of life. It is a way of breaking with the past, in an attempt – not always successful – to create a new social order or language, unhinged from the old front door. How many parents have repeated, in an endless litany: ‘Don’t do this, don’t go there, don’t let yourself hang out with these people, don’t waste the money I give you for the week, study because this will be your future.’ We might then imagine a Stone Age tribe, inside a cave, where a young teenager asks the clan chief to go beyond a horizon visible in the distance. The old man, rebuking her, might have said, raising his arm towards the line indicated by the young girl: ‘Listen, if you cross those mountains, you may encounter wild animals, other aggressive tribes, raging rivers and poisonous plants. Do not go, for it is much safer here with us.’ The hypothetical youngster, having heard the elder, chose not to follow his advice and ventured beyond the forbidden horizon. We can therefore argue that, thanks to his daring courage, the youth managed to return, recounting that he had encountered other human beings, different customs, tame animals, beautiful women, more advanced tools, buildings and rituals.

Therefore, if we accept this hypothesis as true, we could say, without straying too far from reality, that the evolution of human civilisation is founded on disobedience. This means that the clash between generations is an inherent feature of human society and its development. Whether painful or pleasant. Therefore, when speaking of rebellious youth, one ought to consider the lives of Francis of Assisi, Vittorio Alfieri, Jean Genet at the Mettray reformatory, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Rimbaud and Kafka, Maya Angelou and Mario Vargas Llosa, Jim Morrison and Simenon’s daughter, Plato and Gavino Ledda’s *The Education of a Young Shepherd*, right through to the initiation into violence experienced by the youths of Testaccio and Secondigliano, the Zen district of Palermo and the Barriera di Milano in Turin, or the teenagers who grew up in the Parisian banlieues of Seine-Saint-Denis, Montreuil, Aulnay-sous-Bois and La Courneuve. Or in the troubled London neighbourhoods of Barking and Dagenham, Newham, Tower Hamlets, Brent and Croydon, or in the Brazilian favelas, which historically have one of the world’s highest rates of youth homicide—a problem that disproportionately affects young black males, black youths and those living in outlying areas, alongside the anti-social recruitment fuelled by a lack of prospects, which makes minors an easy target for criminal organisations, who employ them as lookouts (olheiros) or drug dealers.

Yet adolescence can also be magical, a chaotic world where the hormonal storm blurs desires and habits, discipline and obedience, sublime infatuations and imaginings that will never return. Alongside suffering, tears, joy, light-heartedness and spontaneity free from cultural superstructures and social conditioning. It is a dimension that transcends the present moment and projects itself toward a probable future. This value, however, must contend with the evolution of a society that develops according to rules that are often unpredictable. Indeed, no one could have imagined that the use of social media could have such a profound impact on the habits and behaviors of multitudes of young people from the latest generation. Consumer technology, in full view of everyone, has essentially undermined a great many educational mandates. Its pervasive and far-reaching invasion has penetrated family homes, schools, relationships, leisure time, creative imagination and the supposed freedom to exist behind a ‘like’. Hours upon hours of being absorbed by a screen without turning one’s attention to what is happening around oneself.

Consider the mental circuits designed by others to capture the attention of millions of teenagers who spend hours navigating increasingly alluring labyrinths, captivated by the digital flow that erodes the depth of independent thought and the critical sense linked to the reality around them. These realities, in which one’s own adolescence crumbles, losing its substance and grandeur, lead young people to stop falling in love with their classmates or developing a passion for any artistic discipline, to stop identifying with the rock star of the moment or the ‘cursed’ poet, the tennis champion or the actor whose beauty is unattainable. No more verses learnt by heart, no more love notes scrawled on the wall of the girl one would like to be with; there is no desire to learn to play an instrument, to take part in a team sport to discover the beauty of peers’ bodies in the changing rooms, or to imagine writing poetry as Catullus and Dante, Ungaretti and Quasimodo once did. Adolescence is that phase of life in which formless chaos hovers around for several years without being summoned. It simply happens and exists. This is true for both girls and boys. Adolescence is like a cactus, as Anaïs Nin said, or, as the distinguished Italian psychiatrist Vittorino Andreoli maintains, ‘The adolescent period, particularly today, lacks a sense of the future’.

Perhaps all this is true, but it is equally true that, in the humble opinion of the writer, there have never been any perfect teenagers or, to put it frankly, better men of the future. One need only think of the last century and what happened in ‘civilised’ Europe. Hordes of teenagers were sent to their deaths between the two world wars, resulting in millions of casualties, families torn apart, dreams shattered and consciences ravaged by grief, alongside the loss of all the innovative possibilities that could have been brought to the participating nations by all those young people cut down in the name of a nationalistic frenzy aimed at a rebirth longed for, in Italy, by Giovanni Papini, Tommaso Marinetti and Gabriele D’Annunzio. Against this backdrop, it is worth asking: which adolescence was better? That of the past, or today’s, as paraded across every screen, depicting an eleven-year-old boy looting a shop in Milan to get his hands on a pair of shoes? Certainly, between these extremes there is also a fairly normal adolescent experience, with a supportive family, a pedagogical framework, a Salesian school, rules that are set and agreed upon, spiritual values, boundaries that work when there are loving relationships, and a school where teachers are respected.

A few days ago, the President of the Republic, Mattarella, spoke of indifference or petty underestimation towards young people. This is an inalienable truth. For those who govern, those who educate, those who wield power, those who believe they have a vision for the future, and those who, as parents, dream of their child becoming better than themselves, cannot ignore that the extremely delicate phase of adolescence must be nurtured like a rare flower. It may be difficult, vulnerable, fragile, silent, and not easy to understand. Yet it is precisely in that extremely delicate phase of chaos and dreams that a human being can give the best of themselves, drawing on their experience, with the awareness that a seed well-planted in the right soil can become a thriving tree in the complex tapestry of existence. If an adult has come through their adolescence unscathed, they will undoubtedly be a fantastic parent in carrying out their educational and emotional responsibilities. To comprehend means to understand, to make the right decision when everything seems complicated, to find the right words in moments of silence that grows heavy, to smile when dark shadows lengthen within the walls of the home, and to act as a bulwark when everything seems to be spilling over into an unknown and uncertain elsewhere.

This must be the role of adults if we are to avoid seeing a generation of young people without ideals, whose only desire is to steal a designer sweatshirt from a smashed shop window. In this regard, Pier Paolo Pasolini may have seen things clearly some fifty years ago when he spoke of an economic boom in which young people and the underclass itself are ‘bourgeoisified’ by consumerism, losing the ancient values of popular culture to embrace a fictitious and repressive hedonism that stands in opposition to the rest of society. This dynamic is a far cry from what a pupil of Maimonides – author of the Guide for the Perplexed in the 12th century – had asked of his teacher: ‘Master,’ the teenager had said, ‘teach me the precepts of wisdom.’ Maimonides replied without hesitation: ‘Your curiosity is stronger than your capacity to understand.’ In conclusion, this remains a dream that could still come true today, in an age when there is such a great need for enlightened individuals to show the right path to so many teenagers eager for passions and torches to light up their future.