Going Back
Nobody talks about school like it was anything but purgatory. Five days a week before dawn, herded into rooms with hormonal teenagers and teachers who were clearly at the end of their rope—probably going home to divorces they never saw coming. The mythology was always bullshit. No magic, no heroic arc, just fluorescent lights and the smell of industrial floor polish and the specific deadness of being trapped in a building with people you’d actively avoid in any other context.
I thought that was done with it. Then I went back. Needed to finish a web design apprenticeship, and suddenly I was the old guy in a classroom full of people who looked fourteen. Same beige institutional walls. Same rigid schedule. Same invisible social geography—who sits where, who’s allowed to talk to whom, which table claims which clique. Nothing had fundamentally changed since the 1930s. Teachers had just traded bamboo sticks for psychological ones. The troubled kids still hid in the bathrooms. The machinery was exactly the same.
But a wasted day could still have its moments. There was usually someone worth looking at. There were stupid funny things—a kid getting destroyed by a teacher, the specific tedium of a lesson that runs five minutes too long. And by that point, technology had reached the point where nobody was actually engaged anyway. MacBook in front of you, you just disappear. Games, actual work, a podcast—doesn’t matter. The teacher’s talking somewhere up there and you’re somewhere else entirely.
You’d think going back as an adult would feel different, like you’d have some perspective that made it bearable, maybe even interesting. It doesn’t. If anything it’s worse because you know exactly what you’re wasting. You remember being young and thinking your time had infinite supply. Now you’re counting the hours and they all feel heavier.
I got through it though. Made it to the end. The whole thing felt pointless going in and feels pointless now, but that’s how it always goes. You’re reaching toward something—a certificate, a credential, whatever—convinced it’ll mean something, and then you’re living it and it mostly just feels like being locked up for hours at a time. The slightly better version of you on the other side doesn’t compensate for the days you’ll never get back. Maybe that’s just growing up. Maybe that’s just life. Hard to tell the difference sometimes.