Best years of your life, my ass

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When my professor in high school said to the whole class that teenage years are the best years of our lives, I felt resentment and absurdity inside me. A part of me wanted to respond to the professor statement, but instead I didn't say anything when he said that because I feared my built-up emotions might overtake me.

My teenage years were THE WORST YEARS OF MY LIFE. And while I am not depressed as I was in teenage years, I have only inherited bitterness and apathy from my past.

There are no best years of your life, everybody finds their happiness at different stages of life. Real life doesn't even start at teenage years! In teenage years you're still a confused, developing, semi-adult.

Are you saying that my adulthood should be miserable? What about the 30 or the 40 year olds? Why can't for example the 30-40 year olds be the best years of your life?

What a strange and bizarre idea is to think that life somehow sucks after reaching adulthood and that these teenage years are the best years, when actual life doesn't even start!

To say that teenage years are the best years of your life is BS, period.

your professor obviously peaked in high school

Yes, I have heard this too, and it definitely was not true for me.

At Christmas of my freshman year away at college, I came home for term break and stopped by the high school to see some people. One of my teachers said "College seems to agree with you! You seem happier."

Yes. I was pulling straight A's and I had my first boyfriend. Yes, I sure was happier.

The teenage years actually suck for most people....

That cliche needs to die. I think it is rarely true in Western cultures (it might be truer in agrarian cultures where adults strive on a subsistence level, though I doubt that too, because aching poverty doesn't seem to encourage kindness to young people).

However at least the people who spout cliches like that as if they were true for everyone are giving you a heads up about their limited awareness of life as it is lived, so you know to take what they say with a pinch of salt. Cliches function as a substitute for thinking.

I don't even think that it can be called a cliché because I don't hear folks say that. Don't know how far that teacher of yours has his head up his ass.

The cliché is that the early part of your teen years- your junior high years- are the WORST years of your life. . The last part (college) seems to be well thought of. The middle part (HS) does not seem to have a consensus view.

And that's kinda how I experienced it. Junior high sucked, HS sucked slightly less, and college was kinda good.

My teen years from junior high to the first two years of college were nasty. But people do say the teen years are the best years of your life all the time. Part of it is the selective memory of nostalgia. When we are older we do not fully understand the ways of the young people and how things work now. It all seems confusing and wrong. So back then SEEMS simpler and better.

My teenage years were good in some respects. Outside of school my parents gave me the freedom to go off by myself most of the time and I had no real responsibilities. My interests have always revolved around the natural world and I had easy access to beach, cliffs and woods. So I was generally happy for much of the time.

Inside of school though, my life was utterly miserable. The bullies, which included many of the teachers, pretty much had free rein to treat people however they wanted. I was forever being told by the teachers that I could do better if only I tried harder. So many of them though seemingly had no ability to make their subjects interesting. I spent most of the time staring out of the window, wrapped up in my own thoughts. At break time I just wandered the playing fields or nearby woods by myself. Occasionally other kids would try to involve me in things but I had absolutely no ability to engage in any sort of play that required social skills or teamwork. Things didn't really get any better right up until the point when I left at age eighteen and then I had to face the massive unemployment rate which existed in the UK in the early 1980s.

I recall being told by the primary school headmaster that we would look back on those years as the happiest.
I disagreed then and do so now. Primary school work is generally repetitive and tedious, one is not in control of the situation to any great extent.

I had much more time for secondary school, with so much Interesting stuff being taught : languages, the sort of maths which unlocks a lot of problems, sciences, some stuff was hard (The literature side of English). However, I note that i had a fortunate set of circumstances which was a school with the academic bias and the majority of the pupils with similar enough profiles that very few people stood out as targets, though it happened even in those favourable circumstance.

Well. I was actually thinking about this the other day as I was walking on my lunchbreak by myself and I miss that in school I had a group of friends to hang out with everyday.

I had no money and I was depressed because of my home life, but I had a sharp mind back then and could learn new things more easily. I was optomistic about the future and what was to come. Now im old and jaded.

Even though I had worn out clothes to wear and only one pair of shoes, my mind wasn't as cluttered with stress and responsibilities as it is now. 8 Had time to play the guitar. I didn't have to cook dinner every day. I got lots of exercise because I had to walk every where.

There were good things back then.

People think that teenage years are the best ones of your life (interestingly, here people think college years are the best) mostly because then teenagers don't have lots of responsibilities (it's mostly just being a good student in school) and are still unaware of the "problems" of adulthood (child rearing, job, paying the bills, taking care of your parents etc).

I think that it all depends on the person and that actually every specific time span has its PROS and CONS. When you're very young, a kid you don't know much and you think the adults are the smartest in the world, but at the same time you're not burdening yourself with the passage of time, relationships and other stuff that come when you get older.
So don't feel bad if you didn't have the best years of your life when someone else had, maybe yours are yet to come
On a personal note, I still hope my best years are ahead of me ^^ because both elementary and high school sucked for me and college was meh.

My best years were actually the last five years. My teenage years, while good, were not really my best.

Ahh ... my teen-age years ... Charles Dickens said it best ...

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way -- in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Otherwise, high school was four years of Hell-on-Earth!

I started high school in September 1983. 35 years ago, but I still remember that during the first day, our entire freshman class went to the school auditorium to watch a short film/documentary that promoted that idea. I think the film was called, "The Best Four Years of Your Life." If not, it was something similar that told us that we were going to have the best four years of our lives, starting today. After the film, some teachers told us some stories that tried to make us believe this would be true.

As I watched the film, I recall thinking that, for me, that would be complete bull****, and that instead, this was probably going to be the worst 4 years I'll ever have, but that things would be way better once I got away from all of these a-hole classmates I'd seen since Kindergarten, and how college would be way better.

As it turned out, only my first 2 years of high school were the worst years, the last 2 were somewhat better, and then college was way better for all 4 of my years there -- by that time, I think I had finally learned to "pass" as a neurotypical well enough to make a few good friends and be somewhat outwardly social when I needed to be.

If I could use what I've learned to this point in life and apply them to when I was in high school, there'd be a good chance they'd be good years.

I think that the pressure on teens is higher now than it was when I was a teen. Social media has amplified the social aspect of high school and the things you do or say can have much greater repercussions because of the social media.

I spent a lot of my high school not being altogether social and certainly not believing in myself, I was a pariah. I also managed to do and say stupid things which, in today's environment, would have been difficult to deal with.

For some, it probably was the best time of their lives, but that didn't go for everyone. Today the line between groups is thin and doing something that was once a momentary embarrassment can live a long time.