High School Never Ends
Whatever happened to Bowling for Soup?
Does high school never end?
Over at The Wonderland Rules, Rollins has written a short essay on high school social theory. Partly this is in response to Curtis Yarvin’s badly named “Tolkien system of social roles”1, but the Rollins theory itself is surprisingly strong in its simplicity. Rollins quickly sketches out a set of intersecting sets of interests, social and economic classes and personality types of high school students, and how they interact intuitively recognizable to most people who have gone through American public schools. One finds themselves nodding along with his descriptions, and the intersectionality of it it all.
To understand the post-high school world then,
What you have to realize is that most people never leave high school. In the overwhelming majority of cases, people just stay where they were, socially. They find a new clique that looks a lot like the old one, or in many cases, stay with the actual friends they made in high school. Growth is rare. It requires real motivation, because it is incredibly energy-intensive. It also requires method, and method is rarely taught.
Again, it feels right. It is hard to argue that adult life isn’t depressingly like high school, right down to the stupid status politics, gossipy nonsense, meaningless conflicts and power plays, persistent sense of alienation and not fitting in, and general unpleasantness.
The observation that high school never ends has been around for a while. The eponymous Bowling for Soup song released in 2006, but the statement goes back a fair bit; I believe I heard people complaining about it in the mid 90’s at least.
Yet, I don’t think it goes much farther back than that. I can’t be sure of course, but one doesn’t seem to hear that sentiment from the older crowd. Possibly later period Boomers (born in the 50’s) are the first to start saying it. In any case, you certainly don’t read “apprenticeship never ends!” in older works, or anything along the lines of “yea, high school sucks, but get used to it, because that’s what the next 50-60 years of life are like” in much of anyone’s writing. If Beverly Cleary were to write “Ramona Quimby, Age 48” it probably wouldn’t reflect Ramona dealing with the same issues as she did 30-40 years prior.
So, why is adulthood basically high school with a mortgage?
That strikes me as an under appreciated question. Why should 4 years of public schooling2 so effectively capture the next 50 years of your life? That seems like a very strange coincidence, considering the vast differences in circumstances in high school students and adults.
One answer is that petty social politics is simply the human experience. Humans are prone to form cliques, jostle for status within those cliques, and basically engage in all the nastiness a neurotic ape terrified of losing their place in the troop can devise. High school is simply the first time in our lives where we are adult enough to start engaging in all the standard adult behaviors, like back stabbing our friends. We never advance past high school behavior because there is no where to advance to.
Another popular answer is that the people you know in high school are the same people you knew as an elementary school kid, and the same people you know as an adult. You all are growing and changing, but still see each other as basically the same people because you are all growing together. You simply don’t notice the change. Not many adults like hanging out with random high schoolers for any length of time3, having very little in common with them4, and this suggests that people do grow up and change quite a bit from high school to full blown adulthood, and thus high school ends. The same sorts of thing bother us, all the petty nastiness, but really what we are doing is calling every situation we don’t like “high school” because high school was our first really unpleasant social time. If we had spent those four years in obligatory military service instead of school we would all be saying “Conscription never ends.” What we should be saying is that life sucks, then you die.
Both of these proposed answers are pretty compelling, but both have flaws, and, importantly, they seem mutually exclusive while feeling true. This is a good thing, if we consider them together. As Robin Hanson says, we should put all the facts out on the table and try to explain them as a whole. As Doctor Hammer says, when some things both seem true but apparently disagree, use them to triangulate truth; you just need to figure out a way they can both be true, or at least observationally equivalent to the truth, and work from there.
Yes, it is possible Dr. Hanson is more concise than I am, but I have better hair.
So to start with, what are the problems with the “humans are just teenagers forever” theory? Well, for starters, not every aspect of adult life is some version of high school. The workplace often is, sure, but some workplaces seem to avoid that problem entirely, and many other adult endeavors don’t seem to share that problem. Further, high school never ending seems like a somewhat modern issue. So if the high school drama nonsense is to be part of human nature, it can’t be the only part, because many times life isn’t like that, we recognize the difference, and then complain.
A similar issue tangles up the “adulthood isn’t just like high school because adults are not like teenagers, but adulthood sucks for similar generalized reasons” theory. Not every part of adulthood sucks, and not everyone hated high school, but the reasons the bad parts are bad do seem really similar. As I pointed out in my Politics is Evil essay, no one says “Oh man, this new job is great! So much office politics to engage in!” Yet politics is definitely part of human nature, teenager and adult. That hasn’t changed over the course of human history, either.
