Are you a young adult who is not responsible for anyone but themselves, perhaps? Many adults have to take care of children or their own parents, manage teams, work jobs with serious consequences on other people's lives, deal with having cancer, etc. High school was tough in its own way but I think mostly due to everyone being young and having no life skills yet.
Solidly in middle age, three kids, plenty of other problems.
Still way easier than high school.
If next week the world went topsy-turvy and providing for my kids now (for some reason) depended on my attending and doing tolerably well at high school for the remaining decade or so that my kids are at home, no other options, but also I'm somehow relieved from all the hard parts of taking care of them and such... frankly, I dunno if I'd make it. High school was incredibly stressful (even after I threw myself a life line and deliberately stopped giving as much of a fuck about grades) and, quite literally, depressing, as in it gave me seasonal depression that took most of my 20s to stop cycling through, and recurring nightmares that didn't end until my early 30s, and I wasn't even bullied or anything. The whole institution's a mental-health catastrophe in a way that nothing I've seen in adult life compares to (perhaps prison does, I, fortunately, am not in a position to compare them)
(Separately, yes, I'm sure—very sure, having seen it up close enough times now—that old age health problems and the process of dying are going to be extremely, perhaps incomparably, bad, but I don't think that's what people were talking about when they said schools had to be shitty in order to prepare me for even-shittier adult life, I think they meant work and paying bills and parent-teacher conferences and stuff)
