[wheels]

I'd second this. I hated school (and eventually dropped out and went to college a year early), but it was because it on the whole seemed a sham. Finding friends wasn't really a problem.

There are hacks to the process -- there are activities that take a lot of time and brains, but tend to make you "cooler" within the HS world. For me it was creating a rock band with friends.

That experience was huge -- that's where I learned the basics of audio engineering and recording, learned to work effectively in a group, wrote software to organize my collection of guitar music, started learning the basics of music theory and so on. Until I quit my job to work full-time on my startup those experiences were still driving me -- I was working in a company writing pro-audio software.

The thing was, that still made it possible to be "cool" without "wasting time".