[hc-taway]

> As if I had left a traumatic situation, I vividly remember enjoying a lot finally having time for myself after work the first few years after I dropped out of high school. I had to put real effort 8 hours a day, then nothing else was expected of me.

Same. I slacked a lot in high school (in hindsight, I'd have gone actually-nuts otherwise) but it was still by far the hardest consistent work I've ever done, largely due to the sheer amount of time it took and the constant, overlapping, usually-very-short ("due tomorrow") deadlines. College was a vacation. Work is easy.

High school did little to prepare me for "how the real world works" (always the excuse for deadlines and requirements and such in school) but did harm me psychologically in ways that took more than a decade to get over—and I wasn't even bullied or anything like that, it was mostly just the strict schedule, extreme lack of freedom (asking to go to the bathroom, stuff like that), and crazy workload.