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As someone with a moderate interest in sociology, despite that field of science generally being captured by leftist activists I cannot really stand, I’m somewhat intrigued by the American concept of ‘peaking in high school’ which I wasn’t even aware of until recently. I tried to dissect what it actually means but I feel like I’m not getting that much closer.
Before I continue I’d like to state two assumptions on the subject, based on what limited information I’ve gathered. One is that the concept, or accusation/dismissal if we want to be more honest, is almost always applied to men only. The second is that it doesn’t really exist as a subject of any conversation outside the jock-vs-nerd dichotomy as a wider concept. It’s a subconcept, if such a thing even exist. It's also inseparable from the idea that your high school years are the best years of your life.
As far as I can tell, the concept basically describes a high school guy who’s a midwit and largely without ambition or intellectual curiosity in life but also has street smarts and some level of charm, plus genetic attributes that are to his advantage (muscle mass, height, jawline etc). Whatever he goes on to do after graduation, wherever he moves to and whatever choices he makes, his social status will never be relatively higher than it was in high school. He’ll never be more popular in his social circle or at his job than he was in high school. Whatever level of success he goes on to have, it’ll never surpass the success he had in high school in terms of noteworthiness within his social circle. The things that made him popular he probably is not even aware of, and he just doesn’t know any better.
Is this an accurate description or am I missing the point?
I don't know if I've seen it specifically mentioned, but there's also the dynamic of how after you leave high school, socialization becomes much more elective rather than obligatory. High school is notable because although you still have some decent latitude in terms of who you spend your time with, you are still surrounded by the same set of people every day, forced into constant, recurring proximity. However as soon as college hits, boom all of that reliable, predictable, forced social interaction suddenly dissolves. If housed in freshman dorm housing, you might have some lesser version of it, but even so there are so many activities to do, everyone is in different classes as you, bigger universities mean that until you get into a major you probably won't see the same people over and over, etc. And not everyone makes that jump. If you go straight into the workforce, it's probably even more stark. And yes, I think it's far worse for men due to the somewhat weaker social bonds and the type of friendship patterns involved, even if statistically women are more likely to be lonely than men (well, at least I know this is absolutely true in middle and high school, but I'm not totally sure about the next 10 year bracket - if I were to guess, I'd say male loneliness doesn't spike higher until sometime in the mid to late 30s). In that sense, I'd say the concept probably has some roots in reality (or a common fear/insecurity people have).
With all that said, in the contexts I've usually heard it, it's usually either a derogatory term to a (usually blue collar, but sometimes narcissistic white collar) guy who no one can stand in the workplace. Or if it's someone you personally knew, I think it's more along the lines of "that guy was an asshole then (but popular), and he's still an asshole now (and I think he's only fake popular)". I don't think it requires him to be a midwit necessarily, but it's said in animus more often than not.
What you refer to as the high school experience was exactly what I experienced in college, so I think it really depends on where you go to school.
How does college make it so "you are still surrounded by the same set of people every day, forced into constant, recurring proximity"?
Certainly there are many easy socialization opportunities in college but those are very self selected, at least after the very beginning. Hell, I barely even bothered attending classes after the first semester (except for a few mandatory ones and those related to my later masters studies specialization). In comparison in high school the course selection is much more limited, there are at most a couple of different tracks and you have to actually be there every day.
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“Peaked in high school” is definitely a real thing, though as others have mentioned, it’s probably more common in small towns and in sports-focused subcultures. A related type that doesn’t get quite as much focus is the “unpopular in high school and trying desperately to make up for it as an adult.” You’ll find a disproportionate number working as high school teachers, coaches (though they’re usually more the “peaked in high school” type), summer camp directors, youth directors, these people, etc.
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Other folks have done a great dissection. You haven't missed the point entirely but definitely didn't hit the mark.
I will say that I ANTICIPATED far more high-school-peaking behavior from my peers than ended up actually occuring by a huge margin. The popular dickheads ended up being much cooler in college + beyond, and even the sports stars may have super hot wives but still caught up with friends at the last anniversary party.
I have a complicated relationship with high school overall. Still where I met some of the best friends of my life and I look back with strong nostalgia, primarily for the pre-alcohol LAN parties that I don't get to enjoy anymore. I think most people view it as a great time but not their peak.
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Let's return to some of the original texts: listen to Glory Days and read/watch/listen to Death of a Salesman with a particular focus on the characters of Biff and Happy.
Lyrics of Glory Days:
This is the basic concept: peaking in high school is about a person who still talks about events in high school, when they were the number one in high school. It's also, we can see, gender neutral. If anything, peaking in high school is way more common for women: girls are often at their prettiest at 16-18, I can remember a lot of girls in college where my wife looked at their old facebook pictures and thought "wow they were so pretty 30lbs ago..."
