THROUGHOUT HIGH SCHOOL, my friend Kenji never once spoke to the Glassmans. They were popular, football-playing, handsome identical twins. Kenji was a closeted, half-Japanese orchestra nerd who kept mainly to himself and graduated first in our class. Yet last fall, at our 25th high school reunion, Kenji grabbed Josh Glassman by his triceps—still Popeye spinach cans—and asked where the after-party was. He was only half-joking.
Psychologically speaking, Kenji carries a passport to pretty much anywhere now. He’s handsome, charming, a software engineer at an Amazon subsidiary; he radiates the kind of self-possession that earns instant respect. Josh seemed to intuit this. He said there was an after-party a few blocks away. And when Kenji wavered, Josh wouldn’t take no for an answer. “I could see there was no going back,” Kenji explained the next morning. “It was sort of like the dog who catches the car and doesn’t know what to do with it.”
The party was fine. Kenji wondered if he’d been brought along as a stunt guest—a suspicion hardly allayed by Josh’s announcement “I brought the valedictorian!” as they were arriving—though Kenji’s attendance was in the same spirit, really, just in reverse. His curiosities were anthropological: He had no idea what it was like “to be a football player or a cheerleader, get out of high school, marry someone from your local area, and settle in the same area.” And his conclusion, by the end of the night, was: nothing special. “It was just an ordinary party, one that might have been a little uncomfortable if we all hadn’t been a little drunk.”
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You’d think Kenji’s underwhelmed reaction would have been reassuring. But another classmate of ours didn’t take it that way. Like Kenji, Larry was brilliant, musically gifted, and hidden behind awkward glasses during most of his adolescence; like Kenji, he too is attractive and successful today. “Literally?” he said. “Your saying this makes me feel I wish I’d been invited to that.”
“Well, right,” said Kenji. “Because that’s the way high school is.”
NOT EVERYONE FEELS the sustained, melancholic presence of a high school shadow self. There are some people who put in their four years, graduate, and that’s that. But for most adults, the adolescent years occupy a privileged place in memory, which to some degree is even quantifiable: Give an adult a series of random prompts and cues, and odds are he or she will recall a disproportionate number of memories from adolescence. This phenomenon has been found over and over.
To most human beings, the significance of the adolescent years is pretty intuitive. Writers from Shakespeare to Salinger have done their most iconic work about them; and Hollywood, certainly, has long understood the operatic potential of proms, first dates, and the malfeasance of the cafeteria goon squad. “I feel like most of the stuff I draw on, even today, is based on stuff that happened back then,” says Paul Feig, the creator of Freaks and Geeks.
Yet there’s one class of professionals who seem to have underrated the significance of those years, and it just happens to be the group that studies how we change over the course of our lives: developmental neuroscientists and psychologists. “I cannot emphasize enough the amount of skewing there is,” says Pat Levitt of the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, “in terms of the number of studies that focus on the early years as opposed to adolescence. For years, we had almost a religious belief that all systems developed in the same way, which meant that what happened from zero to 3 really mattered, but whatever happened thereafter was merely tweaking.”
Zero to 3. For ages, this window dominated the field, and it still does today. There are good scientific reasons to focus on this time period: The sensory systems, like hearing and eyesight, develop very early on. “But the error we made,” says Levitt, “was to say, ‘Oh, that’s how all functions develop, even those that are very complex. Executive function, emotional regulation—all of it must develop in the same way.’” That is not turning out to be the case. Laurence Steinberg, a developmental psychologist, says, “If you’re interested in how people become who they are, so much is going on in the adolescent years.”
In the past couple of decades, studies across the social sciences have been designed around this new orientation. It has long been known, for instance, that male earning potential correlates rather bluntly with height. But it was only in 2004 that a trio of economists thought to burrow a little deeper and discovered, based on a sample of thousands of white men in the U.S. and Britain, that it wasn’t adult height that seemed to affect their subjects’ wages; it was their height at 16. The sociologist Deborah Carr observed something similar about adults of a normal weight: They are far more likely to have higher self-esteem if they were a normal weight, rather than overweight or obese, in late adolescence.
Our self-image from those years, in other words, is especially adhesive. So, too, are our preferences. “There’s no reason why, at the age of 60, I should still be listening to the Allman Brothers,” Steinberg says. “Yet no matter how old you are, the music you listen to for the rest of your life is probably what you listened to when you were an adolescent.”
