My years in middle and high school were rough for a lot of reasons. The last thing I needed were adults telling me “these are the best days of your life!”. That was the most demoralizing thing I could have imagined back then.
Once I was 18 and in control of my life, things got so much better. There have been different chapters, but they’ve all been good or at least memorable in their own way.
What I would (and have) told kids who are clearly having a rough time is that things can and will get better. When you’re a kid, and bad situations that are entirely out of your control to change are happening, life can be miserable. Eventually you get some agency, and that goes a long way. Sometimes as an adult, things come and happen too, but telling a kid who is currently miserable to look forward to something better is a lot more helpful. Barring some outside tragedy, life as an adult is much less grinding than being a kid shaped cog.
Yeah, high school is some of the worst times in my life. If my kid complained, I wouldn’t say “it only gets worse,” I’d say “this is a rough time, but remember, none of the stuff that is hard is real. It’s all just training. The school stuff is training you for deadlines and heavy workloads. The social stuff is training for personal and professional relationships. Try to think of this as the tutorial for life, where you must do X action to proceed, and maybe it’s hard because it’s new, and it’s frustrating because you don’t realize it’s a tutorial and think “this is the game.” It’s not. It becomes an open-world game after this. It’s harder, but it can be WAY better, and you have a lot more control.”
Thirded. And even when I got control, I had a better time in my late 30s than I did at any time prior to that. I had a lot of absolutely great misadventures in my 20s and I’ll be forever grateful. But in my late 30s I had the wisdom to know what bullshit I could get into and out of, enough money to do it, a body that wasn’t beat to hell just yet, and very few shits to give.
Things started to even out at 40 and have been pretty steady the last couple of years. It’s amazing in a different way.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but if I were giving advice to 15 year old me I would definitely say that the best is yet to come. Just gotta keep your eyes peeled for the opportunity.
I struggled with this as well, having not enjoyed my teenage years that much.
How I coped was to tell myself that people asserting that period X is the best years of your life are people whose lives peaked at that time, and that this won’t be true if I made sure to not have my life peak then.
I’m happy to say that I’ve proven the assertion wrong in my case. It’s been a steady climb upwards, with every year being better than the latter.
I love this sentiment. In my mid 40s I went through a period of “it’s all downhill from here” but I took steps to change my life for the better and I’m living the dream now.
Time is going to win eventually but I’m going to fight it every step of the way and will make damn sure I enjoy the battle.
What steps did you take?
Drugs…
That quote from everything everywhere all at once really got me. Kindness is how I fight. In a world of hardship and bravado being jolly and soft is my act of rebellion.
This would have sounded like absolute woo-ey bullshit to me a few years ago. Until I worked at a place that turned openly hostile toward me. On a work trip, I realized quite literally:
“If I’m smiling, those people who care about me will be happy I’m happy. And those people who hate me will be PISSED I’m happy.”
It’s perfect. It really is the ultimate “fuck you” rebellion, as silly as it may sound.
The best way to piss off your haters is to live a happy life.
As I’ve aged, I’ve become less emotional, period. It works both ways. I don’t have the high of the extreme kids as often, but painful stuff is also less-impactfull.
There’s just not much novelty to experiences anymore, so I just kinda live through them and move on.
A few years ago the woman I absolutely intended to marry and spend my life with fairly suddenly broke it off. If I had been 20 it would have debilitated me, but at 40 it wasn’t the same.
Yeah, it sucked and derailed my future plans, but I also had a Planning and Zoning Commission meeting that night I had to prepare for, so I just kept moving forward and lived my life.
I ended up being upset that I wasn’t really that upset. There was no weeping, hatred, name-calling, etc. It was just a shitty thing that happened.
Yeah, it sucked and derailed my future plans, but I also had a Planning and Zoning Commission meeting that night I had to prepare for
That line made me laugh so hard, cheers!
I think it’s emotional maturity that comes along as you learn to regulate your emotions. Probably some hormonal stuff too that gets figured out as you age.
Yeah this has been an interesting thing I’ve noticed too as I age, I feel very regulated emotionally and even-keeled. I find it quite refreshing
I’m 40 and I think with the strongest faith people who say this kind of things are an absolute toxin.
Yeah, people who peak during highschool are so annoying.
Not my problem they have the ambition of a gerbil.
If you’re going to sit there with a straight face and tell me Lindsay “joy doesn’t exist in the real world” Graham was wrong, I don’t know what I’ll do.
honestly when I was younger it was mostly nicer because you looked forward to having a nice life. Seeing it not come to pass and realize its not going to get better is sorta a downer.
