Good and bad aspects of the leisure activities of young people nowadays / José Piñón

Today, young people do a lot of different things in our free time: from doing sport or staying with friends to going to the cinema or surfing the internet. I’m going to analyse the good and bad aspects of these activities.
I think that all the leisure activities that we can do are positive. Some of them are really good and others can be also good, but with certain moderation. I have invented a classification of the different free time activities. We can divide them in sport, culture, technologies and friends.

All the sport activities (playing basketball, football, swimming, skiing…) are totally positive; because we do exercise, we relax, meet people and we forget all our problems for a moment.

As sport, culture activities are completely good. They are things like learning to play an instrument, reading a book, writing or even going to the cinema (depending on the film).

In the technology section, I include playing videogames, surfing the internet, watching TV, listening to music, phoning a friend... Playing videogames and surfing the internet can be something very funny and interesting. There are games which tell us incredible stories as a book or a film; but we should be careful with these activities, because they can make people introverted and we mustn’t stay too much time at home. The same happens with television. There are good and bad programmes, which can influence us negatively; so we must select and not to stay much time watching them. In general, we must moderate the use of this type of activities.

Finally, we have the things that we usually do with friends: going to the cinema, going out for dinner, going out at night… Probably, they are the activities that we like the most, and they really have a lot of benefits. However, nowadays there are some problems with young people and alcohol at nights that, on the other hand, have always existed. Some people drink a bit to become more extroverted and be more talkative. But others drink until they are completely drunk. I don’ t understand the second ones very well but I think that they drink a lot to become ‘silly’; and when they are ‘silly’, all for them is funny. For me, the idea of these people, the necessity to be ‘silly’ to have a good moment, is very sad. The consequences of this are seven or eight people with an alcohol poisoning in the hospital each weekend.
It’s difficult to solve the alcohol problem because we need to change the mind of a lot of people. But I think that the government should increase the control of the alcohol sales to young people because they are starting to drink very early. Boys and girls of twelve or thirteen are buying drinks without problems. And there is a law, but it isn’t respected.

In conclusion, sport and culture activities are completely positive. The rest of activities are even better but we must moderate the use of technologies and be careful with alcohol and drugs at night. If we put this advice in practise, we can have very good moments in our free time.

by José Piñón Vila, 1º BACH A