We all need money to survive.

Well, not money exactly, but the provisions that money allows us to have.

I’ve always sort of had a problem with money. I strongly dislike it and the effects it has on people. Some people spend their whole lives to make as much of it as they can. Some people waste all they have and live their lives with nothing, barely surviving.

It’s hard to find the balance _ the balance where you don’t let money drive your life, yet you respect it enough to manage it well. It’s hard to find the balance between letting a job consume you and not being disciplined or driven enough to hold a job.

My friends and I are at the age where we start working, along with deciding what job or means of making money we want to pursue next as careers.

Our jobs now are fairly easy. The money we make for the most part goes to extras in our lives, such as concerts, extra clothes, music, movies, cell phones, iPods or cars.

Sometimes it goes for things we need, and for some teens, they’re already supporting themselves and have no option for further education.

But on average, the money we teens make goes toward our wants. We usually work reasonable hours in decent conditions with at least minimum wage.

We complain about those hours, conditions and wages, but for most of us our jobs aren’t yet a necessity. We should be grateful we’re not forced to work to help provide for our families, as some people our age are.

Despite not being a necessity, joining the workforce has a lot to teach us about future jobs.

It teaches us responsibility and how to budget by showing us that our money doesn’t go that far. We are introduced to taxes and the role they’ll play in our paychecks for the rest of our lives.

We have to learn how to respect our bosses, even when it’s difficult.

This introduction also teaches us valuable people skills, which are a must in any situation.

We can’t have problems with everyone we work with, and knowing how to just let things go will broaden our horizons.

Our interaction with costumers and how we treat them will be a major factor as well and can greatly increase our job opportunities.

These first few jobs also impact our mind-set about work. If we take a job too seriously and stress about it, we might form the unhealthy habit of making a job run our lives. The opposite could also happen _ where we might not care at all and quit multiple jobs, starting a habit of not persevering even when conditions are not up to our personal par. The great trick of leaving work at work is an amazing thing to develop now, as well. Taking the stress with us into our free time will make it no-longer free. How we handle these early jobs speaks volumes about how we’ll come to handle later ones.

So even though these teenage jobs we have at supermarkets, ice cream places, restaurants, movie theaters, florists, even baby-sitting jobs, may not seem overly influential to our future, I believe they do shape us more than we realize. A job is a job and a way to make money, yet still an opportunity for growth, for learning, for testing the waters and seeing our strengths and weaknesses.

Let us not view a job as just a way to make some extra cash, and let’s not let it drive our lives _ not now when we’re young and not when we’re older.

Jessica Bailey will be a senior at Lighthouse Christian Academy in Oneonta this fall.