You're in High School Again
How we keep finding ourselves living out schoolyard social dynamics throughout our lives.
When Kurt Cobain first started out in the small town of Aberdeen, Washington, his ultimate goal was to one day make it to Seattle and join the burgeoning scene there. Once he had finally managed to do that with Nirvana – first playing a mid-week a show on a Sub Pop bill, then more regularly as the band grew in popularity, finally releasing on Sub Pop and eventually becoming a popular feature on bills across the Pacific Northwest – he depressingly took note that his dream of leaving the confines of his hometown to become a part of a big city scene, had merely thrown him into a new school-like scenario, with cliques arranged along lines of popularity, gossip, perceived coolness, as well as everchanging in and out groups. He encapsulated this disappointment in the song “School” with its bare bones lyrics of verses comprised solely of “Won’t you believe it, it’s just my luck” repeated over and over again, the choruses of “No recess,” and the bridge/buildup of “You’re in High School again” just to hammer the point home. What he had thought of as his great escape out of Aberdeen to the bright lights of Seattle had just brought him back to his dreaded High School social experience.
That story and those lines have come back to me repeatedly over the years, as I have found myself in school-like social situations – be it in various work environments, art and music scenes, even a psychiatric ward – that were all characterized by similar constellations of groups and their interactions. Today, we can witness the adolescent antics being played out by the world’s richest, most famous, and powerful as they all bear their deepest insecurities for the world to see, where culture and politics devolve into adolescent lashing out, only that it ends up costing people’s livelihoods and actual lives. What occurred to me some 25 years ago at my first office job was that we constantly find ourselves back in High School, because this was the first time we experienced this organization of social circles. We just falsely assumed that one day people grow up and, as adults, these peculiarities dissolve due to developed self-confidence. Alas, we are proven wrong again and again. Our need to be accepted and our impulse to be petty and vindictive follow us all the way to the grave.
The first time I explicitly made this connection between Cobain’s lyrics and real-world social circumstances was when I was submerged in my first office job. Previous work had seen me witness and experience crews and cliques, but shlepping furniture or the strictly regimented departments of a hotel bring with them an inherent hierarchy, as well as a certain anarchy, which hadn’t made the parallels as evident. Once I got over the shellshock of being thrust into the uber-corporate machinery of a big company (albeit as an extremely small, practically irrelevant cog), I started to suss out the various structures and behavioral patterns of this new environment. I can look back at it as a kind of anthropological field research, because to the best of my knowledge, that kind of office environment simply doesn’t exist anymore. This was the year 2000, so there were still lots of gratuitous positions and superfluous processes, which included mine and everything that fell into my remit (if anyone has seen the show Enlightenment and the department Laura Dern finds herself demoted to, think that). It was all still paper-based, and plenty of people had spent decades in the same place. None of this really exists today. As a young, bewildered (often hungover), and out-of-place young man, I eyed these surroundings with some curiosity and fear that this might be my destiny.
One of my earliest realizations was precisely that there were little cliques. This seemed strange to me, as I assumed this was behavior one grew out of, but these “old” people (probably in their 30s and 40s) all seemed to be living schoolyard drama on the regular. There was gossip, occasional backstabbing, as well as strange devotion to certain people and ideas circulating within the company. It all seemed extremely low stakes, but this was their life after all. I was, at the same time, becoming increasingly active in the music scene, so I think what surprised me was seeing the similarities between the cabal of cool that is musicians, artists, and the like in their early 20s, and the seemingly most conformist people in the world in their corporate jobs (one has to remember “selling out” was still a thing). I realized that these high school dynamics that so troubled Cobain upon entry into the Seattle scene are simply the dynamics that appear whenever you get groups of people together who have little or one superficial thing in common. As the character of Tim says in the original UK Office, “The people you work with are people you were just thrown together with. I mean, you don’t know them; it wasn’t your choice. And yet you spend more time with them than you do your friends or your family. But probably all you have in common is the fact that you walk around on the same bit of carpet for eight hours a day.” Throughout life, you keep encountering this phenomenon in various forms, though the effects on our behavior remain the same.
