Being in school is like having a job. Each day you wake up, maybe eat some breakfast and make sure to leave your house early enough to get to your designated location (work or school) on time. You spend all day working on various projects, reporting progress on assignments, and interacting with fellow workers or school mates as the case would have it. Then you return home, catch up on the things you didn’t have time for during the day and hopefully get a bit of free time before starting the process over again. Despite these similarities, the two are actually very different.

Work offers you a wage, while school offers you an education. Often work can stay at the office, while school inevitably sends work home, ie. homework. Finally, while you have some choice in the field that you work or boss you obey, school gives little flexibility for anything. Don’t get me wrong, a free education is a beautiful thing. The trouble arises when this “day job”, sitting in class from 7:45 to 2:35, is combined with after school activities and/or a job outside of school.

This is when your seven hour school day quickly becomes a fourteen hour work day. As soon as class gets out, you report to sports practice, band practice or rehearsal. After three or four hours at this activity you rush home quickly to change before showing up to work for the four or five hour evening shift. Suddenly it’s ten o’clock and there is still a mountain of homework to be done. So you binge on coffee, stay up too late, and eventually fall into an exhausted sleep for a few hours before having to rise, earlier than your teenage brain is built to, for another school day.

Thankfully, few high schoolers have to work every night or worry that if they don’t they won’t get their next meal. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t employed! Even just working one or two shifts a week can result in unpreparedness for a test, late assignments, or napping in class. And the above schedule doesn’t even reflect any social time with family or friends, college applications, or community involvement. The demands of work, education, and a social life become so overwhelming it seems as though there’s no way to catch up. Weekends are spent in an agonized panic switching between entitlement for a bit of a break and sloughing through the mountain of homework.

There’s not one quick answer to solve these problems. Each of these elements is very important, education for a future, work for experience and a bit of spending money, and fun for a happy soul. We can’t just cut out some activities and hope everything will turn out alright. Our only hope is for a cultural shift in the popular consciousness to stop putting so much pressure on our youth and allow childhood a chance to linger beyond elementary school. We are being trained at a young age to take on the workaholic traits of our parents and continue the cycle of stress and strain. To escape the loop, we must, as one, break free of societal restraints and begin anew our search for a happy and fulfilled life.