It bears saying, despite being obvious: You can't have all the experiences the world has to offer. And the ones that are in media are both constructs of a prior

It bears saying, despite being obvious: You can't have all the experiences the world has to offer. And the ones that are in media are both constructs of a prior generation - media is selling the aspirations of the experience - and inevitably romanticized, with clearly defined characters, conflicts and firm resolutions. Most real experiences feel ordinary in the moment, with lots of room to ignore, withdraw, disengage, or disbelieve. Even violence can feel quite ordinary. I can assure you that most of your classmates are not feeling their experience as anything but another weekday. So it's not the experience itself, it's what you get out of it as years tick by, and perspective can help. Real stories are subtle, with a lot of ways to retell them differently. "Carefree" high school life is not innocuous - or rather, like a toddler who breaks their toys, it's innocuous right up until it isn't, and the friendships are only lasting in some cases. As a lifelong thing, what will help the most is bringing a balanced skillset and mindset to the scenarios you find yourself in. But the skills and attitudes you get from full engagement in high school life are also some of the most common ones you will encounter among people of your generation, and they are relatively undirected. It can feel good in the moment without doing anything to help you down the line, because doing the most common thing puts you up against a lot of competition. So, "normal" can just mean setting yourself up for a completely different set of regrets. It's something that young people cling to desperately in their adolescent years by way of setting a baseline, but there are a lot of good reasons to grow away from it and focus on life more pragmatically as an unending series of opportunities and threats. College life is more illustrative of the different paths you could take, because there's more specialization, more extremes of behavior. Some college kids break down moments after getting there because they discover they are, in fact, extremely underprepared for life away from their parents. Others can really thrive and define themselves.