I know it's not exactly the point of the post but I want to go on a tangent and note that it's 100% valid for kids to complain about school even if you have it harder. You should take their feelings seriously because their feelings are just as real to them as you hating your job is to you. When a toddler spills their juice and starts crying, those feelings are just as intense as yours, and you should respond accordingly instead of thinking "don't they know about the wars in the middle east?"

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

9 to 3

My bus came at 6:40 am

The homework tho. It was the homework that hurt.

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

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.

Nah I can do whatever I want now

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

Nah, man. fuck school

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.

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.

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

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

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

Grass is always greener

Sounds like she peaked in school.