By Hannah Hobbs

It comes as no surprise to me or any of my fellow peers to be fully aware or at least knowledgeable of just how crazy our world really is. I cannot begin to fathom how many times I have heard someone mention we are on the brink of World War 3 as if it is part of a casual conversation. North Korea threatens us, we threaten them back. To be honest, it all just seems like our leaders are children on a playground fighting over a toy rocket. So what is the big deal?

They are grown children with deadly weapons. That is the big deal.

To make matters worse, it seems as though the rest of the world is facing their own fair share of problems. Syria is still fighting with it’s own people. Turkey is getting caught in some of the fire from what I have recently learned. We fight over oil more than we do water. Russia and the United States seem to be playing with the idea of conspiracy theories and pulling at each other’s puppet strings to see how well the other one dances. Poor little Australia is still fighting animals and possibly flying sharks in tornados for all we know.

It is all one big mess and yet here we are. Fighting over opinions, marching down the streets with confederate flags and swastikas waving high in the air. It is history repeating itself all over again except this time, we have phones being held high to capture it all. We take pointless online quizzes to determine if we could survive a nuclear bombing. What a fantastic century we live in.

We cry because the world is not fair. We vent on social media and share links of articles that voice our opinions that we claim to be facts. We claim to know something that the other person doesn’t while they claim the same. We are still fighting for bathroom rights and now who is allowed to join the military. When will we learn that the world has never been fair? When will we learn to choose our battles and be satisfied with what we have?

I do not mean to sound cynical, it is just a fact of life. The world is truly a crazy place and it will just be filled with more chaos and greed until we become numb to it. I am fairly certain the majority of my generation has heard at least once in their life that the world is a cruel place. It truly is. I don’t doubt we have the ability to change it and make it a little better. We are in the process of it right now as you are reading this. We have already come such a long way, yet I cannot help but notice that we are still trying to fight the same battles as we have before. Except now every country seems to have a weapon pointed in every direction.

I use to ask myself, “What is the use if we are all going to die anyway?” I have come to realize that staying informed of what is happening in the present with politics and our world as a whole is crucial to an extent. It affects all of us in the long term. Yet I know it is important to enjoy life here. It is critical to focus on ourselves and not to fully engulf our entire livelihood through social media or based off of the possible war that we supposedly could be facing. The world is a terrible place, but it is not all bad. Sometimes it is important to stay optimistic even when thinking positively creates a war within our own selves.

Hannah Hobbs is a millenial, a wife and a college student living in Hubbard Lake. Her column will appear bi-weekly on Saturday.