The golden years

Yeah, it's all relative. It's just incredible how your perspective can change in your lifetime.
- I had an absolutely terrible time in my small underfunded high school due to chronic illness, family tragedy, coming from a poor home, and just generally not having that many friends. I got picked on, I struggled intensely with untreated ADHD and depression, and was just all together miserable.
  But to spite all that, I completely understand what people mean when they say they miss that period of their life, and I'd never seek to make them think they're wrong for feeling that. There's a weird defensiveness about this topic where people seem to feel anyone else having any sort of positive association with that period of time somehow invalidates their own hardships.
  High School is not a good or bad thing. It's just a thing. An experience that was different for everyone. It's okay to leave it at that.
Babies cry because whatever happened was the worst thing they can ever remember happening
- I cry because babies are the worst thing I can ever remember happening.
- Is that why I can’t cry anymore, I’ve seen the worst and experienced the worst? I mean that makes some sense after reading that.
This 100%.
Sure, a kids worst day of their life is probably still a better day than the worst day of an adults life. But it is still the worst day of their life and they are entitled to feel like so.
I fucking hated school. I remember my freshman math teacher would give us packets with work for each day of the week. I would finish my folder of work either Monday or Tuesday and would just sleep. I had an A in that class for my work and my tests.
I failed that class because "participation is half your grade" Get fucked, cunt.
- The good teachers teach because they love it and want to make a positive difference.
  But a large percentage teach because they are miserable cunts who couldn't work anywhere else because adults wouldn't tolerate their bullshit.

I would not switch my current scenario for a scenario where I was back in school. Hard pass. Now is much better.

Yeah, I rather get paid for my time and not be dependant on my parents for everything.
Yeah, there are some things missing from that list, like the homework and bullying. No thanks.
- And the endless testing that sometimes, especially if it's not gone well, feels like your whole future life depends on it. No thanks, I hated that, with work I can just quit if it becomes overwhelming and all-encompassing like that.
- And not having money. If I feel sad now I can go for a drive or ride to clear my mind. Also I have the presence of mind and maturity to introspect what is going on and how best to address it.
  Also if I feel really sad I can always buy another motorbike.
For real, as an undiagnosed ADHD kid school was a hellscape of boredom, frustration, and bullying.
Same for me for college and highschool experience. School from 7am-3pm, and then work from 4pm-9pm and 10 hour shifts on Sat and Sunday, from age 14 until I graduated college.
Whenever I say I hated school, people always said it was my own fault for not getting more involved with more extracurricular activities. Those people weren't trying to pay bills while making 4.25 an hour.
That's not what this is about at all. You're missing the entire point.
The only thing being discussed is the amount of time you had to yourself with a school schedule, versus how little time you have to yourself on a work schedule. That's it.
They're not talking about literally being back in school. They're not talking about bullying, homework, taking classes etc. They're not talking about not having money or being dependent on your parents. They're not talking about Mr Jones from Biology who wouldn't stop shouting at kids.
Reading comprehension, however, is something that's worth remembering from those days.
- The only thing being discussed is the amount of time you had to yourself with a school schedule, versus how little time you have to yourself on a work schedule. That's it.
  I have so much more free time now than I did in school. This post is ignoring the existence of homework and extra curricular activities that your parents sign you up for.
- But they are talking about seeing their friends every day? So only the good things about school then eh?

The answer isn't nostalgia for school. The answer is to improve work with the "perceived" benefits of school. 30-hour work weeks, 6 weeks paid vacation, paid holidays including bank holidays, occasional half days after the end of a big project, chatting with coworkers that aren't stressed out of their mind and actually given the mental space to be chill with you.

That's the real dream.

We just have to deal with this lizard infestation first.
- We just have to wait for the climate to cool down...oh, shit.

Ugh, no thank you, school was like a shitty job you can't quit, physical violence is brushed off and your future is held hostage by underpaid govenment workers who either don't care about you or actively hate your guts. I would sooner die than return to that time and place.