They were the hottest and the best in high school, everyone thought they were so cool, they did all the cool things back then, and now they don't, their life is limited and boring. So they still talk about high school.
Then consider Death of a Salesman, which Arthur Miller specifically wrote in reference to his uncle Manny a salesman. When Arthur was young, Manny was constantly comparing his own sons to Arthur, with the implication that they were in competition. Arthur, the weedy literary type, would go on to write important American plays and bang Marilyn Monroe; Manny killed himself. Throughout the play, Happy and Biff are Willy Loman's pride and joy, and he brags constantly about their exploits as athletes in high school, and derides his friend's son Bernard as an "anemic" loser. Now in their 30s, Bernard is arguing cases in front of the supreme court, while Happy is a cad and Biff is a burnout working as an itinerant farm laborer. The action of "peaking in high school" is largely through the mechanism of the parents, Willy and Charley, rather than through the boys themselves. Willy is still bragging about the high school exploits of his sons, while Charley doesn't need to even talk about Bernard's accomplishment because they are so obviously superior. Biff and Happy are pathetic, man-children, immature.
Salesman lives on as a canonical AP English Lit play because it speaks to something in the human condition: Arthur Miller's revenge of the nerds fantasy against his uncle. A lot of people, high school nerds, recognize themselves in Bernard.
I feel like the way the brain encodes memories just means that the adolescent years that coincide with high school tend to produce a lot more formative memories good/bad that are very available. Maybe I'm unusual since I lived at home for my university period but I feel like my 5 years of bachelor's + masters produced like a quarter of the core memories that my high school days did
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Semi-related: There was a girl I went to high school with who, though I didn't think she was particularly hot, certainly acted like she was. I guess she was reasonably popular and hung out with the popular crowd, to the extent that my school had one, but I can only recall being in one class with her and her just coming off as self-absorbed. Fast-forward ten years later and a couple friends of mine were joking about her Facebook account and what a riot it was. They knew her better than I did, and I didn't have a Facebook account until well after people were sending requests to literally everyone they knew, so I hadn't seen it or thought of this girl in years.
It seems that she had taken the idea of becoming a celebrity seriously. Not that she wanted to be anything in particular, or that she had any particular talent, just that she wanted to be rich and famous. Unlike most people with such aspirations, she actively pursued this pipe dream to hilarious ends. The thing that makes it even better is that she didn't fall flat on her face but had just barely enough success to keep the dream alive. I would also add that she grew up in a dumpy, run down part of the Mon Valley and due to school feeder patterns I didn't know her at all until high school. I will say now that the highlight of her life to that point (and probably to this day) was that she was a backup dancer for Beyonce for some period. I don't know how long this lasted, and as far as I know it was only for one performance. She also released an instructional DVD on hip-hop dancing, which at least means that some production company was willing to foot the bill.
Anyway, after professing my ignorance my friend emailed me some pictures with his own captions added. I'd love to just post them but that seems inappropriate, but I think descriptions with his captions will suffice:
Rov_scam,
See Attachments, I feel by being ghetto, from [school], and constantly posting photos like this (aka starving for attention) that you're good enough to achieve [our other friend's] constant yet private attention via facebook.
She had apparently also recorded some tracks in an attempt to enter the music industry. I had previously been unaware that she had any musical talent whatsoever (she still doesn't). She did not sing in high school. She did not act in high school either, but this did not stop her from attempting an acting career. Her real last name is, shall we say, of the ethnic variety. Specifically, of the Eastern European ethnic variety that, while not unpronounceable, is not the kind of thing you want to see on a marquee. So she obviously uses a stage name. A stage name that, I might add, was obviously not selected with SEO in mind, because it shares enough similarity with an extremely popular website that Googling it will not yield other results. She is evidently unknown to AI either, as Claude didn't know who she was when asked directly. She said she planned on having a million dollars in her bank account by the end of the year, which obviously didn't happen because even if it did one doesn't keep that kind of money in a bank account.
My more recent forays into her current history show that she has had 20 addresses in as many years, all of them in New York, Los Angeles, and now Florida, though I don't know how one's [drawing a blank] career progresses at age 40 i Daytona Beach. And by New York I, of course, actually mean New Jersey, because there's no way she could afford to live in the real New York. She was evidently under management by a modeling agency at some point, though I'm not sure that means anything. Her music career has progressed to "creating" AI songs. She billed herself as a YouTube creator at some point, though I haven't watched any videos and I'm not going to. Somehow it's gotten even more pathetic.