Although adolescent, thin-skinned insecurity, insolence, and misplaced confidence are prevalent throughout public life nowadays, creative scenes were more susceptible to these behaviors and social dynamics in the past, as creatives tend not to have emotionally evolved since their first encounter with the means to creatively express themselves, which usually occurs in their teens. What has them standing out and seeming more mature in those pubescent years is the fact that they may have found an avenue slightly outside the norm through which to tap into certain modes of emotional and mental articulation. The downside is that many never move on from this mindset and are stuck filtering life, the world, and their relationships through that lens. Creative people often tend to stay frozen in time, emotionally, which is why one is used to hearing the classic statement from bands, artists, and creatives in general, stating that they or their art (be it an album or their creative process) has matured. Behind-the-scenes documentation of how various creatives communicate and behave speaks to this level of understanding of maturity, adulthood, and anything that comes with it. Just rewatch the Metallica documentary “Some Kind of Monster” to witness grown men struggling to access what should be fairly normal emotions and mechanisms through which to navigate them. This is because their success had shielded them from having to learn these skills, as the world only looked to them to write their songs and live and represent their world. In the world of social media and constant connectivity, we now see that this is the nature of the business. The entertainment industries are filled with adult children who battle their own demons publicly, live out ill-fated relationships, and attempt to navigate their emotional landscapes through an Instagram filter.
What I encountered at that first office job, and have seen repeated again and again, is our need for social acceptance, the gravitational pull to like-minded people, or at least as close as it can get when thrust into a new environment. No matter the job or sector it was in, underground or mainstream, small galleries or large art institutions, their social worlds were all mirrors of schoolyard antics. I even watched this unfold in a psychiatric ward, where I had ended up after my second unsuccessful attempt at taking my own life. Due to those circumstances, I was essentially locked up with a bunch of junkies, alcoholics, and people who had tried killing themselves through toxicological means. Even in this bizarre and deeply troubled parallel world, people split off into little groups. Unsurprisingly, me and the other people who had made the concerted effort not to still be here were fairly solitary. The junkies formed a group who evidently thought themselves cooler than the others, but were also bound by their shared “needs.” Alcoholics tend to talk too much, find themselves personable and lively, and think they’re fooling others with their forthright personalities. The truly mentally unstable seem to have a better time of it all, as they understand where they are and how they relate to the world. This magnetic pull and the emotional and behavioral patterns it produces repeat themselves, no matter where you end up, from the playground to the old people’s home.
Through digitalization and social media, it is now clear that this is how we navigate every world, whether biological or digital, and these new technologies are amplifying it. Every platform is like the smokers’ corners of yore; our normal discourse is now that of the mean girls gossiping about someone’s relationships, people taunting and bullying strangers because of their appearance, except the bullying now includes everyone from pre-teens online to the rich and famous. We have built a high school hell for everyone to inhabit forever. People often ask where the adults are in the room, but the truth is that there are no adults left; it’s adolescent idiocy all the way up to the highest echelons of culture and power. As we all metaphorically stand around at recess while the world burns, the politicians and billionaires who control our society are evidently riddled with pubescent insecurity; journalists trade barbs and use their platforms to strut out their virtues like some teen campaigning for class president; YouTubers and Instagram pages dissect every celebrity appearance and utterance, investing their life’s meaning in the snarky commentary on fleeting moments of fleeting careers; influencers drain themselves of any humanity and dignity, desperate to have your attention; the richest man in the world is desperate to be liked and accepted; governments and their spokespeople bicker, and fumble answers in front of committees as if they were in class. In cyclical moments, this can be amusing if it were not for the fact that it is actively corroding our societies, causing harm to children and adults, and ultimately, thousands of people are dying on account of this immaturity and our inability to break from the stranglehold. “What are we doing here, people?” as the present-day adage goes.
To be sure, the speed of life does not usually, nor has it ever, given us too much time to acquire real maturity – regardless of creative output or not. When faced with the day-to-day of getting by, working together, or just being forced to interact with one another, we revert to or remain the children we always were. At the same time, life throws plenty of tragedy our way that offers a path to growth and moving away from petty insolence, backstabbing, social coldness, or just plain cruelty. We can grow more compassionate through living with pain and use that to break the cycle of immaturity, but it is rare. On the cusp of a moment where we would need to grow up and grow up fast, we are governed by the most childish of people. Not since the time of little-big kings has the population been so saddled with the teenage impulses of insecure men and the women who love them. Our response tends to typically be a similar adolescent rage that boils over in shouting and breaking things, but this is a critical and vulnerable moment; it could belong to whoever finds it within their means to be the adult, strategize like an adult, and play these enraged juvenile adults for the fools they are.
You’re in high school again and will probably always be, as you will always be forced into situations where you share little in common with the people you are forced to spend time with. But it has now reached another level, where societal discourse and global politics are enacted on the whim of what are seemingly man-children who never grew up, and the mean girls who are out to quell that toxic voice inside. Adulthood is so rare these days, but it is not non-existent, and it does not rely on financial means. It is lessons learned from life, it is clarity of thought, it is a balanced understanding of oneself and one’s shortcomings. Access those, and you can navigate the chaos, as well as work against the idiocy that runs our world. Compassion, understanding, and a strategy with which to encounter the lunacy and overcome it are the things that will help us break out of the forever high school we have built for ourselves.