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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?
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.
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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