Schooling can be either the best time of your life, or on the flip side of the coin, it can also be the worst or seem the worst, but it can also be a lesson on things you might not know, especially if you’ve ever looked back on things as i frequently have, although not always by want or choice.
In my case the latter was the truest but there are things i wish i knew about the world & people that are in especially kids, kids are stupid straight up they can flip between good & horrible depending on the clique or group they’re a part of they can be your best friend one day and the meanest friend another day and theyre behaviours are moulded from theyre childhood upwards to adulthood my situation was this i had friends that changed as they became recognised by the higher and dominant group in the school yard that group specifically targeted me and seeing this change fundamentally shook me i couldn’t understand because at the time i too was a stupid kid who is also nieve to the world i had no willingness to see why i was naive of course it didn’t help that i had a very bad support system from my family which gave me series of lazy and bad behaviours that have stuck with me throughout my life.
The kids i knew growing up to put it bluntly i disliked the majority of them to me they hurt me, mocked me and took pleasure in making things as miserable for me as possible and yet they seemed happy at my expense 4 years ago these were my thoughts in fact i would have said worse it was like a trigger for me to go off about but as i said my way brain & way of thinking has matured and as ive become more socially conscious about the how & why people do the things they do but i never stopped to think of the why back then and why those people act in such ways after all if you’re say being bullied at home one way that you might think to regain that control is to say bully someone else in school not that i recommend that but at leat i can understand it and rationalise it.
What would happen if you got into this behaviour, and not only was it accepted, but you would also appear as part of a group? I’ve noticed this phenomenon everywhere, that people tend to gather & coalesce and have this social hierarchy about them. Your thoughts and opinions have to mirror those of the ingroup, especially when dealing with those of the outgroup, which I was definitely considered part of at the time, and maybe am still to some, although the mechanisms for this go back hundreds of years.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
I believe every human in some form or another adheres to the famed hierarchy of needs, and we tend to meet most of them, but not all at once. Like everything, it’s a process that goes from the bottom up.
“Maslow (1943) initially stated that individuals must satisfy lower level deficit needs before progressing on to meet higher level growth needs. However, he later clarified that satisfaction of a needs is not an “all-or-none” phenomenon, admitting that his earlier statements may have given “the false impression that a need must be satisfied 100 percent before the next need emerges” (1987, p. 69).
When a deficit need has been ‘more or less’ satisfied it will go away, and our activities become habitually directed towards meeting the next set of needs that we have yet to satisfy. These then become our salient needs. However, growth needs continue to be felt and may even become stronger once they have been engaged.”
Mcleod, ‘[Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs]’.
This is what I believe causes the need to be in the “ingroup” and circling around to my earlier point. Why these cliques or groups form in a school, and why those in the outgroup are something of a target for them, as it meets 3 of the targets in the hierarchy for them specifically: safety need, belongingness, love needs and esteem needs. things that i have come to have in the last 4 years, and what i believe has led to my growth as a person. I don’t know if there is a way to fix said hierarchy, or even if it needs fixed. Maybe addressing the social aspect of it is all, or perhaps I’m being too childish in my thoughts for this, which can be unsatisfactory. If you have challenges, I’d be interested in hearing them. But I think the challenges can be explained with simple thought about our society and the way we engage with others through it. As I said, kids can be stupid, and behaviour is mostly moulded from childhood, so who knows what is possible.
Hypothetical time
These thoughts have made me think of a hypothetical We will create a paradox of sorts. Assuming that things stayed the same unless acted upon. Would you ever go back to a point in your childhood and change a particular event? This would be a one-time thing. If you can’t give clues or hints to events, you would be like a stranger to your younger self. After which, you’d both continue with your lives, and you’d only find out the result of what you did until you died.
The Long Road Ahead 
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