For me, school before college was garbage. Stuck being babysat for hours and hours every day with classmates I hated, doing extremely boring remedial work.
Once I got to college I had a lot of fun. I could learn more of what I wanted to and only had to spend a few hours a week in the classroom.
its really not so much school as your parents keeping a roof over your head and food in your stomach. On top of it in my time minimum wage was pretty high when you could get a dozen eggs for 29 or even 19 cents for a dozen on sale. Did not take much part time work to pay for vidoe games, movies, eating out, etc.
- Video games existed when eggs were 29 cents? I grew up with NES and the games were $40. $90+ in today's dollars. Of course money was much easier to get in those days, for adults.
  My first job paid $5.15 an hour. So did my second and third job. Miserable hell. Then I went to college and learned you could just say fuck the rules I'm going to bang girls and do drugs. I failed out by the way.
  Kids, there are other places to get sex friends and drugs. It gets better. Don't bother with college unless you want to take it incredibly seriously. Learn a trade instead to make the bucks without the debt.
Yeah but then your health insurance is tied to your job. That's physical violence too.
- As bad as health insurance being tied to my job, it's not the same as knowing somebody could physically assault me at any time in front of the authorities and be told they just earned themself a week's vacation and nothing else.

Yeah, no. Worklife is much easier. No need to worry about tests and homework and no need to sit in what's basically an office the whole day.

To be honest, if I knew what I know now, I wouldn't give a fuck about school tests.
- Indeed, mainly because now you know for certain that with limited effort you're actually going to do fine.
Sitting in the same spot is fine with me. What bothered me from school was walking 10 minutes to the other classroom at the other side of the building that you needed to reach in 5min. Or worse when you have gym and a class directly after. No time to cool down, quickly redress and to the class.
- Yeah, that was disgusting. Even when they tried, school had a way of taking away dignity that is downright illegal in the adult world.
What do you even do?
- Plumbing

I'm a college graduate with a successful career in my field of study. The hardest part of getting here was graduating college. To this day, I have never had a nightmare about college or work; but I still get them about high school.

At work, I have 1 boss. In highschool, I had 6 bosses. At work, my boss tells me what to peioritize. If I have multiple things to do, it is their job to tell me what to let slide. If we are behind schedule, it is management's fault, and they arrange an appropriate responce. Timelines are typically just guesses that are missed, and true deadlines are rare. In highschool, all of my bosses simply give me work, and I am responsible for getting it all done. All work is on a strict deadline, and slipping is highly penalized.

At work, I can simply do the work, and get occasional guidance where appropriate. In school, every piece of work I do is combed through for errors and reduced to a cold score.

As an adult, I would not put up with half the crap we make students go through as a matter of course.

9 to 3

My bus came at 6:40 am

Mine came at 6:20. Day started at 7:10 and we got let out at 2:10. But didn't get home until closer to 3. A 9 hour day not including after school practice.
I don't know where these 6 hour school days are, but I didn't get them.
- Jesus man how old are you?
You can almost hear the country kids crying about how early they wake up.
- They wake me with their lamenting.

What about the endless work you had to take home with you to finish, with some teachers even disallowing finishing it in class, having to deal with bullies and other idiots, being told you need to get laid and that it would change your life, finding out together with someone in the same position that it really doesn't change anything and you just have to be a special type of stupid to think that, resolving stuff with bullies only to start getting bullied by teachers over your health issues, and probably so much more that has been buried as a defense mechanism.

Skill issue
Sounds like it built character. Hope you thanked those teachers!
- I thanked one teacher by using the system administrator's login to delete all her files like tests and assignments to print out. Bugger just signed in right next to me in one of the computer labs with two finger typing.

Nope. I would take my worst days as a working adult over my best days as a minor in school.

Yeah, no shit. If my coworker tries to bully me, I have him fired. If he tries to fight me, I have him arrested. If my boss (I have one, instead of 7) is an asshole to me, I put out my resume.
There's a lot of advantages to school if you're a lazy bastard who just wants life to hand you things on a silver platter and are willing to pay the price of freedom, but there's also a lot of negatives.

The homework tho. It was the homework that hurt.

