“I don’t envy you guys. Don’t put anything you do on YouTube until you are 21.”
Writer, director, and actor Mindy Kaling recently wrote an open letter to today's teenagers for the online magazine Rookie's forthcoming print publication, Rookie Yearbook Two. In the letter, in an attempt to decide whether she hates or pities today's teenagers, Mindy listed out the things that are easier and more difficult about being a teenager today, as opposed to in the nineties. The letter was published in a Vanity Fair exclusive. Here are the highlights.
Teenagers today have cellphones, as opposed to landlines.
"You all have phones that your parents can’t hop on. My dad used to get on our landline at home and interrupt phone calls with my friends by saying, “Is this really something you can’t talk about tomorrow at school?” And I would want to die."
Fox / Via wedoitbetta.tumblr.com
But they also have to deal with their awful teenage years being documented on said cellphones.
"I was disgusting as a teenager. My hair was greasy, I smelled weird, I wore stretchy boot-cut jeans two sizes too small, and I had terrible cystic acne that frequently gave me whiteheads. Whiteheads on brown skin. I was a monster. But according to the Internet, I never really existed until I was 22. I am so lucky."
Fox / Via howtolivecasually.tumblr.com
Teenagers today have full access to their heroes.
"When I was 15 I used to cry myself to sleep with how much I was in love with Dana Carvey and how I would never, ever get to meet or talk to him. Now, Dana Carvey would be on Twitter and I could send him Vines all day of me doing the Church Lady and we’d probably be collaborating on a pilot."
