The Primetime Emmy Award-winning web series, Euphoria elaborates on the real-life challenges revolving around drugs, relationships, anxiety for the future, and sexual insecurities. It brilliantly highlights the life of an American teenager struggling to stay sober. The drama emphasizes the life stories of multiple teenagers: Kat, Jules, Rue, Chris, Cassie, and Nate, as they struggle to confront the obstacles life throws at them.
The teenage years are hard because you have to deal with all the pressure to stay in the limelight and graduate to adulthood. Cassie wittily illustrates in the web series, “Maybe people are nostalgic about high school cause its like the last time in their life that they get to dream.” It can be overwhelming for teenagers, from maintaining friendships and relationships with family to dealing with drugs and hormones. The web series phenomenally identifies the mental health issues that teenagers go through due to their sexuality, body type, need for validation, and unrealistic expectations.
Euphoria is becoming immensely popular among youngsters around the world. Though the teenagers’ lives look messed up in this show, there are a few important life lessons one can learn from these teenagers. Euphoria is an HBO Max original show available on various streaming platforms. You can also watch it on YouTube TV outside USA by using a premium VPN.
5 Life Lessons to Learn from Euphoria
Be Confident in the face of Adversities
As Maddy in the show elaborates that 90% of life is confidence, and the thing about confidence is that no one knows if it’s real. If you are confident in who you are and what you believe in, you can do wonders and become limitless.
Each character in Euphoria has a different personality and frame of reference, but one thing that is common among them is their confidence. The teenage years are excruciating because you are learning about yourself, and often, you are bullied into believing that you are not worthy and undeserving. However, confidence can help you stand out, like Jules. She is the epitome of how confidence can help you outshine and outsmart your bullies. She carries herself with so much confidence that the other person cannot wreck her. Another example is the character development of Kat about how she rediscovered her true worth by staying true to herself.
Euphoria preaches the notion that you need to be confident regardless of your physical appearance, and the rest of the people will follow.
Solid Friendships are Necessary to endure Hardships.
Throughout the teenage years, individuals go through emotional havoc, bad choices, and heartache, but one thing that can keep them sane during these dark times is friendship. Perhaps the best friendship that evolves during the show is between Fez and Rues. Although it is a cliché friendship between a drug dealer and a drug addict, as Fez learns about her struggles and how the withdrawals are becoming worse for her, he gets her far from the drugs and inconveniences no matter what. Even though she is his best friend, he provides tough love and denies Rue when she asks for drugs.
Another friendship that shows the power of healing and empathy is how Lexi helps Rue in the period of scarcity. Every friendship goes through emotional evolution, but what matters, in the end, is how devoted and committed you are to helping your friend in the dark times.
Addiction is a Vicious Cycle
The show sheds light on the issues related to addiction and how it begins from a single glass of alcohol to doing every available drug in days. Moreover, it demonstrates the pain and emotional turmoil of the family when a teenager becomes an addict. Rue is a sociopathic drug addict who would go to any extent to fight her withdrawals and slips back into the vicious cycle of addiction. Euphoria teaches us that addiction can begin from the least of expected places as Rue becomes an addict by feeding on her father’s prescribed medications and how it wildly spiraled. Although everyone has different patterns, addiction is atrocious for the victim and the family. Therefore, it is important to help teenagers with emotional support to overcome them, so they don’t fall back into this vicious cycle again.
Love Conquers All
Euphoria shares insight into how the teenagers of this generation want the approval and validation of one individual who loves them for exactly who they are. From incredibly confounded Nate and Maddy to Rue experiencing passional feelings for Jules, every teenager needs to be appreciated and acknowledged by somebody. The show elucidates how we can help struggling individuals by offering them love and empathy, as love conquers all and is the only way to heal someone. Every love story in this show is twisted, dark, and brimming with confusion, but it makes the storyline captivating and real.
Life is not a fairy tale; you get rejected, you get injured, you get embarrassed or, worse, cheated, but you must remember that everyone is a work in progress, and you must keep loving and be kind to help others. Only love can drive the darkness away.
You Can Choose your Family
The Euphoria created a paradigm shift by depicting that how our families can be messed up and can cause a generational trauma by putting unrealistic expectations like Nate’s father who coerces Nate into becoming the Sociopath who cannot manage his aggression. It shows that our biological family can be flawed as well and we don’t have to go through the pain and agony to get the approval from our family that might never come. Instead, you can choose your family. You can be assertive about saying No to the abuse and trauma.
