When Does High School Stop Being Important?

[John Titor]

I'm going to confess and say that High School did affect me a bit. I have regrets I wished I could have solved like joining more clubs, learn skills early or grow a spine in order to tell certain people to shove it. There's also a bit of a traumatic experience I had where some dumbass bureaucrat somehow deleted a semester off my record forcing me to start all over again; my mom however insists that it's not the school's fault but my fault for being "a worthless slacker".

I know I shouldn't dwell on it so much because college is a much more awesome experience but leaving that incident behind is a lot easier said then done. Unlike Chris, I know I can't rewind time so the only option is to move forward.

 

[Foulmouth]

When you start smoking pot.

 

[pickleniggo]

Immediately following graduation. You shouldn't be sad that your high school days are over, you should be looking toward better things.

 

[AtroposHeart]

I don't do well in academic environments so I LOVED it when I finally got out of school. School was miserable for me, I might get an Associates degree in the future after I learn how to handle my anxiety better, but for now I rather look for a job.

 

[Count groudon]

Dude, I'm in high school and I don't think its important. I just like being around my friends, that's it.

 

[tobacky_vapor]

maybe I'm one of the very few minorities here but for me graduating high school was like an inmate leaving prison after 3 years. This was back in the day before the sick fetishists came on the internet and you became an outcast simply for being just a little bit different. however one thing I had that I got from high school I didn't leave for 2 years was extremely nasty temper (hate to say it I was prone for more than a few fist fights).

technically I stop thinking about high school about a week after I graduated, however I guess with my attitude over others affect it sometimes has on you if you were isolated from others tends to last a little bit longer. Then again once again this is just speculation.mu

 

[Silver]

I hated high school. Well, sort of. I was in the marching band and I also took way more band classes than is probably healthy for anyone, and those were not only the greatest parts of my high school experience (since my best friends nowadays are all people I met in band), but they changed my wish to be a writer into a wish to be a musician, and that's what I'm majoring in now. So, my experience in music in high school influenced the rest of my life, but the actual individual experiences aren't as important.

 

[applecat]

I would say that it stopped being important to me the second I graduated, but the truth is that it wasn't important to me while I was there, either.

 

[Pine Tar]

I saw a post on Facebook from a cousin of mine who talked about his glory days as a kicker for his high school team and I'm reminded of this.

I gotta say that I'm glad that as of right now, I can never look back on any point of my life and say, "Those were the days,". I mean, I'm 23. I just got out of college so therefore, my best years should be WAY ahead of me. I mean, if your best years were the last 4 years of your life when you had to go to school with people in the same neighborhood, you're kind of a loser.

 

[exball]

The nanosecond you touch that diploma.

 

[MirrorNoir]

I had a high school experience that was probably 70% bad and about 30% good. But as time has passed, I find myself mostly fixated on the good times because of nostalgia berries and the fact that I can detach myself away from the bad shit and focus on the good times.

That being said; one moment stands out for me as the moment that I realized I was done with high school. It was senior year/spring 1999 and we were doing the annual awards ceremony assembly for the senior class. It takes up the bulk of the morning of the day and afterwards, while everyone else has to go back to the rest of their morning classes and regular schedule, the seniors get to go to the home ec room for punch and cake before going to lunch and their afternoon classes.

I'm sitting there and there are a lot of us there and I'm sitting across from like three people I had not had any real interaction with since around 5th or 6th grade. It's about a four weeks before graduation and I look around to all sorts of people milling about and I realized something: I'm never going to see 99% of these people ever again.

When I went to the local university, about 10% of my class went there and only about 5% of them actually graduated. I rarely saw them except from a distance on campus and the disconnect was more severe due to the fact that I was the only one of my graduating class going to said college, that lived on campus. Everyone else was commuting back and forth every day.

But back to that after awards "party" in the home ec room. That was when I was "over" high school. In an existential moment when you realize, that the eco-system you lived in for your entire life, a support system that was both good and bad, was going away. Gone. All those social ties that you take for granted, the people who've been in your life both as friends, foes, or "That guy/gal"; the casual acquaintances and people you had superficial friendships with, along with those people who treated you like dogshit and that made you wish horrible things happen to them as a result of their cruelty towards you? Gone. All gone. And the only thing you can do is chin up and move forward, always moving forward because you can't freeze time or change the past.

The only way to describe that moment would be this song:

 

[PipTheAlchemist]

I'm in my 40's, and I still cry myself to sleep everyday over being bullied back in highschool

 

[milk]

Thinking back on the people I know, it would seem most people stop development around high-school age.

 

[McKim's Rolled Roof]

It stops being important when you find out that your grades me absolutely NOTHING. Literally they mean zero. In the US, and more specifically the Commonwealth of PA, which I live in, only requires a student to be present and in attendance for a minimum number of days in order to either pass to the next grade, or to graduate. I learned this when I got out of the public school system, and transfered to a charter school to finish my last 6 months of high school. Grades mean absolutely nothing.

American education is absolute shit

 

[PaleTay]

I wish it always did, it extends into early 20s but not much longer.

Some I miss because I thought we'd always be close friends, others I miss because we always were and time/distance limits that.
I loved the popular kid culture where we'd talk about girls, and do stupid pranks and other nonsense, but also had each other's backs if a fight broke out or someone was going through a rough time. I loved that when I made a dumb joke and someone got offended, an attractive girl would roast them for being offended.

Now, I get called the "nicest guy I've ever met" by most people for acting similarly to how I did growing up, people get much more selfish afterwards but accomplish less.

 

[A Grey Cat]

When you realize it was a stupid time that doesn't mean jack all in life except as an awkward transition from "childhood wonderment" to those awkward and painful pubescence years.

 

[Jason Wynn]

The actual experience doesn’t mean shit. It might have been a nice time in your life sure, but once you graduate, nobody cares that much except for the possible “lol remember when…?” story you and your old friends reminisce about every now and then.

That’s how it was for me when I graduated and moved on to college. College doesn’t mean shit either, but that’s around the first time most kids start gaining more independence, feeling more “grown up” and responsible for the direction their life takes. High school starts to seem trivial around that point.

For me, high school was truly over once the last of my friends from that period in my life started to distance ourselves and drift apart. No big fight, no dramatic breakup, we just slowly started talking and hanging out less and less until we just stopped entirely. We had become much different people in our adulthood than we were as dumbass teens. We had bigger priorities in life, less free time.

 

[Womanhater69]

It never mattered, not when I was 14, not when I reached my twenties. The moment I was out of that place I could not run faster from it.

 

[Retink]

If you're lucky high school stops being important while you're in high school, regardless if you're aiming for something more or just don't care. I had fun in high school and have some good memories of it, but nothing about it defines anything of who I am today and I don't think I ever really had any reason to have an investment in it back then. Then again I dropped out, took a year or so off, got a GED and then went to college.

 

[Red Hood]

It shouldn't matter beyond graduation, but as Bowling for Soup pointed out it's almost a dry run for shit you'll deal with your whole life.

And then when you graduate
You take a look around
And you say hey wait
This is the same as where
I just came from
I thought it was over
Oh that's just great!

The whole damn world
Is just as obsessed
With who's the best dressed
And who's having sex
Who's got the money
Who gets the honeys
Who's kinda cute
And who's just a mess
And you still don't have the right look
And you don't have the right friends
Nothing changes but the faces
The names and the trends
High school never ends!