College is the one topic that, once it starts, never really ends. From freshman year to sophomore to junior to senior year, there’ll always be a conversation about grades, stats, extracurriculars, or any of the million things that we concern ourselves with. What gets discussed a lot less, though, is what it actually feels like to be the student in the middle of it, trying to be a teenager and do well in school at the same time.

Then the second semester of senior year hits. You’ve gotten in somewhere, grades stop feeling like life or death, and you have more free time. You realize your focus in school shifts away from grades and onto the actually exciting part — the learning. And then you look back at the previous three and a half years and realize what you missed out on.

I used to think I hadn’t really given anything up for studying in high school. My logic was that I never liked parties anyway, so what was there to miss? But parties were never the thing. Rather, looking back, I do realize I missed out on many lunches, hangouts, sleepovers, last-minute dinners, and last-minute plans that never ended up becoming cherished memories because they didn’t happen. That’s what locking in too much actually costs you, and it’s much harder to notice because none of it easily comes to mind when you look back.

You can frame studying as a bet on your future: work now, have fun in college later. But people at every college also have fun. So the trade isn’t really fun-now for fun-later. It’s something more like: do you want the kind of satisfaction that comes from caring about school, or the kind that comes from being around your friends? Both are real, and I don’t think you actually have to choose between the two.

However, what can happen is that you only realize that you can have a version of both when it’s almost over. As of now, this is the eleventh draft of this article, and all eleven versions have made me reflect on whether I have any regrets about high school. I think it’s hard not to, but then again, that kind of hindsight is unfair, because once you know how things turned out, everything feels more obvious… but maybe I really didn’t have to write that third Paper 1 draft for English.

Ultimately, the worst version of high school isn’t the one where you study a lot or the one where you go out a lot. It’s either of the extremes because they’re both built on the same mistake: treating school and a social life as a zero-sum trade. I now realize that you can do both, and most of the people I know who seem the most regretful of their time in high school are the ones who went all-in on one side and now regret missing out on the other. The problem is never choosing one sometimes, but rather believing you have to choose only one always.