Recently, I was in conversation with my friend and what I noticed was that a continual topic was 'drama'. It was something we went back to time and again as soon as the conversation got boring. And we're surrounded by it: what one person said to another behind someone else's back; the scandal that everyone wants to see play out; the argument that separates a group of friends and unites a school's worth of drama-hungry onlookers. Why is it that we rely so much on the ever-increasing amount of drama at school?
Check your schadenfreude. It's something deeply ingrained in our society, seen on gossip magazines and celebrity news outlets, mentioned in small talk over office printers. Yet it's something that gen Z are being blamed for. This may be because of how much more it affects their lives. At least one in ten children in the UK are thought to have a mental illness and this number is growing. Many experts believe that the increase of 'drama' in school life is at the heart of this.
So why do we love to hear all this gossip so much? Listening to my friend, Brigitte, recount every ounce of drama that went on at her school was - admittedly - entertaining. When asked about this, she agreed, saying: 'we all love a bit of drama-- until it happens to us.'
Does our love of gossip make us bad people? When express our distaste in one thing that someone's done to another, really, we're entertained- and should we all be ashamed of that? Maybe. Perhaps, going forward, we should take other people's feelings - and mental health - into account, and realise that there's more to life than 'drama'.
Hannah Kent
Waldegrave School
