By Sairah Rehman
Without rules, we’d be in a world of anarchy, where anyone could do anything, without any repercussions. So I’m not saying I’m against rules per se. But then, there are rules that make no sense. You know the ones. They irritate you, like a ‘May Contain Nuts’ warning on a packet of peanuts. They’re usually age based and somehow related to how mature someone thinks you are. Take, for example my recent excursion to a certain Swedish flat-pack superstore. In a frenzied spending extravaganza, I decided to pick up some new knives. But when I got to the checkout, the cashier glanced at me, and noting my youthful and carefree glow, refused to sell them to me unless I was over twenty-one. Incidentally, the age where you can legally purchase a knife in the UK is eighteen. But apparently, this was not good enough; they had put on an extra three years for good measure. As if to say, we know the law, but we don’t trust you, you shifty young person (with ensuing finger wagging).
But to measure what I wonder? I only planned to use them to chop vegetables and I don’t see that I would use them for anything different in two years, when I would reach that pinnacle of maturity, the age of twenty-one. And in the end, Mum got me the knives. But the fact remains, if I am allowed to live alone at eighteen and could theoretically be living alone at sixteen, how could I cut anything with a harder consistency than a peach, without being allowed to purchase a knife? Do not get me wrong, knife crime is horrendous and I in no way advocate selling knives to minors. But the fact remains that most adults use knives to cut food and not stab people. I’m an adult in the eyes of the law, after all. Why am I not an adult in the eyes of Ikea?
There is a discrepancy here that needs to be addressed, not just with knives, but with the way rules that are reliant on age are enforced without particular reason. It’s almost as if someone plucked a random number out of the air to highlight our perceived maturity. Yes, I am a student and yes I am young (no matter how old I feel when I see freshers prancing about campus), but this in itself is not a reason to be differentiated from the rest of society, when I am in fact a consumer, just like anyone else.
Eighteen is an age that I understand as being considered an adult. I don’t think that there can be a uniform time where everyone is the same level of maturity. But when you add needless bureaucracy and pointless rules (after all, in the above story, I still got the knives, albeit in a roundabout way), it goes too far. I carry ID pretty much all of the time to prove I’m an adult. Don’t try and change what adulthood is.
True say :)