According to Osho, when teenagers change their appearance with fashion trends, they’re giving an outer voice to intense inner changes—experimenting with identity, energy, and growth before maturity stabilizes them. It’s a healthy, temporary expression that should be allowed and guided with better alternatives, not condemned, so their inner upheavals find creative outlets rather than turning into tension, rebellion, or destructive extremes.
They change styles because they’re changing inside and need a safe way to explore who they are.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Teenagers go wild about fashion -- changing their appearance at every season. What is it they are expressing by doing that?
Nothing is wrong with it. They should be allowed to, because they are changing, everything in them is changing. Changing fashions is simply an expression of their inner change. It is perfectly healthy and right. They should be allowed and helped to change as many times as they want. Soon they will settle, once their inner changes have settled. By the time they are twenty-one things will start settling. For the time being, if you don't allow them to change the outer expressions then their inner changes will create tensions and anguish in them. Let them change. It is natural. This is the time when so much is happening inside them -- before they become mature, adult -- that they need some kind of expression for it. We can help with better changes but we cannot prevent changes; we can only give them better alternatives. For example, we can give…
Many young people in germany and switzerland and other european countries choose to look ugly. They dress up as punks or skinheads, shaving part of their hair and dyeing the rest in outrageous colors. They also prefer to wear ragged clothing. Can you please comment on this strange phenomenon?
It is not strange at all. It is a commentary on you. They are bored with your Western lifestyle. They are simply showing their resentment. They are showing that you have led society not towards truth, not towards tranquility, not towards godliness; you have led society towards death. The punks and the skinheads are simply reminders that you have failed. The Western civilization has come to its end. Naturally it is always the youth who are most vulnerable to what is coming, are more perceptive. They can see that death is coming, that all Western scientists, Western politicians, Western churches are preparing a big graveyard for the whole of humanity. By their outrageous clothing, their ragged clothes, cutting half of their hair, they are simply indicating that there is still time to drop the line that you have been following up to now. Nothing like this has ever happened in…
Why are young people so rebellious nowadays?
There are many factors. One is universal education: for the first time the youth of the world are well-educated. And to the educated mind the old establishment looks absurd and out of date -- rooted in the past, of course, but with no future. Secondly, the scientific progress of the world and the scientific training of the young basically presupposes a training in doubt. Since all the old cultures and civilizations are based on faith, there is a gap. The young are trained for doubt and all religions and cultures require faith, so it becomes impossible. The young are now really in search of a faith which can be scientific, a faith which is so alive that it can allow doubt, a faith that is unafraid of doubt. Life is complex, and everything exists with its polar opposite. A scientist begins with doubt and ends in faith while a religious…
How can I work as a therapist in an egoless way? What should I do?
THERAPY IS BASICALLY A FUNCTION OF LOVE, and love flows only when there is no ego. You can help the other only to the extent that you are non-egoistic. The moment the ego enters, the other becomes defensive. The ego is aggressive; it creates an automatic urge in the other to be defensive. Love is non-aggressive. It helps the other to remain vulnerable, open, non-defensive. Hence, without love there is no therapy. Therapy is a function of love. So with ego, you can't help. You may even destroy the other. In the name of help you may hinder his growth. But Western psychology is caught up in a mess. The first thing Western psychology still thinks in terms of a healthy ego. And ego can never be healthy. It is a contradiction in terms. Ego as such is ill. Ego can never be healthy. Ego is always leading you towards…
Question: at first sight, sannyas appears to be something that limits one's activities. Why does one have to change one's clothes to red? Why should one have to change his appearance, since sannyas is something that is within rather than without?
Gurdjieff used to say a very meaningful thing: that as you are now, you have no soul. He was both right and wrong. You have a soul, but you do not know about it. You are the outside, and so clothes are very meaningful. Because of clothes a person becomes beautiful and because of clothes a person becomes ugly. Because of clothes he becomes respected; because of clothes he is not respected. A judge has to wear certain clothes -- a supreme court justice has to use a particular robe -- and no one asks why. With that robe he is a supreme court justice; without that robe he is no one. This is how man is. When I look at a man he is more his clothes than his mind. And this is as it should be, because we belong to the body, we are identified with the body.…