ENGLISH ESSAY
What can we learn from the 7 up series? Or should I say what can we learn from life? As one of the characters said, “Only life prepares you for life”. But can we learn from life? Or can we learn from others life’s but not our own? Can we stop others from making the same mistakes or slip-up’s we have? And is their journey different to ours? Or are they the same? Are the values and traits we hold the same? What make’s them an accurate outlook on the world back then and to this day? Should we look at the 7 up series as if they were all our parents trying to stop us from slipping up, or should we ignore them like we usually would ignore our parents? We all want to be unique and special, but are we really? Sometimes life can be like a romance comedy, repeating the same story line with a different way of getting there. But sometimes the way of getting there is the important bit. It makes us who we are and what we will become. This is what the 7 up series is, ‘An ingenious way of observing the journey of life’.
All different people from all different backgrounds come together to make this show.
This is a great way of seeing at how people look at what they have got and how they treat it throughout the years. If they are thankful for what they had or if they help others achieve what they have achieved in life.
Suzie, John, Andrew and Charles all are from the upper class; they all have everything they could possibly imagine. But even at the age of 7 you can see that they already want more and won’t stop trying to get it. Even when they may have say 20 times as much rice or bread as someone in a poorer country may have they still will refuse to eat it or throw it away at the end of the day.
But take some one from the lower classes of England like Tony; He had hardly anything at the age of 7 but was one of the brightest and happiest kids on the program.
He later said in the show that wearing hand-me-downs and not eating the most nutritious food in the world every night was and is what he is used to.
If we never face greed or having plenty then would we want it? Would we only want what we needed? And would there not be the separation of poorer and richer classes?. If we all had only what we needed would the world be a better place?
An important factor of anyone’s life is making the right decisions. Making the wrong decision can alter your life completely. Making the right decision can also alter your life dramatically. In the 7 up series we see all the wrong mistakes that people make in life. Such as Neil maybe if he didn’t drop out of University he might have had a job for most of his life rather than only the last of it. Or Tony maybe if he had stuck to his ambition of becoming a jockey and worked at it harder than he might of made it.
We also see all the good decisions the characters make as well. Such as Suzie marrying her husband, and changing her life for the better and maybe if Paul’s dad didn’t decide to take him in then we wouldn’t have met the people he did and done the things he’s done.
Simple decisions like this may not seem to affect our lives but they really do. Parent’s making decisions in our early lives change our lives for ever. The decisions you make can most likely affect the life of some one else close to us as well as us.
When we make decisions we tend to forget about the welfare of others. We think about how it will affect me? And how will it change my life? These questions are still very important and you still should consider them but asking your self if it would affect the lives of others is just as important.
Another lesson you could grasp from the 7 up series is learning from mistakes. How and if you make mistakes it what you learn from theses mistakes that is important. An example would be any of the characters that had a divorce, they made a mistake by marrying that first spouse and the second time they married (If they did) they were a lot more cautious with choosing their next spouse. All though there is only one person in the world you could successfully have a marriage with, it would be really hard to find that person. It can seem to be really hard to make a mistake and really easy not to but, all the little things that you mess up create one big fat mistake. This is sort of like lying you can get caught in it or you could avoid it quite easily. It all goes back to making the right decision. Life’s most important choice is to choose to choose. If we didn’t have those decisions then we wouldn’t experience many things or have many differences or traits that would make us individuals. And it would make us, us.
What does make’s us, us? What makes the characters from the 7 up series who they are? And how can we compare them to our selves? They came from a different generation, different background, and different culture. If we didn’t have the same circumstances from the beginning, then how is that a fair compatibility? We have grown up with new technologies and things that make life just that little bit easier; they have grown up by doing everything the hard way, the long way (in my opinion). Yes they helped make us, but they didn’t help make us who we are. That generation will be part of both of our lives forever. But this doesn’t mean that they are part of that generation. We might have heard of each other, but can we hear each other?
We can’t compare my self to say Suzie because we have different generation’s different experiences and we’re different people. We most likely have different values and opinions on things too. But this doesn’t mean that what they have done, the mistakes and choices they have made we can’t relate to them completely, we can understand the growing up stage and family issues they haven’t changed for generations before them.
But comparing the ways there lives laid out and how mine are going to are going to be completely different.
As a fellow class mate brought up, all the characters from the seven up series have had a “boring” life. That there lives were all in the same format. As Charles said, “The prep-school to the Marlborough High School to the Oxbridge University and ect conveyor belt”.
Like mentioned before life is like a romance comedy, the same story line in every romance, but what happens in-between the lines makes the movie good, exiting and different. We all want a movie that’s exiting and entertaining but do we really want a life like that? We all want a holly wood life, but do we all want the normal happy life? I know that I do, I don’t want to be famous or popular for the rest of my life. Do we really all want different things to each other? Or do we All want the same things?
But in the end we all want the same thing. We all carry one thing in common and we are all alike in that way. We all want happiness. We all want to be comfortable and have a family and friends surrounding us. We all want to be Unique and special. We all want to have the best thing the newest things, so that we are different. But wanting to be different makes us the same.
Our lives, our generations may seem to be like a broken record player, but every time it replays it tells a different story, a different life with different experiences and problems. What can we learn from life? “Only life can prepare you for life”.
By liz Brown (1,389 words total)