Gimme that homework now. I'll absolutely crush those essays I used to have so much trouble with.
And the exams.
- They really need to be lower stakes. Year-end exams just cover too much material for failure to be no big deal. Should be that failing a test requires a few days of review to catch up on the parts you didn't know, and then you're good.
Homework should be illegal.
- Homework is really helpful didactically, but it should be coordinated throughout the entire school to avoid overlapping crunch time and limited to 30-40 hours per week of combined class time and homework time total depending on age.
Math homework was the worst for me because I'm practically math-illiterate. I was only required to take one math class for college and there was no homework. It was so wonderful.
The professor was a funny guy. He always told us not to study on the weekends because if we studied too much, our brains would explode and someone would have to clean it up.
The homework was the worst part. My school was 7 hours in class every day, which wouldn't be bad, but I'd usually have at least an hour of homework a night, some nights it would be like 3 or 4 hours, and that doesn't count weekend homework, which could be several hours. I've had whole weekends shot due to homework. I think I spent more time with high school than I do with work.

I think it's safe to say that most Lemmy users probably had a shit time in high school lmao

Easily the worst part of my life.
Elementary and middle school were kind of shit too.
I had an awesome high school experience. Same in university, but with bonus independence.
Why? I had no major issues in school. Made many friends, fell in love and had a broken heart, just regular stuff haha. Good times

If you're a social and relatively smart person (or just take the minimum requirements) high school is probably really fun and easy. If you aren't social high school is either a job or a prison.

If you liked high school more than adult life then you probably peaked in high school.

Hmm I liked high school more but I don't think I peaked there. It was just an easy stress free life with the thought of a bright future
As a teenager, I did not like high school. As an adult, I do not like adult life. What does this mean?
- You peaked in utero
High school was easy, but so much busy work. Homework every night? Wtf. Not that it was hard, but, like, I'm not doing that shit
- Lmao. You did homework for high school?

no weekends

9 to 3

Did OP go to like rich people fake school? Homework took up half your out-of-school time and I had to wake up before 6:30.

Here in Romania, it's 8-14 for primary and 8-16 for secondary. 8-15 or 9-16 is pretty standard for the UK. Those both include 1 hour lunch breaks.
There's also been a push here in the EU to move to later start times for children's mental health reasons, especially for teens. I don't think it's gotten a lot of traction though.
Googling around, looks like 9-15 is standard for Australia.
I suffered very badly because of the school times and the lack of sleep triggered manic episodes for me. Yes, getting up at 5:30 and trying to go to school on less than 3 hours every day wrecked my health and mental health.
9 to 3 would have been a God send.
I went to public school, described my experience + I did sports on weekends.
9 to 3:30 in India, and weekends only if an unexpected holiday was declared (for example, due to rain). But we had an hour or two of homework every day.

Nah I can do whatever I want now

Yeah. The people who long for the freedom of school life sure fucked something up in their adult life.
- I mean I fucked something up as well, but it will get better ;)

Depending on the environment you grew up in this isn't necessarily the case, high school and college particularly can be very high pressure and consume tons of time when you're not actively "at school". The pressure in college was so much higher than in a real job for me. Weekends used to be for homework and studying only. Weekdays after 5? Also homework. The stress and self inflicted pressure before finals and exams which determine 20%+ of your grade was unreal. Summers were for internships and those weekends were nice. But still not as nice as doing the same thing and getting paid 4x as much.

Yep, I work hard all day but get to put it away once I clock out. Not too mention I get paid for it.

You’d have to pay me way more money to go back to school.

I maintain the hardest I’ve ever worked was at school.

And you don’t even get paid!

"Education is your pay!"
I cringe even just saying that. It's all I ever heard growing up.
In fact, you pay them tuition fee 😱

I actually personally prefer my current work life over school. WFH, no studying after hours, no exams, no pressure to pass/graduate. Just do my job and forget about it when I log off. Granted there is still stress from the job, but it's more about meeting deadlines for something I know how to do. I do take training and certification exams from time to time (which I hate because it feels like school). YMMV depending on your job obviously.

9 to 3? I used to do 7 to 4, without any money for lunch.

Yeah wth I had to wake up at 6 every day which was basically torture for soft, teenager me.
Though still, enviable compared to having to wake up at 6 and keep your kids alive all day. I kinda miss having fun.

