Choose to be happy.
Life frequently gets better after high school. You get to make your own decisions, be who you want, be with who you want, and live where you want.
In my experience, the people who told me high school was the best time had very boring adult lives.
I imagine the people who said this probably did have a fantastic time in high school. Probably to the point they ended up socially aimless afterward.
Perhaps I’m just over imagining, but I picture them reminiscing about scoring two touchdowns in a single high school game. The kind of people who post about high school memories on Facebook.
I feel like life gets better and better and I’m 40, so…
Outside of tragedies beyond your control, like illness and so on, it’s also a matter of trying to have a fun and good life every day.
My years in middle and high school were rough for a lot of reasons. The last thing I needed were adults telling me “these are the best days of your life!”. That was the most demoralizing thing I could have imagined back then.
Once I was 18 and in control of my life, things got so much better. There have been different chapters, but they’ve all been good or at least memorable in their own way.
What I would (and have) told kids who are clearly having a rough time is that things can and will get better. When you’re a kid, and bad situations that are entirely out of your control to change are happening, life can be miserable. Eventually you get some agency, and that goes a long way. Sometimes as an adult, things come and happen to, but telling a kid to look forward to something better is a lot more helpful. Barring some outside tragedy, life as an adult is much less grinding than being a kid shaped cog.
I struggled with this as well, having not enjoyed my teenage years that much.
How I coped was to tell myself that people asserting that period X is the best years of your life are people whose lives peaked at that time, and that this won’t be true if I made sure to not have my life peak then.
I’m happy to say that I’ve proven the assertion wrong in my case. It’s been a steady climb upwards, with every year being better than the latter.
Yeah, high school is some of the worst times in my life. If my kid complained, I wouldn’t say “it only gets worse,” I’d say “this is a rough time, but remember, none of the stuff that is hard is real. It’s all just training. The school stuff is training you for deadlines and heavy workloads. The social stuff is training for personal and professional relationships. Try to think of this as the tutorial for life, where you must do X action to proceed, and maybe it’s hard because it’s new, and it’s frustrating because you don’t realize it’s a tutorial and think “this is the game.” It’s not. It becomes an open-world game after this. It’s harder, but it can be WAY better, and you have a lot more control.”
Thirded. And even when I got control, I had a better time in my late 30s than I did at any time prior to that. I had a lot of absolutely great misadventures in my 20s and I’ll be forever grateful. But in my late 30s I had the wisdom to know what bullshit I could get into and out of, enough money to do it, a body that wasn’t beat to hell just yet, and very few shits to give.
Things started to even out at 40 and have been pretty steady the last couple of years. It’s amazing in a different way.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but if I were giving advice to 15 year old me I would definitely say that the best is yet to come. Just gotta keep your eyes peeled for the opportunity.
I remember thinking like this once. Then life got a lot worse.
What keeps you going these days?
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“Would you go back to being a kid again?”
I think that implies retaining a certain level of awareness that you were an adult so that you could have an appreciation for the time travel.
The only reason I think I’d want to be a kid again is to see all the people that are gone today. I’m well past middle age, and there are fewer and fewer people left from my childhood, and the togetherness I experienced with family was something I didn’t really appreciate until it stopped happening - along with my failure to ask what their lives were like and learn history from their viewpoint. That’s what I remember most. Not the toys, the idle days at school or with friends. It’s Holidays. Bored out of my skull with people I didn’t appreciate, but yet being glad they were there. A lot of them aren’t anymore.
Otherwise being a kid kinda sucked. Your life revolves around what everyone else wants you to do and you can’t really say no, fuckit, I’m calling in sick today. All the stupid drama at schools. Your freedom (pre-internet) was held by your parent(s) willingness to get their car keys or if you had any money and a bicycle. I didn’t like school. I didn’t fit in. I would not go back.
Yeah, it’s better to be an adult in most ways. (I say that with the caveat that I understand some may have had easy childhoods or have very difficult adult lives. Meh, this turned into a bigger post than I expected. I guess I’ll leave it anyway).
It’s a perspective thing to a degree but it’s also your ability to avoid the crushing weight of reality.
Like approaching 40 I can appreciate that I finally have some money for the things I like, that I have more freedom and wisdom, that I still have the ability to start things, etc
But at the same time there’s the crushing reality. To get that money I trade time and if there’s one thing I miss about being young it’s the amount of free time I had. I just got a bass and I love playing it but I can only do like 20-30 minutes a day and have to skip many days because of life. When I was 16 or even 22 I could often practice drums or piano for hours per day. I could work less of course but that’s not usually an option for most people without changing jobs and also can lead to financial insecurity
Then the even less fun parts of recognizing your body just doesn’t work as effectively. The permanent neck injury I got from work when I was 25 that didn’t bother me as much then is significantly worse now despite physical therapy for years, cortisone, regular strength training, etc. what used to be a stiff neck is now genuine pain that impacts all the way to my shoulders. Knee injury from youth is similar. Then the just unfair bits like my vision deteriorating significantly. It’s not injury related, just lost the genetic lottery.