How can both be true? Well, what if humans acting like narcissistic drama llamas cross bred with neurotic chimps is part of human nature, but only as a response to certain situations?
What if you took a whole bunch of strangers, and stuck them in close proximity with each other for 8 or so hours every day, and then gave them nothing much in particular to do. In fact, let’s take it further, and strictly limit what they can do during that time, keeping mostly to seemingly meaningless work they have little to no interest in. Further, reduce all possible avenues of danger or other aspects that might allow for differentiation, just bubble wrap the hell out of it.
What would that do to people?
I suspect most people would find something to do, and chances are it would turn destructive. Some would turn to mischief, some would turn inwards towards self destruction, but deprived of all interest and agency, deprived of meaning, just about everyone would turn to whatever is left: social group politics.
Humans need challenges to overcome, dangers to face, responsibilities to take on, and will create them if they don’t exist. If internecine power struggles are all they can get, well that’s what they’ll do.
Wait… was I describing high school back there, or the modern corporate workplace?
Exactly.
High school never seems to end because we recreated the conditions in the adult work place, and people never seem to grow because our behavior is largely determined by the conditions. We move kids from high school to college to the office and change nothing. Is it any wonder they stay functionally kids? Is it any wonder they all still act like they were in high school?
This seems to square the circle: why it seems so universal yet is limited enough that we notice it, why it seems fairly recent but is easily understood, why adults are definitely different than teenagers but still fall prey to the same negative behaviors.
Does this suggest a solution? Well, not really. Getting rid of so many bullshit jobs might help. Remove the regulations and other legal issues that reward bigger corporations instead of smaller. Those might help, but then again they might not make much of a dent.
I don’t have the answers here, but I think that recognizing what might well be causing the problem is worth thinking about. On the plus side, if I am right about the causes being the same, if we figure out what works for improving high school or adult life we will have a strong line on what will work for the other.
High school never seems to end because we keep creating the conditions of high school. We can probably stop doing that. Quite possibly we could even make high school less obnoxious while we are at it.
But wait… why do we create adult life in the image of high school hell? Or did we make high school like adult office hell? If we did that, why?
I suspect that we created high school hell first, then copied the template to adulthood. Why? Because students stunted by never growing up during high school and college are not optimized for regular adult life. What are they optimized for?
Eternal high school.
We have coddled our children through youth and high school, protecting them from self reliance, responsibility and risk. Walking alone around the neighborhood at 6 years old? Hah! I am not sure you could let a 13 year old do that these days without hearing about it. Lukianoff and Haidt detail the ways we coddle our youth as they age, and the punch line is that many are not able to really function without someone to tell them what to do, what to think, and keep them “safe.” Their method of dealing with life is crying to authority. Whether it is the teacher or dean or HR doesn’t matter, but those adult children were never going to make it without recreating the only environment they could function in: high school. When they got decision making power, they further shaped their environment to match the ones they were used to.
Now, I am open to the possibility it worked in reverse as well. Possibly corporate pressure drove colleges to produce certain kinds of students which drove pressure on high schools to create certain kinds of high schoolers. But I think it worked mainly in the other direction, mostly because high schools and colleges seem only vaguely interested in what corporations want, but also because I think the schools went to hell in a hand basket first.
That’s just my guess, though.
I might pick apart this defense of Yarvin’s theory, at least the non-pay gated part, but I need to work my way up to it and find the time. Some messes are just so big even starting is kind of daunting if you have anything else that needs done.
For my British readers, public school in the states are the government provided schools everyone generally goes to unless your parents spring the cash for private, or home school you. Just to set both of your minds at ease.
Those that do usually end up employed by schools, incarcerated, or both.
This seems to be the case even in contexts where the whole point of being there is having something in common, such as a gaming convention.
"I suspect most people would find something to do, and chances are it would turn destructive. Some would turn to mischief, some would turn inwards towards self destruction, but deprived of all interest and agency, deprived of meaning, just about everyone would turn to whatever is left: social group politics."
Some would read Doc Hammer's latest missive on their work computer....
Some data points to reflect on.
At school I thought that reading Camus would make me interesting to girls. It didn’t. Therefore I read Camus at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons. I haven’t read Camus since.
This has little to do with your entertaining thought train, but it just needed saying, in the context of struggling to grow.