I can see her Facebook posts pretty easily despite not being friends with her, because she thinks she's important enough to have followers. She still posts multiple times per day, mostly pictures of herself. She has a son, and I'd bet dollars to donuts that the father isn't in the picture. She has multiple LinkedIn profiles. All the jobs are suspicious because none of them have ever ended. These include professional dancer, founder and CEO of her own record label, YouTube content creator, and owner/dance instructor of some kind of.. studio? I guess? And she's a Trump supporter to boot, which doesn't make sense for someone whose primary appeal seems to be to the African American community. Though it makes total sense for a ghetto white girl.
I suggested to my friend years ago that we could easily make a little bit of money off of her by starting a dubious consulting agency and offering to triple her exposure for $500. This didn't seem like that tall an order since her exposure was probably so little that tripling it wouldn't be hard. It appears that that ship hasn't yet sailed.
In this case very little, since it's worth about five minutes every decade, or about 30 second per year. And that's only because I knew her IRL. It's kind of pathetic, but she hasn't done anything to me personally, and she hasn't done anything to warrant anyone trying to destroy her life. I'm not going to condone anything Kiwifarms does, which is why I'm not posting any real details, even though she's still after attention.
"Trying to destroy people's lives" is explicitly against the terms of Kiwi Farms (harassment is illegal, but
doxingphonebooking is not), and the admin quickly bans anybody who crows about engaging in such activities (though detractors of the website like to pretend otherwise).Regardless, I posted the quote only to call her a lolcow, not to suggest that you make a thread for her on Kiwi Farms.
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I wonder how much of this is driven by the fact that the U.S. has a lot of up/down mobility in the way many countries do not.
Although it's also sort of a meme in Japan that High School is the best time of your life, which informs much of anime, gaming.
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It's more of a trope than an actual thing, the prototypical example being Al Bundy from the sitcom Married... With Children. The high point of Al's life was the night he scored four touchdowns in one game for Polk High School. In the series he's working in a shoe store where he spends all day cramming fat women into shoes that are too small for them. The bigger part of the joke, though, is that Al and his family are all lazy and misanthropic, and the fact that he feels the need to mention his past football prowess while in his 40s only serves to underscore what a loser he is generally.
The trope isn't so much a reflection of a real-life phenomenon as it is a warning to kids about not getting too hung up on things that don't matter. There's a lot of pressure in high school to be athletic, or smart, or popular, but the minute you take off the mortarboard it all ceases to matter. Take grades, for instance. In high school, grades and SAT scores and the like are certainly something you need to worry about, far more important than popularity. But as soon as that acceptance letter comes in the mail, that's it. They've done their job, and nobody will care about them again. You're first year in college, you're in the same position as the guy in the seat next to you with the B- average. And if you flunk out and spend the next 20 years working as a convenience store clerk, nobody is going to be convinced that you're smart because you had a 4.0 GPA in high school and won the Bausch and Lomb Science Award. When you apply the same logic to things like sports and popularity it seems even more ridiculous. But for kids who don't know any better, it seems important.
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‘Teenager’ is a marketing category created by the media, so of course media filters perception of the teenaged years in popular consciousness.
There are definitely people who enjoyed their high school years more than their adult life, because the paradigm of ‘teenager’ as a category that exists creates an impulse in authority structures to incentivize the ‘fun’ parts and not the ‘becoming a grownup’ parts. That’s what this is corresponding to; people remembering their fun as the important part of life, not their responsibilities.
It should be noted that this memory is, in general, rose coloured glasses. ‘Teenager’ is an unnatural category in that it poorly aligns with the telos of these people, hence teens are on average unhappy.
I can't help wondering how much of this is North America specific and created by the pop culture. I'm sure there are some people who enjoyed their high school more than anything later around here too, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone take that position publicly. The trope here is that your university years were the best time in your life (for some people), although that might have changed in the recent years (or not - I haven't seen much talk of that lately). There is certainly a lot more partying in university for those who want it.
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It’s funny because high school is probably the time where a majority of humans have peak emotional experiences, simply due to hormones, which is why popular media often centers on high school (Stranger Things, Euphoria, Harry Potter, the various social life anime and Korean shows).
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The concept is because sports in high school can be a really big deal. Especially in the South, or small towns really. The high school football team can be something of local stars not just in their social circle but in the town at large, unrelated adults go to these games and they can be a big deal. But there's an expiration to all that, think of it like Kpop girls or a boyband. This applies to girls to but less so. It can be easy to rest on your laurels in this situation because your never going to be a bigger deal than when you were the town darling but nobody is very impressed by a pudgy 45 year old who keeps going on about the glory days. That's basically it high school sports can turn American teens into kinda sorta child stars. Now there's other archetypes like cool burnouts who remain losers but the concept comes from America's focus on high school athletics which is why it's so interwind with the jock archetype.
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I think that's an accurate definition of the archetype, without passing comment on whether that archetype describes any real person.
For a rather dark exploration of this archetype, see Election.
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