It turns out that just before adolescence, the prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain that governs our ability to reason, grasp abstractions, control impulses, and self-reflect—undergoes a huge flurry of activity, giving young adults the intellectual capacity to form an identity, to develop the notion of a self. Any cultural stimuli we are exposed to during puberty can, therefore, make more of an impression, because we’re now perceiving them discerningly as things to sweep into our self-concepts or reject (I am the kind of person who likes the Allman Brothers).
At the same time, the prefrontal cortex has not yet finished developing in adolescents. It’s still adding myelin, a substance that speeds up and improves neural connections, and until those connections are consolidated—in our mid-20s—the more primitive, emotional parts of the brain have a more significant influence. This explains why adolescents are such notoriously poor models of self-regulation, and why they’re so much more dramatic. In adolescence, the brain is also buzzing with more dopamine activity than at any other time in the human life cycle, so everything an adolescent does—everything an adolescent feels—is just a little bit more intense.
IF HUMANS REALLY do feel things most intensely during adolescence, and if they also happen to be working out an identity for the first time, then it seems safe to say this: Most American high schools are almost sadistically unhealthy places to send adolescents.
Something happens when children spend so much time apart from adult company. One of the reasons that high schools may produce such peculiar value systems is precisely because the people there have little in common, except their ages. “These are people in a large box without any clear, predetermined way of sorting out status,” says Robert Faris, a sociologist. Such a situation, in his view, is likely to reward aggression. Absent established hierarchies and power structures (apart from the privileges that naturally accrue from being an upperclassman), kids create them on their own, and what determines those hierarchies is often the crudest common-denominator stuff—looks, nice clothes, prowess in sports—rather than the subtleties of personality.
The result, unfortunately, is a paradox: Though adolescents may want nothing more than to be able to define themselves, they discover that high school is one of the hardest places to do it. At the time they experience the most social fear, they have the least control; at the time they’re most sensitive to the impressions of others, they’re plunked into an environment where it’s treacherously easy to be labeled and stuck on a shelf.
Most of us, says Brené Brown of the University of Houston, opt for one of three strategies to cope with the pain this causes. We move away from it, “by secret-keeping, by hiding”; we move toward it, “by people-pleasing”; or we move against it “by using shame and aggression to fight shame and aggression.” Whichever strategy we choose, she says, the odds are good we’ll use it for life.
"IN HIGH SCHOOL,” said Winnie Holzman, the creator of My So-Called Life, “we become pretty convinced that we know what reality is: We know who looks down on us, who is above us, exactly who our friends and our enemies are.” The truth of the matter, said Holzman, is that we really have no clue: “[W]hat seems like unshakable reality is basically just a story we learned to tell ourselves.”
Faris’s research on aggression may help account for adolescents’ distorted understanding of their social world. One of his findings is obvious: The more concerned kids are with popularity, the more aggressive they are. But another finding isn’t: Kids become more vulnerable to aggression as their popularity increases, unless they’re at the very top of the status heap. “It’s social combat,” he explains. “Think about it: There’s not much instrumental value to gossiping about a wallflower. There’s value to gossiping about your rivals.” The higher kids climb, in other words, the more precariously balanced they feel, unless they’re standing on the square head of the totem pole. It therefore stands to reason that many popular kids don’t see themselves as popular, or at least feel less powerful than they loom. Their perch is too fragile.
Maybe, perversely, we should be grateful that high school prepares us for life. The isolation, the shame, the aggression from those years—all of it readies us to cope. But one also has to wonder whether high school is to blame; whether the worst of adult America looks like high school because it’s populated by people who went to high school in America.
High school does something to us, is the point. We bear its stripes. Psychologist Joseph Allen found that kids who suffer from mild depression at 14, 15, and 16 have worse odds in the future—in romance, friendship, competency assessments by outsiders—even if their depression disappears and they become perfectly happy adults. “Because that’s their first template for adult interaction,” says Allen. “And once they’re impaired socially, it carries forward.”
I went to my high school reunion curious about whom people had become. There were the football players, still acting like they owned the joint, but as more generous proprietors. There were the beautiful girls, still beautiful, but looking less certain about themselves. I was happy to see a lot of them. We’d all grown more gracious; many of us had bloomed; and it was strangely moving to be among people who all shared this shameful, grim, and wild common bond. I imagined how much nicer it’d have been to see all those faces if we hadn’t spent our time together in that redbrick, linoleum-tiled perdition. Then again, if we hadn’t, I probably wouldn’t have cared.
By Jennifer Senior. ©2013 by New York magazine.
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