Yeah, but have you considered that you don't get paid to go to school?

Nostalgia is a very strong thought, but being a grown-up means that sadly, there is a lot of things in life you'll have to give up because of money and responsibilities.

But life is short, there is no reason to not live your dreams and enjoy life and be a kid again once in a while. Do something crazy, say something stupid, go see your friends every day not because you have to, but because you want to, have fun again.

But consider: we could make it less shit to be an adult (on average)
- I think you guys are finally starting to get the point of the movie. :)

You didn't realize? It seemed to me that the adults wouldn't SHUT UP about how oh you better enjoy this life while you got it because once you grow up life is going to suck!

which ironically made it worse

I had to wake up at 6 am in order to arrive at 7:30, didn't get out until 3 pm. It was basically a full time job with horrible hours and unpaid overtime.

Nah, man. fuck school

When I was in school, a bully punch me in the face and laughed about it. I didn’t fight back, I just walked away. We were both suspended. We both came back to school. They kept bullying me.

If this happened at work, the offender would have been fired on the spot.

Being an adult can suck, but we should stop telling kids how amazing they have it and how it gets so much worse being an adult. Some kids really do have it bad.

If I had known that life got better after school, maybe I wouldn’t have been so damned depressed at the age of 13.

Yeah, somebody's wearing rose colored glasses. High school was fucking miserable. My junior and senior years I had no less than two hours of homework every night on average from the AP courses I was taking, on top of working a part time job every weekend and all summer to pay for the car I was driving. I never fit in because everyone else was talking about some pop culture, music or TV I had no time for because I was completely occupied.

My best years were in college. All that unstructured time and autonomy over my bodily functions rocked. Shame it came with a $50K pricetag I'll never pay off.

Your experience isn't universal either, of course.
- That's fair.

Wait you guys only got 6 weeks off for summer?? Summer break was always from mid-June to September for me, about 10 weeks...

Heck I took 5 weeks off for summer now and still got two weeks of paid vacay left.
- We are talking about school here dude

Nah, shit fucking sucked and I think it's the source of most of my physical and psychological trauma.

Grass is always greener

It was the dream as long as you saw through the bullshit that is homework and just ignored it.

In highschool my average day was 6 hours of school, 1 hour commuting, 5 hours of homework, and then cutting into my sleep to have some brief time to play videogames and argue with people on the internet. It seriously fucked me up.
- Yeah I wouldn't finish homework till like 8:30 PM, a lot of the time I just didn't have the time to finish it.. Homework is trash!
Yea, if I couldn't get it all done during my study period it wasn't happening. Sorry math teachers I didn't need to do 100 problems a night to learn that shit

Friends in school? So you were one of those people.

school sucked though?

7:45am start time sucks ass. no one in their right mind likes being up that early. i was NEVER well rested, it made my anxiety and social anxiety even worse, making me even more alienated from my peers
tons and tons of busywork and stress and deadlines while getting nothing in return for it. at least with a job you get paid
when i started high school they installed these awful internet filters that didn't let you access youtube, or 'forums', or 'sports', or anything potentially interesting, fun, or engaging. half the time it'd block legitimate lesson plans as well. (before anyone says 'you should be paying attention in class' in many classes and obv study hall we had free time to work on assignments)

It wasn't. School sucked. Fuck school.

This is partly why I am almost middle age and working seasonally. It's more like 10 weeks off but I haven't worked full time year round since 2009 and it is really nice. My time off is in the winter tho.

Annnnnd hours of homework. Still better than work but still.

RIGHT???????

Summer felt endless back then. Now years go by in a blink of an eye.

And no money at hand... So no freedom. Not a great way to live

I don’t get bullied now

Friends?

Nerd

I still prefer adulthood. No job, no money, living with your parents, I can't go back to that.

Never. People who say that are just the people who made wrong decisions later life. Maybe, maybe, the fact that they had fun at school affects what decisions they make later.

And don't get me wrong. I don't think I mastered in life and most importantly I'm not happy that I didn't have fun at school. I just remember it as the most stressful period of my life and I wouldn't want to experience it ever again.

