It’s a phrase teenagers hear often, that the years spent in high school are “the best years of your life.” Honestly, I am so sick of people telling me this. It’s incredibly awkward for me to stand there and fake agreement while they reminisce their own high school years.

High school is stressful. Many nights, I barely get any sleep, simply staying up trying to finish the homework assigned. A poll by the 2007 national Youth Risk Behavior Survey found that 68.9% of high schoolers get less than eight hours of sleep.

Ignoring all the stress and many nights where I get barely any sleep, I still cannot fathom how a person could believe that high school is the best part of someone’s life. Admittedly, I’m not yet out of high school so I don’t know how life after school is, but high school, logically speaking, should not be the peak of one’s life.

High school is a preparation for life, where a person learns all the education deemed essential for everyone to learn. One also learns to manage time, as well as learn social skills, make friends, build relationships, discover and build talents, and figure out what they want to do.

Since it is a preparation, the four years we spend in high school shouldn’t be the highest point of our lives, it should only, and hopefully, get better from here.

This isn’t to say that high school can’t be enjoyable. We make great friends, have the opportunity to join activities and organizations that we like, and I definitely don’t want to discredit all the teachers who go above and beyond to help us.

I understand the reasoning behind this saying. Most people saying it simply mean to tell us that we should make the most of our high school years, that we should enjoy them while they last, and to not stress as much as a lot of us do.

However, it is the implication that life only goes downhill from here that I don’t need to hear. Even if it’s true, even if the next eighty-something years of my life are truly going to suck, it’s a very depressing thought that high school is it.

So please, stop telling us that these four years are the best years of our lives. I really don’t want it to be.