This year I celebrated my 20th birthday and, leaving my teenage years behind, I felt for the first time that I had reached this thing called “young adulthood.” I, thankfully, have been out of high school for two years now and have come to a new level of maturity and self-awareness.

I figured out the miracle of thriftshops and developed a style, which to some may seem “weird,” and figured out the way to appreciate all that crosses my path, as hard as it may be.

Now it seems that since we are all adults here at college and that we have come to terms with the somewhat crappy reality of life as a starving college student, that we would get over our petty, gossipy natures and just focus on what is truly ahead of us: life.

However, this is not the case for some. They are still stuck in thinking the more rudely you speak about someone, the farther you get to climb this totem pole of popularity among your peers. They, at the age of 20-something, still eye others up and down and giggle among their friends.

It seems surreal to sit in a college class, one where you pay decent money to attend, and have to deal with the snickering of the people behind you making fun of the kid who wears a certain pair of shoes or decides to wear their hair a little differently than yours.

So many people from older generations look at us and think that we will never make it; some even think from the radical viewpoint that we could cause the end of the world.

That may be a little crazy, but in reality we are slowly losing all respect from the people in which we should start seeking it from. It just seems to be time that we grow up and learn about the significance of those around us and how we can be more amicable.