For most people, childhood tends to be a time before they had the full burden of adult responsibilities. They had chores to do around the house, but typically, they were not managing the house hold budget. Long term decisions were more about what classes to take next year or what type of major will I want to pursue. They were not thinking how the financial and lifestyle decisions they were making would affect them during the later parts of their lives.
- Yeah I think I had ticked all the boxes you mention here about what childhood is not for most people

Peaked at high-school admission

Probably why school setting anime is very common. Where you make friends and find rivals

It's set in school because it's targeted towards people who are in school 😅
- Partially, but plenty of anime targeted at adults are also set in high school. Because japan romanticizes high school as, unless you go to university after, it is the last time before retirement where you aren't stuck in their hellish (but at least slowly improving) working conditions.
  Very similar to the tweet in the OP really.
  Personally even with the relative lack of free time i prefer working over being in uni, and high school was hell on earth that I only managed to cope with through video game addiction.

I miss playing sports and fucking around. It's hard to organize lacrosse with 6 people in your 30s with kids :(

You could always make friends with people who don’t have kids, and if you have kids, well IMO you don’t really get to complain that kids affect your independence and time.

You're not exactly selling adulthood to the young readers here...

Excellent. Adulthood sucks a lot, avoid it if at all possible.
There is the having money part.
- Not necessarily, most people probably have less money than when they were at school if you think about it

I enjoyed high school. I did well in high school. My father was never around And my mother lived 900 miles away but I still had everything I needed so I had immense freedom compared to that of my peers.

I still have lots of friends from high school over 20 years later, And because of moving around the country a lot before high school I had to make most of those friends in high school. I would never go back to the way things were. I don't mind having a job if it means I get to choose what's in the fridge, what I get to build and where I get to build it.

Also what high school did you go to that it was 9:00 to 3:00? I went to 16 different schools in five states and I've never seen a school day that short. High school for me started at 7:00 which meant I had to get up at 6:00 and it didn't get out until almost 4:00 And if you had any extracurricular activities you probably didn't see sunlight a good portion of the year.

What school started at 9 mine was 8 on the dot. Also you only got 6 weeks we got 10. Did this person even go to school or is this the matrix pretending to be a human again.

8??? My highschool started at 7:15???
- Dang 7:15 that's crazy early. Did it end at like 1 or something.

Yeah... For sure... Let's say I currently don't have it this way. School from 8 to 6, come back home, do homework, repeat 5 days/week. Weekends: I have to work at my job and do my homework = less than 1 day of actual break. I can honestly say, I can't wait to finish school so I can have my evenings and weekends without having to worry about 7 courses until I have kids that will take those away from me. But that's a later me problem.

Wisdom comes with age.

School now is 8 to 6 or 8 to 4, depending on if your parents work

A kid wanting to grow up fast and an adult wanting to be kid for having less responsibilities.

Oh yes, the 8 hours of those 180 days I wasn't the explicit property of my parents, and was instead the explicit property of the school system.

Truly those are the golden years /s

Nostalgia for not having to pay bills at the expense of personal freedom and an ability to choose is an easy way for me to sus out whether someone is a fascist or not.

Are you seriously calling this person a fascist simply for looking back on their childhood with fondness?
- If you look back on being enslaved fondly, perhaps you should reconsider your ethos.
That is genuinely one of the most deranged comments I've seen on here, so congrats, I guess
- Is it so deranged?
  I'd rather be living paycheck to paycheck, uncertain of my next meal, but able to think my own thoughts and live my own life, than to EVER go back to being a slave for someone simply because they were related to me.
What? Could you explain the fascism connection?
- If you say you'd rather go back to being told when to wake up, go to bed, when to eat, what to eat, what you can and can't say, what you can and can't believe, what clothes you can and can't wear, what haircut you have to have, what you can watch, when and where you could go, being required to be monitored, being under non-stop workload, and even what you're supposed to be when you're an adult...
  You're a fascist and you want your kids to believe this is freedom.
  This is textbook slavery. Sure, all your expenses and care are covered. But you also don't have to worry about thinking either, they do that for you too.