[ryandrake]

> Adult life is far easier than high school. High school is insane. Like it's an actually-crazy thing to subject kids to.

This is probably not universally true. It certainly matches my life experience, but I have to admit that a life that gets easier and easier as time goes on is something that relatively few privileged people experience.

For me, school was a prison full of torturing peers, strict teachers with no flexibility, and ultra-high-stakes tests that to a large extent determined your future. Whereas work is a paradise and a breeze in comparison. And as life goes on, I make more money, can optimize my way further and further up Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and things get better and better. This is an ultra privileged scenario though, and we have to admit that.

For many (most?) people, school was lower stakes and less pressure. You fail a test? No problem. You get a B or C on your report card? Not the end of the world. You don't get into Harvard? I wasn't trying anyway... Then you start adulting, and the pressure is on! You gotta gets some kind of job now and make some money every week so you can avoid homelessness and starvation. You've got a boss on your ass and threatening to fire you (or worse) every day. Your family can't help you anymore, and you're on your own to figure out the world. I know a lot of people who just can't deal with adulthood and hate it, and wish they were back in high school.

[pixl97]

>school was a prison full of torturing peers,

This can be quite true. My mother worked in the justice system and had kept track of the students in and around my grade. A significant portion of them ended up incarcerated a short few years after graduation. Being under 18 had protected them somewhat from the bullshit they had pulled in school.

[rockercoaster]

There's perhaps more pressure in a way because you're now responsible for fixing any problems, but kids are exposed to the exact same risks of adult life and employment via their parents, plus some extra ones that adults aren't subject to (parents can be abusive, for one thing—adults can abuse other adults in their household, but getting out is a lot easier for an adult than a kid, especially young kids).

That's one factor that's lower-pressure (sort-of... plenty of kids end up working to help support the household, in addition to school) but still offering up similar risk & worries, on one side, and then all the bad stuff of high school and of not yet having the freedom of an adult on the other side, increasing pressure. I still think in the typical case, being a high schooler's a ton worse.

Add to this that the pressure on you in high school is in part to perform well so you don't fail at adult life. That adult life pressure, and the concerns about e.g. lack of employability or homelessness, are is already present in high school. The harm is in the future, but the pressure is already there.

Though, yes, one absolutely can "fail" badly at adult life. I don't mean to suggest it's entirely easy street. It's just a whole lot less unpleasant or difficult on average than high school.

I mean, truly, if adult life were anywhere near as harsh as high school, assuming I hadn't offed myself, I'd definitely have "failed" by now and be living on the street or something. Expectations are just... comically low, most of the time, not much-higher as so many suggested when I was in school, so it's pretty easy to do alright provided you don't get hit by bad luck (which exact same bad luck potential, again, high schoolers are exposed to via their parents anyway).

[svachalek]

Are you a young adult who is not responsible for anyone but themselves, perhaps? Many adults have to take care of children or their own parents, manage teams, work jobs with serious consequences on other people's lives, deal with having cancer, etc. High school was tough in its own way but I think mostly due to everyone being young and having no life skills yet.

[rockercoaster]

Solidly in middle age, three kids, plenty of other problems.

Still way easier than high school.

If next week the world went topsy-turvy and providing for my kids now (for some reason) depended on my attending and doing tolerably well at high school for the remaining decade or so that my kids are at home, no other options, but also I'm somehow relieved from all the hard parts of taking care of them and such... frankly, I dunno if I'd make it. High school was incredibly stressful (even after I threw myself a life line and deliberately stopped giving as much of a fuck about grades) and, quite literally, depressing, as in it gave me seasonal depression that took most of my 20s to stop cycling through, and recurring nightmares that didn't end until my early 30s, and I wasn't even bullied or anything. The whole institution's a mental-health catastrophe in a way that nothing I've seen in adult life compares to (perhaps prison does, I, fortunately, am not in a position to compare them)

(Separately, yes, I'm sure—very sure, having seen it up close enough times now—that old age health problems and the process of dying are going to be extremely, perhaps incomparably, bad, but I don't think that's what people were talking about when they said schools had to be shitty in order to prepare me for even-shittier adult life, I think they meant work and paying bills and parent-teacher conferences and stuff)