Each person that has graduated from high school and college has told me the same thing "Have fun right now while you can. This doesn't stay forever so enjoy life as it is right now. It only gets harder from here so appreciate what you have." Each time, I take this with a grain of salt and think that, this person can't be telling the truth. High School and College are the hard parts about life due to the long hours of studying or the time spend dealing with this unnecessary drama and stress. But I feel that later down the road, I will be humbled into the truth.

In high school and college, we take all these classes and push ourselves to the limit for nothing. For example, a lot of colleges want you to take AP Biology in school but when you get to college, they want you to retake it and pretend like the course never happened. So you just wasted a year of your life focusing on a subject that you found out that you were going to have to retake anyway. Furthermore, getting into college is getting harder and harder and its not the students who aren't working hard, it's just becoming more selective.

Another thing about these hard classes, the schools continue to tell us that we get extra points for them but most colleges take it off. We have to submit a weighted and unweighted GPA which continue to show our true grades without the points that we receive. This makes all of our efforts to take these classes seem worthless and another waste of time in trying to outdo our peers and take these extra courses. It just seems like a never ending cycle of students working their butts off only to have their efforts undone by college.

People will argue that stress is constant and stress is good. I disagree. A certain level of stress is good and helps us grow but overdoing the stress can continue to be a factor in affecting our mental health and affecting our physical body. The lack of comfort we have can force our sleep patterns to be off or can push our bodies into bad mood swings. All of this is just more instrumental in showing that stress never seems to get better and sometimes maybe its on us to relieve some of our faults.

At the end of the day, it is up to us to decide to live our lives. We can continue to take these hard high school courses and hope that they come thru with a college acceptance letter or we can try to enjoy our lives in the moment so we have memories to reflect on from our time in youth. The latter is a better option as we then know we tried our best but also tried to live our life another way instead of constantly being stressed. This would be much more beneficial and productive for students.