this is the one that just sent me. Sure life gets hard in ways teens don't understand but high school is genuinely hard and shitty for a variety of reasons for a lot of people! How do you not remember!
I just thank god every day that the internet, much less social media, did not exist when I was in middle/high school. At least I got to escape the mean girls when I went home at the end of the day.
It is awful for lots of kids. From being left out to absolutely hateful comments left anonymously or from untraceable accounts … I feel terrible that so many kids deal with this shit.
It's interesting, though, that my thoughts go the opposite way: that maybe I would've felt less isolated and alone if I'd been able to connect with other weirdos back then.
I just don't know. I know there's a lot of crap kids deal with online. I just don't know if it's *all* crap.
Eh, I disagree. I had a quiet but dull suburban childhood, and when I discovered BBS's (dialling in with an acoustically coupled telephone-based modem), it transformed my life. The idea that there were other weirdos out there like me? Access to today's internet would have been amazing.
fair! entirely fair! I have been caught posting without really thinking it through! (though I had some pretty nasty high school/jr high situations, a result of moving around way too much, and I don't know that the socials would have helped)
I can't speak to your situation at all, but a lot of recent research seems to be showing that marginalized kids' mental health benefit greatly from social media by providing a supportive stable network of like-minded people. (It also shows a small percentage having negative effects.)
Dont tell them, but discord and tumblr are also social media. Heck, I met one of my best friends almost 25 years ago on the old Television Without Pity forums.
They define social media as facebook/insta/twitter/tiktok/mastodon ("tumblr is blogging, mom").
I've never seen either of them actually use a server on discord. They use it strictly as a direct text platform, to the point that they don't like using texts on their phones, they use discord for that.
I've had more than a few years that were by all objective standards much worse than high school was for me, and I'd absolutely re-do two of those years for any one year of high school.
We moved when I was in the middle of high school. If social media had been around, I would have been able to keep up with my old friends. Don’t know if that would have improved the experience since I couldn’t join them. 🤷🏼♂️
My son is preparing to graduate. His awards ceremony featured a scholarship as a memorial to someone I graduated with. Nostalgia is hitting me hard, but I realized I'd never want to try to do it over because I was miserable for the same reasons as you but also ended up finding a life I'm happy with.
High school is when a lot of mental illnesses emerge and people are usually least equipped to deal with them! You don't usually have control over where you live! You probably aren't earning a good income which limits your choices. So many things!
You spend eight hours a day in a confined space next to twenty to thirty other people in exactly the same situation, and no one has anything approaching the capacity for adult emotional self-regulation!*
*maybe one person in the room. MAYBE.
Ah yes, high school, that easy part of life where every thing I did was dictated by different authorities who had conflicting instructions, and where every action I took was used to assess my value and worthiness to attend a university.
AND girls didn't like me.
it’s crazy to me. people my age complaining about how crappy teenagers are these days and it’s all I cannot to reply with “remember the guy that burned down the HS library in 1993???”
The irony is 50+aged people with too much time on their hands posting thoughtless, immature cruelties for clout targeting kids just trying to survive with their self-esteem in tact.
I was physically and emotionally attacked nearly every day at high school, and nearly murdered (by being pushed over a bridge) and not a single one of the people who openly did this in front of school officials was ever punished at all. High school scarred me.
one thing i thought about a lot as a youth and try to remember as an adult is that your life is only what you experience while you’re living it
just because there’s heavier responsibilities and consequences attached doesn’t make paying bills or struggling at work feel more stressful or “important”
only when meeting my classmates 20 years later did it twig how much psychological pressure our daily interactions had put us under
it was so much easier to chat to everyone, cos there was nothing at stake
and i really enjoyed school too, i was always on good terms with most people and yet
was it an easier life in terms of the number of things i had to care about and the "output" i had to produce? absolutely
did it make any difference to the amount of stress, pressure and difficulty i felt? no, it meant fuck all
that's the whole point, if it feels hard, it is hard
High school was one of the worst periods of my life. Only the most privileged and lucky person in the world thinks this way. I was taking care of babies, tending to sick elders, cleaning houses, working two jobs, being bullied, being abused—scared, exhausted, no control over my own life whatsoever.
Hahaha. Like my life has only improved by leaps and bounds since I got out of high school. Even with my 60s approaching and the physical ailments of aging I would not go back to being a teenager. I'd rather ride out kidney stones without painkillers.
Its the diminishing of a group just to boost their own ego that gets me
I don't care if someone wants to puff up themselves - but not at someone else's expense who is just starting out
same with someone just starting out with big dreams who puts down anyone who didn't achieve those dreams
I'm pretty sure the only thing that kept me alive through high school was having a good sense of how full of shit the people who said this kind of shit really were.
As somebody who *thoroughly hated* every last tick of the clock in high school, let me point out that this meme would deserve to get immediately pulped by a book publisher if it was on paper.
In high school, I got good grades, had friends, dated some nice girls, had a good home life without financial problems, and remember it as some of the most stressful and unhappy times of my life. Adolescence is like that because everything is changing and you don’t know what you’re doing or why.