The cognitive decline as well. I’m still plenty sharp but I can recognize my math processing becoming slightly slower, tripping up my words more often, needing to read things more thoroughly than I did when I was 24 and in grad school, takes me longer to learn things like the bass, my reaction times in videogames are worse, etc. It’s nothing major of course, no family history of dementia thankfully, but it’s part of how the human body works. My job involves assessing people’s neurological state and somewhere in your mid to late 30s starts the slow decline. For some people this will just get to “pretty forgetful, senior moments” and then they die. For others not so lucky they get dementia and have a truly tragic end of days.
But at the same time I do think a sense of optimism is important. I just think it’s important to be rational and realistic about this. Radical acceptance helps here. I can’t get back youth or time lost or whatever, so no sense getting too distraught over it. This applies to youth as well, who may not deal with any of the above but often have their own problems that cloud the potential positives in their life. Anyone can lose their sense of joy and everyone has shit going on. Maybe for them it’s more existential dread, the crushing weight of finding direction, etc. The shift to optimism is that I remember despite the ugliness of reality there are still good times to be had, even if my neck hurts the whole time
Where you still living at home at 22?
I had my moments of “wow, adulthood is shit” but I’m trying to change that.
The best part is yet to come: you’ll get sick and then you’ll die. Alone. In the rain.
Like tears in the rain…
Honestly, being an adult is pretty similar to being a kid, except you have more freedom. I still have to spend 8 hours a day doing something I don’t particularly love, except on weekends where I get 2 days of free time. I have to take the results of what I’ve done all day and turn them in to other people (homework = bills), but there’s a little leftover for fun time/stuff.
Here’s the big difference, and why nobody can ever convince me that childhood is superior to adulthood - if I decide to make bad choices and have ice cream for dinner, or stay up until 2am on a weeknight, nobody is going to say shit.
The freedom of adulthood that allows ME to decide if I want to make a choice I know will hurt me later is the best part. IDGAF what anyone says, sometimes I want pancakes and ice cream for dinner.
I feel like life is shit in general, regardless of age. The reason youthfulness seems better to me is the lack of understanding how the world really works. Joy can be had at any age though, I find more joy today than I did as a kid. I’m 42 and just got back from the skate rink with my daughter and wife and we all had huge smiles and fun the whole time. There’s always moments of shit but also of happiness. What you focus on determines how you feel IME.
My childhood was trash. My life has only gotten better as time goes by
I’m older than most here and I lead a mostly good life. I think the saying is mainly regarding death. In youth, you don’t experience as much of it, but as you age, more and more people pass around you until it’s you, alone.
The realization that life is one day at a time wether you like it our not is a heavy one.
My adult niece and I had a convo years ago when she was still in high school. I told her that she was in the most challenging part of life and that in a few years, when she turned 18, it would start getting better with autonomy. I don’t know if it helped her during a challenging time, but I hope it validated her struggles and gave her something to look forward to because being a teenager in school is the worst.
I have more than a half century and keep waiting to feel jaded, but wake up happy every day, am delighted by lizards running around, and the sky and clouds, the escalator that a shopping cart can ride up makes me happy.
I didn’t have a particularly happy childhood, a sort of awful teenagerhood, but adulthood suits me much better. Pay for work? Hell yeah. Make what I want for supper? Fantastic. Love having a family, and so far have also been happy seeing them grow up and move out too. I have enjoyed being a grownup, it’s delightful. I happily traded lack of control for responsibility and it’s a better deal.
That quote from everything everywhere all at once really got me. Kindness is how I fight. In a world of hardship and bravado being jolly and soft is my act of rebellion.
This would have sounded like absolute woo-ey bullshit to me a few years ago. Until I worked at a place that turned openly hostile toward me. On a work trip, I realized quite literally:
“If I’m smiling, those people who care about me will be happy I’m happy. And those people who hate me will be PISSED I’m happy.”
It’s perfect. It really is the ultimate “fuck you” rebellion, as silly as it may sound.
The best way to piss off your haters is to live a happy life.
I’m 35. I’ve had some tough times. I’ve struggled and I’m sure I’ll struggle again at some point, but aside from politics and covid, I’ve been in a sort of golden age for like six years, and things have been getting better throughout. There have been some shitty spots, but it’s been joyful in general. There was a time about ten years ago that I truly thought about giving up for good, and I’m really glad that I didn’t. I never thought I’d have so much to live for; I didn’t even think I deserved a shot at it.
Work hard (but also rest), stay curious, and tell jokes. Joy is possible, but you may need to be the one to provide it, but it pays dividends.
