For all those years of youth spent wanting to be older, when we finally reach that state that we thought we yearned for so badly–a post-education existence–we come to find that, “Oh, this is just as bad. Worse, actually.” The desire to escape from being under the thumb of parental authority transforms into the desire to escape from a more official kind of authority, one that can’t be appealed to because they birthed you.
The days you spent pretending you wanted to bang your head in your locker in front of your peers (or, if you were from California and they expected you to carry your own shit all the time, you still knew you wanted to bang your head in your locker if you had one based on John Hughes movies and Daria), become days spent pantomiming suicide Amy Winehouse-style to your co-workers.
The transition of gestures from youth to “maturity” is a drastic one, because the higher the stakes (i.e. having to make your own money), the more intense something is. It’s all pressure, responsibility–mounting your life at every angle. High school would be a welcome vacation in retrospect.