[Long post] Nasty teens=Nasty adults???

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Short version: Based on your own experiences, does majority of nasty teens develop into nasty adults or does majority of nasty teens repent and change for the better? I wonder whether I should sever all ties with an acquaintance because of her nastiness as a teen. Have you ever severed ties with somebody after learning more about his/her past? Thanks in advance!

Long version: I have an acquaintance who is slightly older than me. (We are both in our early twenties.) I initially thought well of her because she is so charming and confident, but I soon realized that she has been looking down on many people (including me) because she thinks that we aren’t as highly-educated, popular and successful as she is. She once told me that she is aware of her tendency to look down on people. She promised me that she would do her best to get rid of this trait. She even said something like, “People all have strengths. People all have weaknesses. We are neither superior to nor inferior to anybody else in the world.” Um, despite her arrogance, I still regard her as an acquaintance because I think that her arrogance is a tolerable flaw. I’m not supposed to overlook her good traits because of one stupid flaw. Besides, I’m full of flaws.

One day, due to boredom, I decided to perform some “background check” on this acquaintance through Google. My findings disgusted me. To cut a long story short, if we had known each other as teens, she might have ended up having lots of fun bullying me. She was so bitchy and nasty as a teen! Here are some of her “sins” as a teen.

Sin 1: She was a social climber who strongly believed that “the ends justify the means”. She spent her middle school years trying very hard to climb to the top of her school’s social pyramid and ultimately succeeded. She enjoyed flirting with boys, especially boys who were good-looking, talented and born to rich families. Whenever she thought that her boyfriend wasn’t “prestigious” enough for her, she would dump him for a much more prestigious boyfriend. One girl criticized her through blogging, writing that she was in love with prestige rather than the boys themselves.

Sin 2: She often played truant. Her middle school’s principal once hit her palm multiple times for cheating during a class test. She received “Fair” for conduct year after year. Instead of feeling remorseful, she boasted that she didn’t feel anything. She elaborated that as long as she could maintain her excellent academic performance, she believed that she could get away with any misdeed.

Sin 3: She was terribly obsessed with beauty. She enjoyed ranking female celebrities based on their looks. Once, she even made a male classmate of hers do some sort of “Rank our classmates from most beautiful to ugliest” list and that guy really did that list in order to please her. (Based on that guy’s blog posts, I suspect that he once had a crush on her.) She showed off photos of herself wearing nothing but bras and panties. She complained that if she wasn’t born with certain flaws, she would have already been the most beautiful girl in her middle school. She complained more than once that her boobs weren’t big enough.

Sin 4: According to a Chinese belief, our parents give us our names to express their love for us, so if we aren’t satisfied with our names, then we are displeasing our parents. As a teen, my acquaintance hated her name to the extent that she gave herself a completely new surname plus a masculine personal name. She insisted that all her middle school friends should address her by her new name.

Sin 5: She wrote that she aspired to become a doctor because she wanted to earn lots of money, not because of passion. On some other occasion, she wrote that she wouldn’t mind prostituting herself for money.

Sin 6: She has siblings. She was popular among her classmates (at least in middle school). Yet she described herself as “lonely”. She freely revealed her email address and cell phone number to strangers over the Internet, inviting them to contact her anytime.

Sin 7: A netizen once predicted angrily on a forum that she would grow up into “a b***h who never does her share of work, bullies newbie colleagues and plots against people who have displeased her” because she once caused some conflict to brew on the forum where one group of netizens (who sided with her) to quarrel with another group of netizens (who disagreed with her).

Sin 8: Recently, my acquaintance has stopped siding with any political party openly. (She has always dreamt of becoming a civil servant-turned-politician, so if she openly sides with any political party, she might be hurting her own chances.) Have you ever heard of the term “50 cent party”? She has been part of my country’s own version of “50 cent party” up to 2012, meaning that she tries to brainwash people into supporting the ruling party by posting comments favorable towards the ruling party all over the Internet. Gosh, I have always been disgusted by members of the “50 cent party”.

It might depend on if the teen is a sociopath(ASPD) or not. I've long suspected that most of the super-rude teenagers I used to know were sociopaths; so they're probably still nasty as adults, but it's sometimes not quite as severe as when they were teenagers.

Teenagers often behave similar to sociopaths even if they aren't ones, but the worst of the worst often actually are and they obviously continue to act that way into adulthood.

It really is amazing how the internet has changed things. There are literally records of our lives out there. I'm too old for anyone to find anything about my childhood online, but I would probably be embarrassed and shamed by some of the things I used to say and do.

Considering almost everyone goes through a period of adolescence, I'm not sure it's fair to make a statement like that. OP, of the "sins" you listed, the only ones that could have an impact on you now are #1, 4*, and 6, but those are dependent on if she still does them to a degree. I'm a pretty firm believer in people having the ability to change over time, and the fact that she admitted not only to her tendency to look down on people, but of her past as well could mean she's looking to right some of the wrongs of her past. I'd say unless she still commits the "sins" I listed and shows no sign of even wanting to change them, still giver her that chance to be your friend.

In answering your question, again, I've only done it if their past is so deep it affects me, or the person knows there's a problem connected to their past that they aren't willing to change.

I find nasty teenagers more often than not grow into nasty adults because they were never taught that their behavior was wrong or punished for it. Of course nasty teens firmly believe the entire world revolves around them, they can do whatever they want and nothing bad will happen to them. But when they become adults and continue to behave that way karma usually bites them in the rear end and they end up in prison or dead.

This to me is the most telling aspect of her character. I doubt she is a sociopath but she probably does have some narcissistic tendencies that ultimately started making her feel lonely and isloated after highschool (remember that highschool is more like "lord of the flies" then real life.) The fact that she recognizes these traits in herself is a sign that you should give her a chance and not judge her too much based on her past. I sure as hell wouldn't want to be judged based on my highschool self.

I have no idea. I'm not really in touch with anyone from my childhood/adolescent, nasty or nice. But I don't think people generally change a lot, period.


No, I haven't. If I had found that they had:

- committed murder
(unless it was accident or self-defence; and I mean real self-defence, not the kind of "self-defence" where someone stabs someone 50 times for looking at them wrong )
- been involved in causing serious physical harm to someone
(again, unless it was an accident or self-defence)
- raped
- mistreated animals or killed members of endangered species

I'd drop them. Otherwise, I wouldn't really care what they had done in the past. Quite frankly besides the things I've already mentioned I'm pretty indifferent to what they're doing now, as long as I like them/think they're nice and I enjoy being with them. That's what matters to me. If anyone else dislikes them and even have reason to, I don't see that as my business.

haha Lord of the Flies, what a description you put to High School. It sort of does become like that... how accurate.