“Glory years”

Your first car, street races, drinking whiskey on the lake at midnight on a full moon, fistfights at the flag pole, smoking cigarettes outside the malt shop

AKA installed nostalgia

Even by the standards of our shitty little country the Yanks really go hard on full on indoctrination at high school. Pledge of allegience, that recent thread about fucked up christian fundamentalists having abstinence only ed. And christian study groups. They get brainwashed through their shitty curriculum and hidden curriculum massively. Then the poor fucks get unceremoniously thrown into the gaping maw of a collapsing, brutal capitalist economy. It’s no wonder high school is something they clutch on to like a life raft, whether they hated it or loved it.

Other countries are pretty obsessed with it too… Japan comes to mind. I think its because in HS you’ve got a real social network that isn’t built on exploiting eachother - or at least it doesn’t HAVE to be by design.