This confuses me. If you grew up in hardship, what made you think that the future was going to be better than the present?
Also, your description sounds overly general. Nobody has a life that consists entirely of nice moments. I’m not sure why or how anyone would ever have expected otherwise.
My young life was not hardship but not a life of excess. Type where I made some homemade toys and such and my father had not completed high school. Thing is at that time there was an idea that if you did well in school you could go on to get a good job that would provide for a family and a decent home and (yes im just old enough) have a pension to retire on. The trajectory was different with the environment pre reagan as it seemed like we were polluting less and cleaning things up. Took awhile to realize just how much they had torn that stuff apart or moved it overseas. Now it feels like you have to be incredibly successful to have the American dream. Paid off house (yes the dream was not to have a lifelong mortgage that you never get out from under) and a rustic summer vacation place (or just yearly nice vacations) is possible if your a doctor or lawyer. Now a two bedroom condo on a mortage you can afford the monthly nut and retirement savings where the math does not look good is doing pretty darn well.
I’ve started going on afternoon walks where I just go around town snooping, smelling flowers, looking at cool bugs, and seeing how long I can walk along the curb. It’s actually been really great.
I remembered how when I was a kid, a square meter of nature held infinite fascination. I could just squat there for hours (RIP being able to hold a squat for more than a minute lol), just like peering into this fractal of wonder.
So yeah, maybe not quite that level, but I’ve been recapturing a bit of that.
Ha! Jokes on you, I’ve never been happy.
I feel like life gets better and better and I’m 40, so…
Outside of tragedies beyond your control, like illness and so on, it’s also a matter of trying to have a fun and good life every day.
Joy isn’t reserved for the young, but it’s sure fucking easier to be joyful when your body hurts less because you’re far less likely to have one or more chronic pain conditions in your youth.
Your heart won’t harden? It might just with atherosclerosis and enough time.
So go enjoy the joy even more now while it’s still easier.
As much as i dont want to be the adult saying this to youth. And i won’t be outwardly cynical enough to actually say it to anyone. It is really funny when i know that’s how i felt in my youth, and i know how i feel in my mid-30s. It’s creeping up on me. Tapping me on the shoulder. Wondering why i am still pretending its not there, and no matter how hard i fight and cling on, i am still falling into the realisation that i can’t be a kid forever.
i am still falling into the
realisationmisconception* that i can’t be a kid forever.You definitely can. I have met plenty of people who preserved this part of themselves. It’s too often outside pressure that makes people abandon it. A few weeks ago my mother berated me for owning a game console as a grown man but it didn’t phase me because the little history I lived through has taught me some lessons. When my father was my age he was working overtime to provide as much as possible for his family. He’d come home tired and stressed and self medicated with booze to somehow keep going. I’d often get a speech about how much he sacrificied for me but here’s the thing, I never asked for it. Did I like living in the big house after we moved from our small rented apartment? Sure, about as much as living in a big apartment complex with a bunch of other kids to play with. What I didn’t like was having a dad who was constantly burned out and angry so I made sure not to live as he did. Recently I took my wife and our dog fossil hunting. We were digging through rocks and mud having a blast and around us were a bunch of kids. Meanwhile their parents were standing in the back complaining there aren’t enough benches to sit on while the kids have fun. I will never get this old. Not in a hundred years. As long as I can hold my hammer I will be right next to those kids digging for paleontological treasure instead of standing in the back with the bitter “grown ups”.
Right right, but that’s totally different from saying that you can’t make today better than yesterday. Nobody ever expected things would stay the same, but that doesn’t mean that they all get worse in every possible way.
Six decades from now, when your health really is failing in every possible way, that’s the time when you’re allowed to say that it only gets worse from here.
In the US, at age 18 you become a debtor.
Somewhere in your 20s or 30s you become a real estate speculator.
Eventually people start owing you money, and then the cycle repeats itself with the next generation.
This system is anti-joy, and I will never accept it into my heart. I will fight it with every ounce of my strength until the day that I die. This is my joy.
I’m 43 and I feel like I’m living in a movie after the credits rolled. It’s joyful when I sleep I guess.
Good Luck kid. Try not to lose that spark.
That’s not how it works, unfortunately.
The longer you are an adult, the more people in your life will die. It’s shitty but that’s how time works.
Sometimes that’s a plus.
